20900 is also pretty awesome.

Thanks :) I've tried this with non-chromatic scales and the result is more aesthetically interesting (I think), but I thought I'd post this since it's the "purest".

It lasts forever :) That's why I jokingly say "excerpt". If you'd like to hear, I can post the code somewhere -- but this is more of a minor exploratory prelude to a bigger project I'm working.

hah, right, well, practically forever, but it's still technically finite — just curious how the numbers worked out if you had, say, eons to listen.

:) If I understand correctly, the natural numbers are infinite (but countable -- by definition) and there is one composition for every natural number. So it is infinite... as far as the scale goes, in this excerpt it takes about 90 seconds to get through about 21,600 compositions. That's about 240 compositions a second. The third chord will be introduced at 2^25 (=2^(2 * 12 + 1)) iterations, or 33,554,432, or in about 139,810 seconds = 38 hours. The fourth chord is introduced in about 18 years. The fifth chord, about 74,000 years.

ah right right — naturally infinite, i guess i was thinking in digital terms wherein the number of possibilities would be bound by the sample rate? would that make sense? i've worked with bitmaps in a sort-of-similar way (iterating through possibilities at a certain resolution) so i'm trying to understand this in the same context, which might be an apples-to-oranges situation. thanks for the numbers, though!

Oh, exactly, I should have clarified: in theory, it is infinite, in practice it is finite. If you listen to it linearly, in practice it is infinite less because of hardware constraints than age-of-the-universe constraints :) Bitmaps: there are very interesting here, but the space is huge! Sound can be analyzed in one dimension, but it's hard to do the same in a meaningful way with images. You might enjoy John Simon's "Every Icon numeral.com/eicon.html and Jim Campbell's "The End" jimcampbell.tv/DU/DUTheEnd

I think that once you get past the "performance art" aspect of work like this, you have to ask questions like: "How do we iterate through every /interesting/ image?" and "When is one image sufficiently different from another to be perceived as 'unique'?"