Happy Pi Day!

Here is some Pi music:







http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134492882/how-to-transform-the-number-pi-into-a-song

It wants to be free!

Apparently January is Math Madness Month, at least at Taylor & Francis publishing company. They are offering free online access to the current and back content for all of their math and statistics journals through January 31st. Why am I mentioning this here, on a music blog? Because one of these free journals is the Journal of Mathematics and Music. (They also have the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.) This is a new journal, only 3 years old, on the uses of mathematical analysis to explore various aspects of music. This isn't a new thing, heck Pythagoras (or someone else) talked about the mathematical relationships in musical sounds back in the 5th century BC. But new things are constantly being found, and it was decided to give a common home to a variety of approaches to this general subject from the perspectives of music theory, neuroscience, mathematics, statistics, and physics. As an example, here are the articles in the most recent issue:
"Minimum description length modelling of musical structure" by Panayotis Mavromatis (a friend from grad school).
"Ionian theorem" by Thomas Noll.
"Counterpoint in 2k-tone equal temperament" by Octavio A. Agustin-Aquino.
"What pre-whitened music can tell us about multi-instrument compositions" by R.E. Dumas and A.P. Georgopoulos. (Apparently pre-whitened music is music with the melody and harmony removed, so only timbre and rhythm is considered. This looks interesting to me.)

So if you find your month not nearly math-mad enough, go on over to the website and browse through some math-tastic music or musical math.

E = mF B D# G#

A scientist (or mathematician?) pseudonymed Thoreau describes how attending musical performances helps him solve research problems.

...you may be thinking “So, you spent 5 hours not paying attention to the show?” but somehow a good music performance just gets me in that zone. One of the most important things that I worked out during my thesis research was done during Phantom of the Opera. And I loved Phantom.

I don't see a problem with this at all. I do the same thing, at musical performances, at plays, watching movies, reading books, etc. I don't tend to solve entire problems as much as get inspired to consider new problems or new approaches to a problem that I will complete later. This is because I get pulled back into whatever art I'm consuming at the moment, unless it really sucks. And then I will flit from problem to problem, including working on my grocery shopping list.

Bonus points to the first person who figures out the title of the post.

Cats and Dogs, Living Together!

Synesthete.org promises to test you for synaesthesia (via Mind Hacks). It's a good thing Fred is still offline.

A mathematician has taken it upon himself to create music expressing well-known mathematical proofs.

And cookies have just come out of the oven, so I must go!