Pi Music

Music is certainly mathematical. Octaves. Fifths. Thirds. The western diatonic scale is a mathematician's paradise of interwoven frequencies. But here's a question. Is math musical?

The question was brought to my attention by a colleague who'd bumped into a musical arrangement based on the number pi. Pi has long held one of the most the most prominent positions in all of mathematics. Defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, pi pops up in all sorts of unexpected places.

One of the properties of pi is that it's irrational. If we write it down — 3.14159... and so on — it goes on forever without getting stuck in a repeating sequence of digits. Thus we might ask, if we assigned each digit in pi to a key on the piano keyboard, say, "1" to middle C, "2" to C sharp, and so on, what would the music sound like? Listen for yourself.

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