What the Fibonacci series sounds like
Alex Ross in The New Yorker (subscriber only) on composer Iannis Xenakis who translated parabolic shapes into music, working out his musical and visual ideas side by side:
He drew ruled parabolas on graph paper, then translated the shapes into music, mapping them as expanding web of glissandos. (The Beatles roughly echoed that effect in the orchestral crescendos of “A Day in the Life.”) A few years later, when Xenakis worked on the Phillips Pavilion [Xenakis was an engineer for Le Corbusier and a mathematician as well] he cast similar shapes in prestressed concrete.
From Robin Evans by way of The Polytechnic:
He was searching for some measure of unity in his musical notation, and was bothered by the irrelation between the geometric progression that defined the pitches of notes in the 12-tone scale, and the additive properties that conventionally pertain between note lengths and bar lengths. So he devised his own musical Fibonacci series to articulate the percussion and the string episodes in Metastasis.
Don’t miss the sketches, and some takes on visualization. The Fibonacci series does seem to be everywhere.
