Harmony of the Spheres

[ardcarp]

Radio 3's Sunday Feature explored the influence of 'the cosmos' on music...or was it the other way round?!!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003sgc

A superficial listening to this programme might have led one to believe it to be at best 'arty farty' or at worst a load of b******s. However, it made the valid point that Pythagoras (who discovered the beautitifully exact mathematical relationship between musical intervals) thought 'the cosmos' was involved, and that Kepler (who understood planetary motion a generation before Newton) believed that the ratios of musical intervals were involved.

The music played was fascinating, but was either annoyingly brief or in the background. On the whole though, a thought-provoking programme.

[BBMmk2]

Did they feature Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Etoiles?

[MrGongGong]

Thanks for this, looks / sounds really interesting
Will have a listen


This is also worth watching (but not a produced radio piece, I might have linked this before ? so apologies if this is a repeat) we made a sound installation in Cambridge a few years ago with A level physics students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_teUrJjlM_4&t=2310s&frags=pl%2Cwn

[Richard Barrett]

Kepler (who understood planetary motion a generation before Newton)

He recognised that planets moved in elliptical orbits but he didn't understand that this was because there was a force of gravity operating under an inverse square law. (And while Newton claimed to have discovered this relation, Hooke actually came up with it first.)

Last Friday I was in Bruges where the Bruges Concertgebouw has been putting on an entire festival around this theme. https://www.concertgebouw.be/en/cosmos-festival

[DracoM]

I kept muttering 'why do they not IDENTIFY on air the sounds we were hearing and link them to particular stars / planets / constellations etc, instead of simply letting them flow as non-sotp wash under the talk.

If it was such a wonderful series of discoveries as to how LOUD 'space' was, then help us to understand by some discreet labelling.

Not having daily, handy access to Jodrell Bank or the Atacama Desert or myriad places in California, we could have been listening to some 'soothe' and snooze' tapes.

[ardcarp]

If it was such a wonderful series of discoveries as to how LOUD 'space' was, then help us to understand by some discreet labelling.

As I suggested, there was a large element of...well...drivel spoken! Neither grounded in science or music, though Gongers will probably disagree with me over the latter.

[MrGongGong]

As I suggested, there was a large element of...well...drivel spoken! Neither grounded in science or music, though Gongers will probably disagree with me over the latter.

Can't wait to listen

[ardcarp]

...but I enjoyed your link!!

[MrGongGong]

...but I enjoyed your link!!

I hope there's some 432Hz woo

[Dave2002]

I hope there's some 432Hz woo

Is this only available today - in the morning - (1/4/2019) or has it been around for a whie?

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xywy74/the-fringe-audiophiles-who-want-to-topple-standard-tuning

[ardcarp]

I became (faintly) interested in 432Hz as a 'standard' A. This was more from my (feeble)) grasp of science and maths than for any musical reason. Musical theorists tended to talk of C as a standard note rather than A, I suppose because C is the Ut of Ut, Re, Mi, etc of the Western diatonic major scale.

There is a set of numbers achieved by doubling, e.g. 1,2,4,8,16,32,64.128,256,512. I understand that for a long time the 'theoretical' pitch of 256 was given to middle C by some organ builders and tuners well into the early 20th century.

How does this help with the 'magical' A 432Hz as mentioned in the previous posts? Well, I consulted a brainy daughter who told me that to get the next chromatic note up or down you multiply or divide its frequency by the twelfth root of 2 (anyone still following?) which is 1.059463 (approx, because it's a recurring decimal). So, as A is three semitones down from C, you divide the frequency of C512 by that number three times. You get (approx) A432.

Having said all that I'm not convinced of any mystical, magical, celestial or other airy-fairy powers attached to any particular pitch. Modern performance practice has chosen A415 as a sort of 'standard' because it has the convenience of being a semitone down from modern concert pitch. Bach's Matthew Passion (for instance) sounds different at that pitch though not necessarily 'better'...except for tenors! But we know that pitch was not settled in the 18th century and different towns would have differently pitched sets of wind instruments and organs.

I still think The Harmony of the Spheres is a load of cobblers, though clearly it wasn't for philosophers from the Ancient World right up to the time of Kepler.