Pi Music

Published Mar 14, 2016 (9 years ago)
Danger icon
The last modifications of this post were around 9 years ago, some information may be outdated!

It's Pi Day!!!! For those unaware, March 14th, or 3-14, or better yet, 3.14 Is the first three digits of that mathematical number Pi. I'm particularly fond of this day in part to a couple of math instructors who had a competition every year to see who could recite Pi to the most digits.

what-day-is-it_16627345938_o

One instructor in particular (thank you Dr. Woo) used a musical approach to memorize the digits. He essentially started with middle C and assigned that as 0 and moved up the scale. From there he "sang" the digits and did his best to remember the melody.

I was never studious enough to try this approach myself, but I found it rather ingenious and always wondered what the "music of Pi" sounded like. Fortunately plenty of others have had this same curiosity and here are a couple of videos to tickle your ear. It's no music of the spheres, but it is still rather fun.

Traditional C scale:

https://youtu.be/YOQb_mtkEEE

Slightly different scale:

https://youtu.be/eP3_NioYP5U

Finally, here's a really cool app that will generate pi musically to 10,000 places and let you pick a scale in which to play it on (requires flash)

https://avoision.com/experiments/pi10k

Happy Pi Day!!!