Latest: Canton Becker's "Techno 2020" is a musical composition that goes for 999,999,999 hours, or about 114 years.

How Was Pi Used To Make This Music?

A music generating algorithm was composed to produce music using the first one billion digits of pi (π). These digits supply the "turn signals" used to determine every musical expression in the song. Each digit (3.1415...) is responsible for orchestrating approximately four seconds of music. The electronic instruments and sound samples were prepared by the composer in advance.

Because the numbers in pi never repeat, each of the million hours in each song are in fact unique. If you fast forward to an arbitrarily distant moment in a song, you are virtually guaranteed to find yourself listening to something that nobody else – including the composer himself – has ever heard before.

In 2019, Becker composed Shepard's Pi, an ambient million-hour song. In the following year, Becker released a more ambitious work, Techno 2020.