When was the last time you've listened to a full album of music front-to-back? In some bizarre way, Bull of Heaven's work with the catchy title 260: lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73,79,83) will not only make you wonder about your listening habits, it will probably make you reconsider what you're doing with your life altogether. Attention spans have been crippled by the age of social media, to the point where a six-second video is capable of being criticized for focusing too much on setting up the story.
This was the opening paragraph, if you have managed to read it without checking your smartphone notifications at least twice in between, congrats! With your mental stamina you might just enjoy an album that is four nonillion minutes long. You better have a few spare lives laying around, cause that's about 8,462,937,602,125 trillion years. But how does that even work?
Bull of Heaven’s album consists of 23 tracks. Each of the track titles corresponds to one of the first 23 prime numbers (2 through 83, as eloquently listed in the album title). The titles of each track also represent its length in seconds. When the first track ("2") is over after 2 seconds, it is looped to play again, and the second track ("3") begins at the same time. Once both these tracks synchronize (thus, end at the same time) after 6 more seconds, they repeat again, and the third track ("7") is started at the same time. The fourth track starts when the previous three tracks have synchronized, and so on. Because the length of the tracks is chosen specifically for them to take as long as possible until they synchronize – hence prime numbers – the last track will not loop at the same time as all the others until exactly 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955.2362595095 years have passed. Up until then, happy listening!
Iron Noder Challenge 2017