Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
My first supercomputing job ran yesterday: the visualization of every possible combination of the notes of the Nokia Tune ringtone… all 6,227,020,800 of them!
Run using code written in Processing (with the help of Adam Caprez and Ashu Guru at the UNL Holland Computing Center) on the Open Science Grid of supercomputers, the result is ~311,000 image files, each with 20k permutations; the above image is a scant 3k permutations.
Very excited!
In doing some research on ringtone file formats for an upcoming project, I found some information on the “Nokia Tune”, the ringtone standard on Nokia phones.
Shockingly (or perhaps not, if you’ve recently spent time on a train, city bus, or in an airport), according to Wikipedia, a 2010 study found that this melody is heard 1.8 billion times per day, about 20,000 times per second.
There are so many “great” versions online*, but here’s a tutorial to create your own:
* If you need more, there are tons of terrible, just awful versions just a YouTube search away. We’re talking heavy metal, gonzo animation, and lots of techno versions.