4 Minute performance
Let us suppose that the length of the piece, in performance time, is to be four minutes. Meanwhile, the length of the time series of pitches in the data tables created by the discrete (or ODE integration) method is 12,000 days. This is a round number, just short of 33 earth-years, and long enough for a full cycle of Saturn, the slowest of the planets among Kepler's list of six.While Saturn's cycle is compressed into about four minutes, Mercury is going to race through about 136 of its shorter cycles: about one every two seconds! Here, to bring this point home, is a pair of graphs of nu-prime vs time.
Mercury, 12000 days:
Saturn, 12000 days:
Revised 01 jan 2003 by ralph abraham