Okay, I want to play around with taking various mathematical constants and intepreting them as music via the following method:
1. Taking the numbers digits in base 8.
2. Replacing 0s with Cs, 1s with Ds, etc.(7 becomes the C one octave higher).
3. using the first digit to set the octave to play in(thinking a Piano's roughly 8 octave range).

Of course, to do this, I need a way of calculating numbers in octal to a precision that gives a suitable number of notes to work with. I already found a webpage that includes the fir 100 digits of pi in octal, but I would also like to take a listen to pi/2, tau, phi, phi^2, phi ^3, e, sqrt(2), and any others I come up with.

Ideally, a Linux command line program that could output the answers to mathematical expressions in octal to a precision of a few dozen digits would be nice, but I will take anything that I can either use from the command line or from within a web browser(with me still recovering from a detached retina, graphical apps other than firefox are beyond my reach).

Thanks for any help you can provide.

This is pretty easy with PARI/GP

I use "gp" for almost everything because it's so fast and arbitrary precision.

gp understands decimal and can convert to binary for you so that makes all the power-of-two bases trivial.

For example, here is Pi in binary:



If you want Pi in octal just take groups of 3 binary digits.

You can dial up the precision as much as you want. A million decimal digits of Pi can be achieved with:


You can get e by using exp(1). Here are 100 decimal digits:


Phi is also easy:


For exotic constants you may need to script gp to expand a taylor series or similar. Then figuring out how far you have to go for your desired precision will take some math on your part.