Canning Town Blues

I am going to call this latest piece of software after one of the Muses - see if you can guess which one.

Listening to Four Organs by Steve Reich

You may not wish to listen to this as apparently caused one woman at the premier rose from her seat and approached the stage saying "I confess! I confess!". I love it. It is basically one chord which gets longer and longer throughout the piece though there is some dissection of the basic notes in that they are not all played all the time (Thank you Eric Morecambe). Its beauty to me is the choice of chord which is found in lots of music - just usually in a much more conventional setting. Steve Reich is not a difficult composer; his works are far more melodic than the atonal pieces that you can sometimes hear on Radio 3 and I have often argued (not than many people can be bothered arguing with me about this) that there is far more variation over the length of the pieces than you will find in a standard pop song. I listened to some samples of Metal Machine Music the other day and found that reasonably interesting as well.

Currently reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan. I was immediately struck by how flowery the introduction to this was and although this poetic approach has returned throughout the book it seems to work even with the diversions into various Zen-like interludes. I suppose that anything to do with zero really does actually fall naturally into a reference to Zen. My aunt told me about how her first few lectures for her maths degree just involved discussion of the succession of 1 and 2. I now have a whole book about zero which if you think about it hard enough is far more than either just the absence of anything to number or the number between -1 and 1. It is the pin on which all numbers circle, wheeling about this central point without which the galaxy of mathematics would spin off into the universe with no real definition.

All this is leading to some weird dreams about maths. Last night I dreamed that I had found a geometric solution to the sequencing of prime numbers, where the angles between the sides of polygons with various numbers of sides has a direct relationship with whether that number was prime or not. I'll let you know when I crack RSA. Begging letters to the address above.