Singing Pi
the long song
Silence, still. He hasn’t sung for forever. No melodies, no lyrics have come to him for a very long time. No songs, so no singing. And so the days go. On and on.
One day, randomly, he comes across a website. A single page, very long: it shows the first million digits of pi. And suddenly… in his head he hears a faint melody. Using the numbers as the lyrics, at last he begins to sing.
A half hour later he’s interrupted by a call. (A job interview). Before he heads out to the meeting he downloads the pi page as a file to his phone. He bookmarks where he stopped singing.
A week later in a spare moment he opens the file, and, from where he left off, sings further along the number. Then over the days, here and there, he sings a bit more of the decimals. (Kind of loud when in the shower; sotto voce while in his tiny new office). His melodies and motifs evolve and circle and repeat, but the lyrics are always new — he only ever sings the next series of infinite digits.
He begins to sing them in the mornings, as a warm mantra to welcome the sun. And sometimes, as a muted melody, at night for the new moon. He tries the numbers out as a Christmas carol, as a hot dog jingle, and one New Year’s Eve at the uni pub (on a dare from a girl), he karaoke’s the next-in-line numbers to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. For a Mardi Gras lark he tries some of the sequence out on the street with his brass band. To get his punk on he shouts pi out with his garage band. To do true justice to the number with hours-long jams he finally does the obvious and forms a math rock band. (Called “πhsh”. They gain an avid following. He is able to rest his vocal cords during the extended guitar solos, but he learns 0 to 9 in ASL because sometimes he loses his voice completely during their marathon performances, and so has to sign pi.)
And on. He croons a verse/chorus sequence of numbers as a love song to his wife (the darer) at their wedding. (She laughs). Increasingly life-busy he sings the number less-frequently, but he does yodel to his wife some epenthesized digits while in the mountains on their third-point-one-fourth anniversary. (She frowns).
He never yodels again.
But he does continue to sing pi over time. With a joyful series of the numbers he sirens his son out the womb. (As he catches their baby his wife frowns and laughs.) He also outsources the song — sometime on, he sponsors the uniforms for his son’s little league baseball team (the Pines) because they cheerfully agree to war-chant, at the start of each weekly game, a few more numbers down the line.
The song, now many, many decimal points in, is delivered (in French) as a jaunty chanson for the cancan encore of a local musical production that he directs. Also his favourite students (after checking where he is in the decimals in the updated file) include some numbers as the hook for their thesis rap.
Others of the numbers are sung for him in numerous ways: at a conference he coaxes a visiting member of the Tibetan Dge-lugs-pa sect into throat-singing a deep sequence, and a Swede to perform the next numbers as a high mountain herding-song. On March 14th he pays a singing-telegram man to herald the following figures while riding a skateboard throughout the campus. And so on, till a last one at work: a long set of digits, in Italian, is lovingly sung to him by a teary, barrel-chested colleague, an operatic lament for him on his final day of teaching before retirement.
After that, less. He does, intermittently and with only half a heart, scat some numerals with his latest band (a jazz trio), but before long they break up due to the complications. Then a rest on the unlimited digits. An interlude on that irrational number, for a while. A certain caesura. A grand pause, and on. Permanently, he thinks.
But at last he returns to it, at his wife’s request. He sings it to her as a lullaby in the evenings (as she lives out her last days in the hospital bed).
So on, and along. With aged ears, voice gone, and a slowing heart, the last lyrics he ever hears in the long song come from his son in the next room. He is serenading his own young daughter, teaching her to sing the infinite numbers. In his head, in repose in his bed as his eyes close, he sings along with them in soft harmony, and he knows he has sung forever.
NOTES:
one million digits of pi, printed in a single line, is one mile long (font size 8 point)
it would take roughly 5.8 days (139 hours) of continuous speaking to recite the first million digits of pi, average speaking speed of 120 digits per minute without breaks (vocal font size 8 point)
pi (3.14159 …) has been computed out to 10 trillion digits with no evident pattern. (but there is no mathematical proof yet showing there isn’t a pattern, so we don’t know for sure… maybe it all repeats after three hundred and a fourteen trillion)
Possible “The Window” exhibition wall arrangement: a group of three (space) then one (space) then a group of four (space) the one (space) and so on….
the above story came from a dream of mine where souls from different dimensions sing their pi to each other to signal where they are from — cuz time and space work differently in every dimension, and so circumference ÷ by diameter (the formula for π) is different for everyone’s home dimension. I also had a dream where music was my DNA. You could play the strands like a harp. (I made that song real; it’s prob. the aural equivalent of this post… if curious you can hear it here: Music Is My DNA (Spotify, Apple etc) listen for the hum that runs throughout all the changeups
why pi? cuz it’s both random and infinite and impossible but actual— which are the themes (and/or working process) of The Window photo series. And also: music (like math, like art) is eternal. Archeologists have found playable flutes that are 40,000 years old. The oldest known song (that can be reconstructed) is the Hurrian Hymn #6, from 1400 BCE, in Canaan (Syria), performed on the lyre (a small harp). Greensleeves — a pop song, still sung today — is nearly 500 years old.
math rock is a real thing. math rock makes use of non-standard, frequently changing time signatures such as 13/8 . Some bands are: King Crimson, Game Theory, Weapons Factory, with hints of Pearl Jam, and other two-word groups. (There’s even one from Taiwan: Elephant Gym.) a subgenre of it is mathcore. like, harder math. calculus rock. none of the bands, to my knowledge (and a halfhearted google search) have ever recorded pi, or used a 3.14/8 time signature, so maybe they are only mathsoftcore…
obv. every shot in this set of pics is a musician - unposed, candid, and caught by chance — improv jazz, like all photos in The Window series. (music is another sub theme of the W project — each photo like an individual note in a bigger song. the various sets/groupings that resonate with each other I suppose are the chords). anyway the guy on the skateboard has an operatic voice and sings beautifully as he shoots through traffic. you can hear him for blocks and blocks. as for the 2nd last photo (b&w): not sure if the guy on the left is a “somebody” in the music world, but the guy on the right hustled across the street to shake his hand and enthusiastically ask him lots of questions — that’s why he’s playing air guitar. and as for the last photo, as she danced on the chessboard playing with her dad, the little girl sang away in some language only she understood. maybe she was singing out her home dimension.
…The Window , for the noobs, is one massive infinitely recombinant portrait of the times composed of sub-portraits (grouped sets by theme) composed of single portraits — individual photos of people shot randomly in unstaged ephemeral-but-eternal moments:
The Window : the long view
BONUS IMAGE: musician Drake + Maybach + crew (he’s in white at the car door)
PREVIOUS POSTS:
Balenciaga Winners
Holiday, and feeling somewhat wordless, so at bottom is a stack of ‘stacks from over this year, in case you missed some; many have also been refined post-post, i.e. the Dick Cheney bit re: Cthulhu prompt in the Notes of the AI for an Eye substack.
never hold snow
“Winter’s my favourite though. Stars are snow. Flakes that haven’t yet fallen to earth, tiny white frozen fires descending from the sky in lovely twirls. I joined them, in pirouettes and leaps across the yard, trying to get one to land and burn cold in my opened hand — I imagined, the whole day, sitting inside, a wee girl looking out, all ways, always,…
That’s quite a dream 🙉😄👌