Archive for January 27th, 2008

Musical Pi, Part 1

January 27, 2008

Jon Turner, a professor of musical composition here at Nazareth, has composed a suite of music based on π! (see also part 2 and part 3) As he says:

The basic idea is to use the decimal expansion of pi to give an unendingly varying [but] related series of notes.

The first step was to convert π to base 12 (to match the chromatic musical scale), so

\pi = 3.1415926535\ldots_{10} = 3.184809493B\ldots_{12}

(where B represents decimal 11 in base 12). Starting with C at 0, he gets

\pi = E\flat D\flat A\flat E A\flat C\ldots

Hear the result!


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