Version of Alan Stewart's excellent prog rock epic uploaded at Numberphile for pi day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36qMxXGo3A 

Alan and I collaborated on this last year. Everything but the guitars is down to Alan -- overall concept, arrangement, drums, bells and whistles, kitchen sink...

Early demo with guitars. Guitar riffs, notes, and solos similarly inspired by/derived from pi (and from tau, for the tau-ists out there...)

Pi Prog Rock (...or "Pi-Tau and the Snow Dog")

See https://muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SUAC_PhysicsWorld_Sept2023.pdf 

or, for all the gory detail: https://muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com/2023/06/06/quantum-mechanix/

Shut Up And Calculate

Sample of "point spread function" for a concert hall.

"Point spread function" for concert hall

Audio "point spread function" for an ice cave.

Ice cave

Gregorian chant -- Monty Python

A version of Lizzy's "The Sun Goes Down" I recorded to mark the anniversary of Phil Lynott's untimely passing thirty years ago. 

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53Na23R-XUo 

A blog post on what Lynott's and Lizzy's music meant to me (and others, including Lemmy and Motorhead): https://muircheartblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/play-me-the-melodies-i-want-to-know/

It's mostly a faithful cover, apart from the intro and outro where I've taken the very simple, but very effective, keyboard riff Darren Wharton plays in the verses and transferred it to piano. The guitar solo is as close as I can get it to the version that Scott Gorham plays on the "Thunder and Lightning" version of the track. 

"The Sun Goes Down" is one of my favourite ever Lizzy tracks and Gorham's solo in it is stunning. In terms of raw emotion it equals anything that, for example, Dave Gilmour has recorded. 

The Aerodrums I'm using on the track are described here: http://aerodrums.com/aerodrums-product-page/ 

Native Instruments' Guitar Rig (http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/guitar/guitar-rig-5-pro/ ) used to record bass, guitar, and keyboards.

The wonderful Audacity application (http://audacityteam.org/) was used for mixing and effects.

The Sun Goes Down

WUCP--PatienceThree

WUCP--WhistleHarmony

WUCP--SanitariumNoteHarmonic

WUCP -- Barchetta

WUCP--ScumGrief--Undistorted

WUCP -- ScumGriefDistorted

WUCP--ScumGriefFiltered

WUCP -- BatteryNoWah

WUCP -- ABatteryOfWahs

Recorded in October 1994 at Andy Sneap's Backstage Studios in Nottingham. From Sentience's Trend demo [Steve Murphy on guitar].

Guiltrip

A short piece of music derived from the 'opening' digits of tau (i.e. 2pi) and those of phi (the golden ratio).

Written for Brady Haran's Numberphile video on tau. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiibxmqXV9M for the video and http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/tau-of-phi.html for a description of how the music is related to phi and tau.

A riff from Tool's Lateralus makes a cameo (for reasons that Tool aficionados will understand), as do the wonderfully crystalline vocals of ViHart (sampled from this great video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtxmFlMLYRI )

The Tau of Phi

Professor of Physics at the University of Nottingham. Rush fan. Metal fan. Not a fan of the binomial theorem.

Philip Moriarty

Popular tracks