Bode's law

Troubledoor wrote:

> "John F. Sprague" wrote:
> > This number series doesn't seem to be related to the creation of a musical scale, but perhaps I'll see something more in the other replies to the original posting.
> >
>
> You've got the number for the planets in mean millions of miles it looks like. In geometrical form, all the numbers of any scale or magnitude of size always get reduced to the musical intervals. That was the essence of Einstein's Relativity Theory. That it is better to reduce everything to geometrical ideas. It's in the Guy Murchie book I mentioned above. You have to divide those rather big numbers into the ratios that produce them. Its always comes out to Pythagorus' ratios.

Sorry, but that paragraph reads like a series of unrelated sentences to me. I'm confused. Are you saying that E=mc2 is a musical formula? How in the world does Bode's Law relate to Pythagorean ratios?

Can you please explain how to reduce the Bode's Law series into geometrical form in such a way as to arrive at musically meaningful ratios? I did an experiment once where I took the planetary distances (in mean millions of miles) and reduced them to their simple ratios. Then I generated tones (sustained, with weak harmonic overtones) within human hearing range at frequencies with the same set of ratios (not easy to do, since it spans almost the whole range!), and played them together in series and as "chords." It sounded like crap. So I tried it with the theoretical Bode's Law series itself. That also sounded like crap. I could perceive no musical value, nothing remotely resembling anything that could conceivably be
construed as a musical scale. To quote Homer Simpson, it sounded like "just a bunch of stupid stuff that happened." Meaningless chaos. Where did I go wrong? Where is the legendary music of the spheres?

--
David J. Finnamore
Nashville, TN, USA
http://members.xoom.com/dfinn.1
--

> From: "John F. Sprague" <jsprague@dhcr.state.ny.us>
>
> It is, however, more accurate than Kepler's inscribed and
> circumscribed spheres around the Platonic solids, an hypothesis
> which he abandoned.
>

Has anyone else read

Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration

from the Shiller Institute?

This is a treatise by (or supported by) Lyndon Larouche. The
major aim of the work is to demonstrate that C=256 and that
deviations are ruinous for Western music. It all stems
from where the register breaks are in the human voice...

These same breaks are shown by the asteroid belt and correctly
predicted by Keplers model.

The natural laws of the universe match those that cause
registration in the human voice. Raising C, (via A=440)
and Newtons theories, are both things that should be
repealed.

An interesting but strange read...

Bob Valentine

Please accept my apology for being so long in replying to the question about my statement that Kepler had abandoned his notion of inscribed and circumscribed spheres around the five Platonic solids as describing the orbits of the planets. That was my recollection of something that I had either read or heard in a lecture probably between thirty-five and forty-five years ago. Digging out that reference or my lecture notes simply didn't have a high priority for me. However, now I have received back from a colleague my set of Carl Sagan's videos and book, "Cosmos", after having these on loan for over three years. Although the book doesn't list Bode (or Titius) in its index (probably a good indication of the slight regard for his "law" among contemporary astronomers), there is a section on Kepler, particularly pages 43 through 51. His realization that the orbits were not circular and that there were satellites which did not fit this scheme apparently led to his grudging acceptance that God had not set up the solar system on the basis of solid geometry (The Cosmic Mystery). Eventually, after Tycho Brahe died and his observations became available to Kepler, he figured out that the orbits were elliptical and the result was his third or harmonic law: the squares of the periods of revolution are proportional to the cubes of the average distances from the sun. He then went on to relate these to musical tones (Sagan does not go into the math about that).