Michael Blake gives mathematical constant Pi a musical note

March 14th, 2011 - 5:14 pm ICT by ANI  

Melbourne, Mar 14 (ANI): Canadian musician Michael Blake has created a piece of music based on mathematical constant Pi to celebrate Pi Day- the 14th day of the third month.

“The idea just hit me one day - what would happen if I found some kind of equation or formula that I could transfer to music?” News.com.au. quoted him as saying.

“I thought about the Fibonacci sequence, because I liked the sound of that, but it didn’t really work in my mind so the next one I tried was Pi,” he said.

Blake’s music video on YouTube explains how each of the eight notes in any major scale can be assigned a numerical value - C being one, D two and so on. The same thing goes for chords.

Using those values, the 36-year-old composed a musical interpretation of Pi to 31 decimal places. He also set the piece to a tempo of 157 beats per minutes, or 314 divided by two.

However while Blake can play more than 10 different instruments and come up with incredibly nerdy pieces of music, he said that he’s not actually very good at math.

“I didn’t do great at math in school or anything like that. It’s really just confined to music. I’m mainly a musician, not really a mathematician.”

The Portland, Oregon resident’s video has struck a chord with viewers, being played more than 550,000 times so far on YouTube. (ANI)

Related Stories

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in World |

Subscribe