Archive for December 31st, 2014
Happy New Year: composing music in SQL
My previous New Year posts were about drawing pictures in SQL: snowflakes, clocks, fractals and even our planet Earth as seen from above.
But contrary to the popular belief, SQL is not just about graphics processing. You can use it for all kinds of things.
Today we'll use SQL to create music.
Remember those polyphonic ringtones in early 2000's cell phones? Instead of downloading MP3's (which were a pain to download and even more pain to upload them to the phone), you could type in the notes and their values, and the phone would play them for you.
Most phones played tunes in a very straightforward way: for each note, they calculated its frequency and generated a pure sine waveform of this frequency. Polyphonic phones could play several notes at once: this would require two or more superimposed waveforms. Math behind that are very simple: channel amplitude is a sine function of time and frequency, and all the channel amplitudes are added together.
Let's do this too and play some New Year music with PostgreSQL.
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