Primes as Notes

Page 1 from the Prime Listening Guide

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Method One: We could take each note on a keyboard and assign it a letter, in fact, that is exactly what the MIDI standard does. It has 128 different notes. Middle C is 60, C# is 70, D is 71... This allows us to "play" the small primes by just playing the corresponding notes. You can hear this by clicking on the ear on the left (or use the eye to view the score).

The problem with this approach is that it only allows us to play a few primes (at most those below 128) and sound cards (as well as human ears) have difficulty with sounds at the end of their spectrums. So this will seem to start with silence.

Fortunately there is an easy way to get the sounds in our normal hearing range - see the Next Page.