Hey, shouldn’t everyone have one? I’ve suggested many times on this blog that number is at the heart of all things. Here’s one article: Pythagoras’ Epiphany. I think the beauty of music, especially harmony, is similar to the beauty of math, but happening in real time. It slightly parts the veil, deepening the view of what…
Every prime number generates a new musical universe. Prime numbers are numbers, greater than one, that can only be evenly divided by themselves and 1. All other numbers are composite — that is, they can be made by multiplying two or more primes. 1) Multiplying by 1 does nothing. 1 is a singularity, the universe before the…
All the notes I’ve discussed so far are found above and to the right of the tonic, in the northeast quadrant of the map. These notes are generated by multiplication alone. What about the notes that are generated by division? These are found to the left and down on the lattice. The closer a note is…
The tonic is the center of the lattice. A drone note on the tonic establishes the center of that particular musical universe. Adding a major third and a perfect fifth (5/4 and 3/2) further reinforces the center and starts to carve out some territory on the map. This is the tonic major chord: In my…
It may be Keats’ most famous pair of lines: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ I believe he’s right on the money. I think that when we experience beauty, it’s because we have seen a little deeper into the nature of things. This seems…
Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who lived about a century before Athens’ golden age. Some time before 530 BC, he had an epiphany. He had been investigating vibrating strings, and found that when you cut the length of the string in half, the note it makes is an octave higher. Sound is vibration. When one…