Re: [tuning] Bode's law

"David J. Finnamore" wrote:

> 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?
>

They both unfold in the same manner. One by geometric division and the other by multiplication in regular magnitudes (1 2 4 8 16 etc except that its by Pythagorus' ratios. Remember that ratios are symbolized by the division sign and division is the opposite of multiplication so you are probably getting lost where you started dividing and the universe started multiplying the divisions/ratios.). All of Einstein's and Newton's equations can be expressed by the octave series (3 binary bits produces 8 slots of data). Your computer is doing that at this very moment. It's taking the decimal system and creating binary bit digital copies of the 10 fold series (decimal). Someone can take the many bits from a computer (these days
its 64 bits) and divide these into 8s or octahedrons. This happens all throughout nature. Its almost rediculous for me to tell you to read Amy C. Edmondson's "A Fuller Explanation" because that material is very difficult and you'd have to stop playing music to get to the heart of it. I'll try to find my one volume of the Guy Murchie book and I'll see if what you're asking is in that one volume (I lost the other one).

ALL BE BOCK

>
> 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
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>

Typical of the subject matter we are discussing, I have the wrong volume of Music of the Spheres (vol. 2). It's in vol. 1 and I can't remember if the Joscelyn Godwin book is called "Cosmic Music". It has essays by Josef Hauer, and other proffesors. Godwin is the editor. I think the matter with this subject is that the people who study it are usually on drugs. I myself was on drugs daily back when I had those books.

In Hinduism, there are 7 theosophical rays and when the surat shabd yogi's of the Radhasaomi tradition start to meditate on these things, they say that they hear music. I've heard this music myself while meditating. Another example of this Bode's Law is in chemistry where there are 8 classes of elements.
Something musical is going on in creation. Or alternately, the rainbows are responsible for this paranoid conspiracy of Apollo's lyre. The Guy Murchie volumes are the best place to start for the physical facts. I'll get back to the subject when I can find those books again.

Maybe you're right to criticize Bode's Law and the Pythagorean ratios. It is the case that most of the other physical facts center around the number 8 more than they do the musical ratios. So really it might be the number 8 that is causing my antiquity philosophy paranoia. Octaves are octaves though. And the octave is always the 8th diatonic note. It's still the music of the spheres.

This material is called "the occult" in the books tradition. That is another reason why you are having difficulty getting the exact method right. And in fact, the books I used to own were all occult oriented books. Why it is such a secret I can only gauge by my own personal psychosis.

I need those books though before I can say anything more so I'll have to wait to get the whole theory out for this group.

Did you know that Saturn is the octave of the Sun and that Uranus is the octave of Mercury? Maybe you didn't calculate that in your equations and therefore came up with the bad music.

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I was replying to a joking reference to "Bode's Law of musical intervals" posted by "troubledoor", who was replying to Joe Monzo.
Bode's law did have significance historically and aided in finding Uranus and suggested the existence of the then undiscovered asteroid belt. Uranus can be seen by the naked eye under near ideal conditions but was apparently never recognized as a "wanderer" by any civilization until it was discovered telescopically. Orbital perturbations of nearer planets were the main clues in finding Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
Bode's law equates the Earth's distance to the sun as 10, not in tens of millions of miles. Of course, that's only about 7% off from 93 million miles.
Other orbital radii are expressed in terms of Earth's radius. Of course, all are ellipses, not circles, although Venus' is almost an exact circle. Pluto's is the strangest and most irregular as well as having the greatest inclination to the ecliptic. At times, it is closer to the sun than Neptune. Its origin is uncertain, but it is far larger than any asteroid. Some astronomers hypothesize that some of the satellites of various planets are captured asteroids. This depends largely on whether the asteroids are fragments of a planet that disintegrated or whether they are a band of fragments that never coalesced into a planet, analogous to Saturn's rings.
As Asimov implied, it is doubtful that any contemporary astronomer takes Bode's law seriously. It doesn't explain anything. It's merely a curious coincidence. That it is still mentioned in textbooks is probably only because of the appeal of abstractions to academicians. It is, however, more accurate than Kepler's inscribed and circumscribed spheres around the Platonic solids, an hypothesis which he abandoned.
Any group of numbers can be related each to every other one and if some small number fractions result you could say these are musical ratios for just intonation. Taking the Bode numbers only as far as Uranus, you get: 5/4, 7/4, 13/8, 25/16, 49/32, 8/7, 13/7, 25/14, 8/5, 7/5, 13/10, 49/40, 25/13, 49/26 and 49/25 (putting them all in the same octave, between 1/1 and 2/1). These are mostly not the ratios in Pythagoras' scale.
I never mentioned E=mC squared in relation to music, nor to my knowledge has anyone else outside of this tuning list. Nor have I ever previously read or heard that the essence of Einstein's relativity theory was that, "all the numbers of any scale or magnitude of size get reduced to the musical intervals".
In fairness to Titius and Bode, as far as I know, no one else has an explanation of why the planets happen to be at the distances from the sun that they are. There is, however, some degree of synchronization in their orbital periods which has apparently stabilized over some billions of years due to their mutual gravitational attractions.
I didn't know of Godwin's "Cosmic Music" talks and Murchie's "Music of the Spheres" and Edmonson's "A Fuller Explanation". I suspect they are not readily available in most libraries.
Sorry about the typo. (Add four to each of the series: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, etc.).
Lawson's translation (into English) (Henry Holt & Co., 1920) of Einstein's "Relativity, The Special and General Theory" has no reference in its index to music or Pythagoras. Kepler, Helmholz and the Doppler effect are mentioned, but not in reference to music or sound. There is a brief reference to the pitch of an organ pipe varying with its relative position, whether parallel or perpendicular to the direction of travel (of a calliope, for example).
One might as well decide to create a "Manhattan " scale by deriving ratios from the street numbers of subway stops. (I hate making this analogy because someone will probably decide to do it.)