When I was a kid the legendary mathematician Bill Thurston came to the elementary school where my dad taught to give a lesson on the binary number system. He taught us to count on our fingers using base two (i.e. each finger is a single binary digit, so one hand you can count from 0 to 31, two hands from 0 to 1023). Remembering that lesson, I thought it would be fun to create a little clock/counter that counts in binary, with each digit displayed with its own color.

In addition, I’ve been revisiting the overtone series, which is a series of pitches that are integer multiples of some fundamental frequency (i.e. if you start on the middle A on a piano, which is 440 Hz, then the series of overtones of that note would be 880, 1320, 1760, 2200, etc.) Strange but true, as the pitches go up higher and higher, you end up essentially making all the notes you would need for an A major scale (edit: with some “blue notes”). And even stranger, it turns out that all instruments, and in fact all physical resonating objects, produce a sound that can be closely reconstructed by combining different amounts sine waves in the overtone series. (What separates a clarinet’s tone from a trumpet’s, when playing the same note, is mostly that they have different proportions of various overtones of that note.)

Anyway, here it is. A binary counter where each digit produces its own overtone as you count up (from right to left), and each number from 0 to 255 is represented by its own unique combination of overtones. Enjoy! (with headphones)