March 28, 2008

Ragtime, Limericks & Fibonacci Hardly mainstream knowledge, but bloody interesting, if you're interested in that kind of thing.
posted by Skrik 16 years ago
  • It appears no one is, Skrik. Sic transit gloria Monkeyfiltris.
  • It is very interesting, but my brain isn't up to much these days and I found it hard to grasp clearly how the limerick is based on Fibonacci numbers.
  • Fascinating, but I had to put it off to finish reading from home.
  • It's a neat coincidence, but I don't see anything particularly interesting. Yes, there is a popular rhythm that matches up with generation N of Fibonacci's rabbit population. The fact that the ordering of the tree was manipulated arbitrarily to produce a generation with a matching pattern takes away from the magic a bit. If other tree arrangements produced generations that correspond to other equally popular rhythms then I'd say there's an underlying relationship. This looks more like the author happened upon some math and music that look the same. Hell, with enough looking I bet any simple mathematical pattern can be found in a piece of music somewhere.
  • Well, Skrik, I guess it will only be a few of us that care that the Rubik's Cube can now be solved in 25 moves or that a sketch of a four year old Ada Byron was found. He skewered the slug And gave it a tug. "This cabbage," said Babbage, "Is hard to debug." Ha! Cracks me up.
  • It [Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag"] deserves to be be highlighted as one of the most significant events in the history of music - a trailblazer to the explosive development of contemporary popular music, which is almost certainly one of the most widely-shared cultural experiences on the planet. Word.
  • I totally have it on my mp3 player.
  • Philistines!
  • So now the Fibonacci sequence is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, eh? What happened to 42?
  • Joseph Shillinger wrote a monumental work called "The Mathematical Basis of the Arts" (Da Capo 1948) that convincingly showed the underlying mathematical structures that underpin all the arts but especially music. The fibonacci series figures prominently. One of the most convincing analyses in the book was the sublimated fibonacci series that governed the position of the primary and secondary climaxes in "Die Meistersinger" overture. It turns out that Wagner and conch shells have a lot in common.
  • 42 is not in the Fibonacci, but it is the product of two numbers, namely F3 and F8. See? See?
  • My voice teacher had a theory that Wiliam Byrd loved asymmetrical musical phrases so much because he walked with a limp.
  • Search for largest fibonacci prime