Golden Ratio - Making a Math Metal Anthem - Numberphile

right got my trusty guitar my back last few months I've been working on a special musical collaboration uh related to a very important number uh in nature we're about to head off down the road to meet this collaborator for the very first time and I'm very excited about [Music] it we're at the studio of Mr Dave Brown here who's a very tal yes with his trademark High who's a um very talented uh musician producer so we're writing a song uh a math metal song about fi math metal is a genre which has very um sort of mathematically based riffs I guess very very syncopated uh very technical and um after we filmed a video on piie for number file a few months ago they got in touch and um was Keen to to collaborate and to to to really take that idea and push it further and so what we've done is we've based a song around the the number five based The rhythms based the melody if you can call it that uh based the lyrics um all around all around F the number five first riff we've got in the song this nice clean one before we punch you in the face and that's derived from uh riff Phil came up with um as you can see here quite conveniently um from the different digits of fi what we want all also want to do as well as mapping the digits of fi onto the Melodies onto the riffs and onto the rhythms is also somehow embed the geometry of fi in the song and the way we're going to do that is we're going to take the guitar string length of the guitar string and we're going to pick out the note which defines so the position on the string which defines the golden ratio the note of the golden ratio as it were and so what we're doing is we have this is our guitar string from here to here the fundamental definition of the golden ratios you've got a B so you got a length a and you've got a length B here so a + b over a is equal to A over B and that's equal to five what we're going to do now is use your wonderful golden ratio calipers wherever they've gone to Define where that note is it's going to be a note that's not going to um match up exactly with where it's though it's not too far off where um we have a fret on the guitar it's just slight below the 17th fret and then what we're going to do is we're going to overdub on top of that or maybe build it up we'll see as Dave suggested what we're going to do is then build this up so we'll go from that just below the 17th fret then we're going to choose another note which as you can see is just around about where the um the screws and the pickup are and then we're going to subdivide that down again each time building up and each time defining the music of the gold or the note of the golden ratio geometrically okay so this next riff I thought it'd be quite cool if we took the number of chugs that a guitar plays technical term a chug is when the guitar goes sounds kind of like it's on a matap pic and we took the number of them and put a a gap in between each one and if you count the number of chugs between each Gap you actually get number five which is quite cool so take a [Music] listen so there was one chug six chugs one chug eight yeah you get the idea so these are gold Nano particles 2 nanometers 2 nanometers across um in water vile what I'm we're not going to really use the nanoparticles what we are going to use is the vial that um the nanop particles are in but of course it's gold it's golden ratio so we thought it was opt well I thought it was [Music] up next up we get to a riff that's kind of like the pi video that you guys did where Phil mapped the digits of pi onto a scale we did that with Fi onto the B flat harmonic minor scale I'm not really good at musical Tech i' do it by [Music] ear um can I get you shouting into the mic I need to get a level unfortunately I'll give you some volume so you can do it but yeah real blood uncountable I haven't done this for a long long time over 20 years so I was in a band while I was a student while I was a postgraduate as well IR Ral I did a level maths I got a C I blame my teacher I'm more of a musician now I uh have a YouTube channel called boy in a band you you can search for that um it'll probably be in the description I'll make sure Brady puts it there oh we'll even put it it'll be just on this just there there we go there how about that cool um but yes uh I make music of varying Styles lots of electronic music but I'm horrendously into metal as well I've just used horrendously twice I hope that's okay IM from the equation spiral that a control 1 61803 3 98 eight seven four it's been a hell of a lot of fun and I'm I'm really happy with the song I think we've done some very interesting things we've gone beyond you know people talk about math metal but math metal those riffs sound complicated but they're not really mapped onto maths in this case we've actually gone beyond that and there's only one other band to the best of my knowledge that has attempted anything like this before and that's a band called after the burial the proportion is divine so five is 1 plus theare < TK of 5 over two so we decided to be a bit clever and and we have got one in this by the open string on the guitar representing that and the other notes being played by the guitar are the digits of square < TK 5 and then over two we go into halftime drums partway through this which we thought was quite clever so [Music] that's quite clever isn't it yeah you're pleased with it yeah some people might not consider it beautiful I think the way that the mats are embedded throughout the song yeah has its own bizarre Beauty about it [Music] yes fight your way to fight to fight to fight and we do a similar thing for the outro as well the one there is that top note then we've got the chugs you remember what chugs are um doing square root of five and again halftime [Music] [Applause] [Music] drums liet was a very famous mathematician developed calculus independently of Newton and he has this wonderful quote which is that music is the human mind counting when it doesn't know that it's counting and that's great there are these fundamental links between numbers between maths between mic music and um it's great to actually embed those so tightly as we doing doing this song well hopefully by now you're all dying to hear the finished song I know I am I haven't actually got the final copy from Dave yet we're going to upload it here on the number File channel on Friday if you're watching this video after Friday I'll have the link below the video and you'll be able to find it of course also below the video in the description I'll have a link to Dave's Channel you really should check it out he's a super talented guy and I'll also have some information under the video about these golden mean calipers which were sent to us from New Zealand they're lots of fun and I'm sure you're all going to have some questions about them and we'll be using them in some future videos we've got coming about the golden ratio on number file in the weeks and months to come but for now we'll uh hear the song on Friday [Music]