The Magic of Pi
Sound sculpture . . . 2022 . . . 6:23
Ever since it was viewed and photographed from space (see below) by Apollo 17 in 1972, Planet Earth has become known as the Blue Planet.
Such a distant perspective reveals the pervasive blue water of oceans, brilliant white of cloud layers, and some brown/green shapes of land masses beneath. It also reveals the spherical shape of our globe. (Euclid said a sphere is a hollow 3-dimensional rotation of a circle, and scientists have measured that Earth is not a perfectly round ball but a solid ellipsoid.) Nonetheless, the eternal, perfect rotating sphere is our iconic notion of Earth’s shape. Spheres and the Euclidean circle that generates them in three dimensions are governed by the mathematical constant π, defined in Euclidean geometry as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Pi is magic, an irrational number that cannot be expressed as a common fraction. Its decimal calculation never ends, never settling into a repeating pattern of digits, which appear to be random . . . and infinite. It starts 3.1415926535897932384626433…
The beginning of its decimal expression was used in composing Blue Sphere as both a rhythmic timing pattern and a corresponding dance of the lowest 9 pitches of a Pythagorean overtone series. This is one way to literally hear π, expressing musically the eternal restlessness of our rotating blue sphere.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 