Try not to get too excited about what Tau looks like - it's even better with banjo. Source: Supplied
- Man makes music from maths
- Says Tau sounds better than Pi
- Today, we celebrate Tau Day
REMEMBER the guy who created the Pi video, setting the mathematical constant to a tune?
No?
Well, Michael Blake probably doesn't care anyway, because�the math genius reckons his�new music video will put Pi in its place.
He's composed a melody based on the value of Tau -�6.28 - just in time for Tau Day (the 28th day of June or 6/28 in US date format).
?I just felt like I wanted to do something else along the same lines (as my Pi video),? Mr Blake told news.com.au.
?Also mainly because I kept getting comments on my page about people really liking the idea of combining math and music in that way.
?People kept saying ?Hey, you should do other math constants, you should do this one and that one? so I picked on and just went with it.
?I'm very pleased with it. I believe it's a step up in quality from the Pi video.?
This isn?t the first time Pi has come under attack. In fact, the two mathematical constants, Pi and Tau, are kind of at war.
Math boffs the world over can't understand why only they can see how�Tau is a more accurate way to measure the circumference of a circle.
In a nutshell, whereas Pi is measured by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter, Tau is its diametric opposite; it divides the circumference by the radius.
The reasons why Tau is better than Pi are subtle, and complicated to explain - too complicated say, for this particular journalist - but this video does a pretty good job of explaining it.
Mr Blake, however, prefers to let music do the talking.
Each of the eight notes in a major scale�- and their corresponding major, minor and diminished chords�-�are assigned a numerical value; C being one, D two and so forth.
Mr Blake composed ?What Tau Sounds Like? based on the numerical value of Tau to 127 decimal places.
?The 126 decimal places, I go all the way up to that decimal place, but not in every phrase,?�Mr Blake said.
?Most of those phrases that you hear are the first 32 or 16 notes but then there?s a couple places that you see ... where the notes go really fast.
"I think they?re like 16th notes or something like that, so I obviously needed a lot of numbers.
?I basically started at one point, I started after about 20 numbers after something like that, so I went and kept going until I had all the notes I needed for that particular part, so it happened to go up to 126.?
For such a complicated constant, the melody is very mellow and soothing.
The Australian Science Exchange were so wooed by the melody that the Elder Conservatorium of Music will perform Mr Blake?s musical notation at a Tau Day celebration at the Royal Institution of Australia in Adelaide today.
?Even though maths is logical and rational, even maths is subject to human interpretation, which is why I'm getting behind the Tau Day celebrations,? RiAus's science and social facilitator Cobi Smith said.
"It is an international collaboration in the name of maths and science and music and people doing things together for good!"
The politics of Pi
Mr Blake first shot to fame after composing a melody based on the value of Pi set to 31 decimal places.
The video is currently unavailable online. YouTube removed it after someone filed a copyright claim on the video.
?When the video started to get really big, I received a video comment email from this guy Lars Ericson who said he had copyrighted this melody back in 1992,? Mr Blake said.
?He wanted me to sign a contract that basically gave him ownership of the song and I just refused to do that because I didn?t think that really was his position to do.?
Mr Blake decided to fight the charges under the belief that you can?t copyright a mathematical constant.
?My opinion was and still is that you can?t own a melody that just basically translated from a number,? he said.
?In my Pi video, I didn?t write that melody either, I just translated it from a number.
?I?ve got a good legal team that is working for me and they?re very confident that he doesn?t have a legal leg to stand on. I?m just going to have to wait it out.?
In the meantime the interwebs will fight about it�- Mr Blake has already received support from countless geeks following the news of the ongoing lawsuit.
It even inspired a YouTube video explaining the mathematics of why copyrighting Pi is wrong.
In any case Mr Blake said he didn?t know which maths constant was more accurate, but he hoped that people would enjoy his new music video -�even if one of them is more wrong than the other.�
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