Dev.SN

Pi Progressive Rock. Listen to the sound of Pi

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:45AM   
from the irrational-exuberance dept.

jorl17 writes:

"Brady Haran over at Numberphile has brought us an amazing experimental track based on Pi. Everything follows patterns of the irrational number, and the result is a mind-blowing progressive rock song. This expands upon the concept first tried with the Golden Ratio song. Notice the length of the video?"

• "digits" are too arbitrary "digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @06:52AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @06:52AM (#19660)

  We human have got 10 fingers, so what? That's not an intrinsic mathematical property of anything, it's just arbitrary.
  It might have been less arbitrary if they'd also chosen to subdivide the octave into 10 tones, but nope, they used the also-arbitrary 7-note scales based on the also-arbitrary 12 semitone subdivisions of the octave. So they could have used base 7 or 12, not 10, and I would have had fewer complaints. Of course even using base 7 gives them the freedom to just arbirtarily chose different keys or modes during the different phases of the song, meaning that yet again you were hearing their conscious artistic choice, not an intrinsic property of the number.

  Did you also notice that in the Phi one, the first phi-ratio split of the string on the fretboard was actually at 2-phi not phi-1 (so they threw away the larger proportion), but the subsequent splits they threw away the smaller portion. Why the difference? Arbitrary!

  Math-metal is just reverse gematria.

• Re:"digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @10:06AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @10:06AM (#19696)

  Math-metal is airtameg? What's an airtameg?

  Parent

• Re:"digits" are too arbitrary Re:"digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 4, Informative) by DeKO on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:22PM

  by DeKO (3672) on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:22PM (#19732)

  The 12-TET is far from arbitrary. Read up on the history of scales, and you will see that there was no lack of conventions on how to create them. See this for instance [wlonk.com]:"

  The twelve-tone equal-tempered scale is the smallest equal-tempered scale that contains all seven of the basic consonant intervals to a good approximation — within one percent.

  In other words, 12-TET is both mathematically sound, and outlived nearly every alternative ever devised.

  Parent

  • Re:"digits" are too arbitrary Re:"digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:17PM (#19992)

    Why 1%?
    Why not 0.979534234987976 percent?

    Seems pretty arbitrary to me.

    Parent

    • Re:"digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 1) by DeKO on Sunday March 23 2014, @11:30PM

      by DeKO (3672) on Sunday March 23 2014, @11:30PM (#20068)

      Sorry, I didn't use the full quote, it ends with:

      ... and contains more consonant intervals than dissonant intervals.

      The 12-TET is a local minimum regarding the approximation to the ratios, the next best approximation is the 53-TET (with 31 and 41 coming close). They are, however, full of dissonant intervals, so most of the notes would never be used anyways. The 1% is not an arbitrary choice, it just happens to be within 1%, all near possibilities are much worse than 1%.

      Parent

• Re:"digits" are too arbitrary (Score: 1) by jorl17 on Saturday March 22 2014, @05:33PM

  by jorl17 (3747) on Saturday March 22 2014, @05:33PM (#19804)

  I never thought of it as the actual "sound" of Pi. It's creative work, there's no doubting it. However, it is made by mapping our knowledge of Pi to other kinds of knowledege we have, involving maths to do part of that mapping. Bases are arbitrary, the instruments are arbitrary, everything is pretty much arbitrary, but they didn't build the music and search for patterns, they made it with the patterns. It doesn't really matter to me if they're the most X or Y patterns -- they are patterns.

  Parent