Sunday 30 August 2009

Numbers in aesthetics



I had been reading about numbers and maths in Coincidences, Chaos and All That Math Jazz by EB Burger and Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, both mentioning the relationship between numbers and aesthetic beauty, mostly in nature.

I didn't bother doing much research into numbers in music via Pythagoras, etc, I just jumped straight in. I took a sort of number that I liked and made a video out of the first hundred of them. The blocks going from right to left are counting one to one hundred and every clear box resembles one of these significant numbers, also revealing two further ways of counting to one hundred.

The music also counts, though not exactly to one hundred. There is an electric piano going up a major scale during every non-significant number and a synthesiser going up a major scale on every significant number, both over a simple drum beat in common time. You will notice that as the numbers rise the frequency of the significant numbers drops, this would continue to drop if I kept counting past one hundred and beyond. There is also a nice coincidence (perhaps?) that both major scales finish their octave by the end of the piece.

I think it is pretty obvious from this description what kind of numbers the clear boxes represent, but I'll let you work it out.

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