Dylan E. Turney

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

For related content, please view the full “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus” program at our website.

Music By Numbers

This is my final piece for my ‘Maths And Art’ project. The reason I coined this piece ‘Music By Numbers’ was down to the fact that the music itself had absolutely no traditional foundation. The glass harp was tuned by the golden ratio, so none of the wine glasses even identified to a traditional note.

The composition of the piece is quite compelling, it starts of quite slowly using a very simple pattern and carries on with these very basic patterns right through until the 40 second mark. From this point on we move into the second section of the piece, which has been divided by the golden ratio. For the second section the notes were arranged using the Fibonacci Number pattern. This was also used for the timing for part of the arrangement.

I am unsure why, but during in the middle of the piece where the tempo is picked up it almost sounds like a techno beat or a high speed guitar riff.

Although recorded outside, I rerecorded the wine glasses inside for a crisper sound. I am annoyed I didn’t anticipate needing a Zoom audio device, as it would of been good to get the best quality sound.

Overall I am mostly happy with this final piece, it elaborated on a point I made in my essay about the relationship between Maths and Music and how the two are dependent on each other. Although after the creation of this piece I am not entirely sure, as the piece had not traditional musical construct but yet at times sounded melodic.

One unexpected result was that of the clicking between the note changes, although ultimately unintentional, it created a quite nice sense of beat and structure for the song. As for the golden ratio to divide the two sections, I’m not sure if it was all that successful from a creative stand point, but it still worked seamlessly into the piece.

Resonating Wine Glass, Tuned Using The Golden Ratio
Test

This is a small test I did to test out the concept of a series of wine glasses tuned using the golden ratio. Ultimately I think it was a successful concept with the wine glasses singing at the required fidelity that was required.

It will be interesting to see how it all fits in with the final composition in which I’ll film tomorrow. It will be hard to judge if in reality it will work convincingly. I might have to implement a stop motion editing technique to make the piece enjoyable and up beat.

I am excited to see how this will all come together tomorrow! Hopefully even with the lack of mathematical structure it still comes off as enjoyable.

An incredible performance of an arrangement of J.S. Bach’s ‘Toccata and fugue in D minor’ played on a glass harp.

As the wine glasses I will be working with aren’t crystal wine glasses which are the glasses that create a crisp and beautiful sound, I will instead be using a different approach of gently hitting the side of the wine glass with a thin knife.

Although this sound is more direct, it shall be equally effective in demonstrating the aspects of my practical assignment that I will be trying to portray.