Max Cooper - Transcendental Tree Map

Max Cooper: For the "Yearning for the Infinite" project I looked for different ways of visualising the infinite, interspersed between imagery of humans in endless pursuit. For one chapter I wanted to visualise the digits of a transcendental number, thought to be endless and non-repeating. Martin Krzywinski specialises in visualising these digits amongst many other things, and one of my favourite images is his tree map of pi, which presents this endless nested chaos in beautiful visual form. I wanted to map that growing randomness and chaotic detailed structural form to the piece of music, so I collaborated with the great music software developer, Alexander Randon on a special tool which allows the construction of musical fractals and many other complex melodic forms. With this tool I started the piece with a simple melodic structure, which is iteratively broken down into more and more complex melodies as the tree map breaks down the initially simple first digit into more and more complex sub-structures. With the aesthetic as a whole becoming this sea of interacting notes, partly random, but with a global form emerging eventually, as the circle is embodied by the chaos of the digits of pi.