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The Thaddeus Gazette

Π In Your Face

3/14/15

Huzzah huzzah, ring the bells and shred the documents, it's Pi Day!

Oh yeah, I see your eyes glazing over. Big Nerdy Deal, Pi Day, you're so freakin' smart your brains leak out your nose. Who cares about math when it's raining?

Ohh, but! but! It's Super Pi Day!

This year, that venerable BND The Day Of The Foundational Transfinite Decimal Ratio falls on an especially (if arbitrarily) auspicious occasion, namely March 14, 2015, or in the vernacular of the peasantry, 3/14/15!

Get it? 3/14/15!

3.1415...?

Guys?

Okay, glazed-eyed sheep of pathetic deluded practicality, we'll cut this short. All us nerdy cool folk are happily celebrating a Very Special Edition of a Very Special Holiday and if you can't see fit to appreciate the wondrous humanity inherent in this totally meaningless confluence of syntax, calendar and constants so universal they encompass everything from the submicroscopic to the stellar, can't you at least be happy that those weird people who spend so much of their time thinking up newer and cooler ways to subjugate, humiliate and confuse you, not to mention bombs and stuff (we care so you don't have to), have something innocent and fun to obsess about for a change? C'mon, glazed-eyed sheep, work with me here.

Anyways, in honor of this auspicious occasion, I'm pleased as pie to bring to the modern web browser a blast from my creative past, one of my more obscure works of soundmongering, a deranged yet delicate suite of MIDI compositions I whacked out back in the Roaring 90's based on musical interpretations of the number that's the reason for the season. Primary tools were a Mac II, ProTracks sequencing software and an Emu Proteus 1 sound module. The Sounds Of The Future Of Yesterday, Here Today And Gone Tomorrow!

In deepest respect of my muse, I tenderly concocted a high-concept artsy cover for the work, bundled it up in high-fi compact cassette format and proceeded to ignore it like all the rest of my stuff, but not before writing profoundly self-indulgent liner notes:

Π

This suite of compositions is based on the first 206 decimal places of the number π, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Mathematicians call this constant a transcendental number, because it cannot be expressed in any finite number of digits. I mapped the digits of ¼ to a number of musicals scales, including major, minor and whole tone, and used the resulting melodies in quasi-composed vehicles, adding a certain amount of random variation to the rhythmic elements

My thanks to the librarian in Kent who read the 206 digits to me over the phone in a lovely southern accent, and to my spouse Sandahbeth who suggested the project in the first place.

T Spae, 7/96

So here then, thanks to the glorious patronage of Soundcloud, is the entirety of that magnum opus, preserved for your edification and momentary amusement. Eat hearty!

Note to the easily distracted: this is one of those difficult works of music you've no doubt read about. Don't feel bad if you find yourself checking your watch at times.

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