June 19, 2015 7:04 AM

This song illustrates a quote from the Tao Te Ching -- “Existence and non-existence create each other”.RhythmUsing Google Translate, I Romanized the original Chinese text.gu you wu xiangshengI then used this script to find the ASCII representation of each Roman letter. This gave me a “binary translation” of each word.gu = 1100111 + 1110101 = 11001111110101white space = 100000you = 1111001 + 1101111 + 1110101 = 111100111011111110101etc.Next, I concatenated each of the four words together. This yields a binary translation of the entire Tao Te Ching quote.11001111110101100000...Finally, I “chunked” the large and unwieldy binary string above into parsable segments of 4 bits and 2 bits.1100 + 11 + 1111 + 01 + 0110 + 00 + ...This is the rhythmic structure of the top two voices (1 = note and 0 = rest). The “4 bit rhythm” is played by the middle staff. The “2 bit rhythm” is given to the top voice.MelodyI used this script to create the melody. I listed the first 55 composite numbers and translated them into music with the simple key 0 = a, 1 = bb, 2 = b, etc. Since 4 is the first composite number, I gave this “composite melody” to the “4 bit rhythm”. Likewise, since 2 is the first prime number, I listed out the first 27 primes, translated them into music, and gave this “prime melody” to the “2 bit rhythm”.The melody of the low voice is taken from the Kyrie of the Missa Orbis Factor. The rhythm is freely composed.All of the printed words are autoantonyms . The one-syllable word is given to the voice in 1/1, the two-syllable to the 2/2, and the four-syllable to the 4/4.The score, as well as all the python and lilypond code I used, can be found here