🎶 HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎶
Harmony in music is the tango of rational and irrational numbers, coming close enough to kiss but never touching.
This image by my friend https://bsky.app/profile/gro-tsen.bsky.social illustrates it nicely. Check out how pairs of brightly colored dots seem to repeat over and over... but not exactly. Look carefully. The more you look, the more you'll find.
I'll quote him:
"Let me explain what I drew here, and what it has to do with music, but also with diophantine approximations of log(2), log(3) and log(5).
So, each hexagon in my diagram represents a musical note, or frequency, relative to a reference note which is the bright green hexagon in the exact center. Actually, more precisely, each hexagon represents a note modulo octaves… in the sense that two notes separated by an integer number of octaves are considered the same note. And when two hexagons are separated in the same way in the diagram, the notes are separated by the same interval (modulo octaves).
More precisely: for each given hexagon, the one to its east (i.e., to its right) is the note precisely one just fifth above, i.e. with 3/2 the same frequency; equivalently, it is the note one just fourth below (i.e., with 3/4 the frequency) since we are talking modulo octaves. And of course, symmetrically, the hexagon to the west (i.e., to the left) is precisely one just fourth above, i.e., 4/3 the frequency, or equivalently, one just fifth below (2/3 the frequency).
The hexagon to the northeast of any given hexagon is one major third above (frequency ×5/4) or equivalently, one minor sixth below (frequency ×5/8). Symmetrically, the hexagon to the southwest is one minor sixth above (×8/5) or one major third below (×4/5)."
(1/n)