- Joined
- Oct 18, 2004
- Location
- London on the Wisla
If you don't know what the golden ratio is, read here. If you don't care about the fundaments of music and art, there's a discussion about blap-blap semi-automatics going on right now somewhere else.
Back to the subject at hand.
A mathematician took a look at the Amen and had an epiphany (that's not a type of pill, to nick from Banksy).
"To appreciate this relationship between the Golden Ratio and sound, it's worthwhile to consider some of the ideal, eternal, unchanging principles of Golden relationships which can only be approximated in nature, and byartists, architects and musicians. I'm not going to re-teach here everything there is to know about this wonderful ratio since some great websites already tell you everything you want to know, such as this and this. Most pertinently, information about the appearance of the Golden Ratio in worldwide music, such as in the work of the classical composers Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Debussy and Satie can be found here."
"Human bodies and created sounds, like flowers, crystals and galaxies, can never exactly equal any ideal mathematical template. But the major wave peaks of the Amen Break, and many of its smaller ones, seem reasonably close to being an expression of the fractal nature of the wonderful Golden Ratio. I wonder what it would sound like if it was more precisely proportioned to the ideal, but I also know that slight differences are what make it human and alive."
http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen Break and GR.html
So there you are. Proof that the amen is an expression of the Golden Ratio. The early jungle pioneers didn't know about this... but they had the feeling that there was something implicitly beautiful about the beat.
So the next time you get crap for listening to dnb, from somebody who prefers their beats 4x4, boom boom boom boom, just tell them that an amen is a sonic expression of the basic underlying, universal, mathematical ratio for beauty, of the universe, as appreciated and utilised by Pythagoras, Euclid, Leonardo Da Vinci, Fibonacci, Mozart, Beethoven Mondrian and Le Corbusier. Boom boom boom boom is for primitives.
Back to the subject at hand.
A mathematician took a look at the Amen and had an epiphany (that's not a type of pill, to nick from Banksy).
"To appreciate this relationship between the Golden Ratio and sound, it's worthwhile to consider some of the ideal, eternal, unchanging principles of Golden relationships which can only be approximated in nature, and byartists, architects and musicians. I'm not going to re-teach here everything there is to know about this wonderful ratio since some great websites already tell you everything you want to know, such as this and this. Most pertinently, information about the appearance of the Golden Ratio in worldwide music, such as in the work of the classical composers Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Debussy and Satie can be found here."
"Human bodies and created sounds, like flowers, crystals and galaxies, can never exactly equal any ideal mathematical template. But the major wave peaks of the Amen Break, and many of its smaller ones, seem reasonably close to being an expression of the fractal nature of the wonderful Golden Ratio. I wonder what it would sound like if it was more precisely proportioned to the ideal, but I also know that slight differences are what make it human and alive."
http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen Break and GR.html
So there you are. Proof that the amen is an expression of the Golden Ratio. The early jungle pioneers didn't know about this... but they had the feeling that there was something implicitly beautiful about the beat.
So the next time you get crap for listening to dnb, from somebody who prefers their beats 4x4, boom boom boom boom, just tell them that an amen is a sonic expression of the basic underlying, universal, mathematical ratio for beauty, of the universe, as appreciated and utilised by Pythagoras, Euclid, Leonardo Da Vinci, Fibonacci, Mozart, Beethoven Mondrian and Le Corbusier. Boom boom boom boom is for primitives.