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The ancient Greeks knew of a rectangle whose sides are in the golden proportion (1 : 1.618 which is the same as 0.618 :
1). It occurs naturally in some of the proportions of the Five Platonic Solids (as we have already seen). A construction for
the golden section point is found in Euclid's Elements. The golden rectangle is supposed to appear in many of the
proportions of that famous ancient Greek temple, the Parthenon, in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece but there is no
original documentary evidence that this was deliberately designed in. (There is a replica of the original building (accurate
to one-eighth of an inch!) at Nashville which calls itself "The Athens of South USA".)
The Acropolis (see a plan diagram or Roy George's plan of the Parthenon with active spots to click on to view
photographs), in the centre of Athens, is an outcrop of rock that dominates the ancient city. Its most famous monument is
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the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena built around 430 or 440 BC. It is largely in ruins but is now undergoing
some restoration (see the photos at Roy George's site in the link above).
Again there are no original plans of the Parthenon itself. It appears to be built on a design of golden rectangles and root-5
rectangles:
the front view (see diagram above): a golden rectangle, Phi times as wide as it is high
the plan view: 5 as long as the front is wide so the floor area is a square-root-of-5 rectangle
However, due to the top part being missing and the base being curved to counteract an optical illusion of level lines
appearing bowed, these are only an approximate measures but reasonably good ones.
The Panthenon image here shows clear golden sections in the placing of the three
horizontal lines but the overall shape and the other prominent features are not golden
section ratios.
Links
There is a wonderful collection of pictures of the Parthenon and the Acropolis at Indiana University's web site.
Dr Ann M Nicgorski of the Department of Art and Art History at Williamette University in the USA has a large collection
of links to Parthenon pictures with many details of the building.
David Silverman's page on the Parthenon has lots of information. Look at the plan of the Parthenon. The dividing
partition in the inner temple seems to be on the golden section both of the main temple and the inner temple. Apart
from that, I cannot see any other clear golden sections - can you?
Allan T Kohl's Art Images for College Teaching has a lot of images on ancient art and architecture.
Modern Architecture
The Eden Project in St. Austell, between Plymouth and Penzance in SW England and 50 miles from Land's End, has some
wonderfully impressive greenhouses based on geodesic domes (called biomes) built in an old quarry. It marks the
Millenium in the year 2000 and is now one of the most popular tourist attractions in the SW of England.
A new £15 million Education Centre called The Core has been designed using Fibonacci Numbers and plant spirals to
reflect the nature of the site - plants from all over the world. The logo shows the pattern of panels on the roof.
What is 300 million years old, weights 70 tonnes and is the largest of its type in the world? It is the new sculpture called
The Seed at the centre of The Core which was unveiled on Midsummer's Day 2007 (June 23). Peter Randall-Paige's design
is based on the spirals found in seeds and sunflowers and pinecones.
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The architect Le Corbusier deliberately incorporated some golden rectangles as the shapes of windows or other aspects of
buildings he designed. One of these (not designed by Le Corbusier) is the United Nations building in New York which is
L-shaped. Although you will read in some books that "the upright part of the L has sides in the golden ratio, and there are
distinctive marks on this taller part which divide the height by the golden ratio", when I looked at photos of the building, I
could not find these measurements. Can you?
The United Nations Headquarters Virtual Tour has a view of the UN building .
An aerial view
[With thanks to Bjorn Smestad of Finnmark College, Norway for mentioning these links.]
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A M B
The line AB is divided at point M so that the ratio of the two parts, the smaller MB to the larger AM is the
same as the ratio of the larger part AM to the whole AB.
We have seen on earlier pages at this site that this gives two ratios, AM:AB which is also BM:AM and is 0.618...
which we call phi (beginning with a small p). The other ratio is AB:AM = AM:MB = 1/phi= 1.618... or Phi (note
the capital P). Both of these are variously called the golden number or golden ratio, golden section, golden
mean or the divine proportion. Other pages at this site explain a lot more about it and its amazing
mathematical properties and it relation to the Fibonacci Numbers.
Pacioli's work influenced Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) and is seen in some of the work
of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Mondrian, for instance.
Many books on oil painting and water colour in your local library will point out that it is better to position
objects not in the centre of the picture but to one side or "about one-third" of the way across, and to use
lines which divide the picture into thirds. This seems to make the picture design more pleasing to the eye
and relies again on the idea of the golden section being "ideal".
Leonardo's Art
The Uffizi Gallery's Web site in Florence, Italy, has a virtual room of some of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings and drawings. I
suggest the following two of Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings to analyse for yourself:
The Annunciation
is a picture that looks like it is in a frame of 1:sqrt(5) shape (a root-5 rectangle). Print it and measure it - is it a
root-5 rectangle? Divide it into a square on the left and another on the right. (If it is a root-5 rectangle, these lines
mark out two golden-section rectangles as the parts remaining after a square has been removed). Also mark in the
lines across the picture which are 0618 of the way up and 0618 of the way down it. Also mark in the vertical lines
which are 0618 of the way along from both ends. You will see that these lines mark out significant parts of the
picture or go through important objects. You can then try marking lines that divide these parts into their golden
sections too.
Leonardo's Madonna with Child and Saints
is in a square frame. Look at the golden section lines (0618 of the way down and up the frame and 0618 of the way
across from the left and from the right) and see if these lines mark out significant parts of the picture. Do other
sub-divisions look like further golden sections?
Modern Art
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Links:
More information on the tapestry.
Take a virtual tour of the Cathedral.
Purchase this print from Rob Orland's Photos website
Top9.com's List of the top art sources on the web is an excellent place for links to good art sources on the web. Highly
recommended!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York houses more than 2 million works of art.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco site has an Image base of 65,000 works of art. It includes art from Ancient to
Modern, from paintings to ceramics and textiles, from all over the world as well as America.
A Guide to Art Collections in the UK
Michelangelo is famous for his paintings (such as the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel) and his sculptures (for instance
David). This site has links to several sources and images of his works and some links to sites on the golden section.
Using the picture of his David sculpture, measure it and see if he has used Phi - eg is the navel ("belly button") 0618
of the David's height?
Why not visit the Leonardo Museum in the town of Vinci (Italy) itself from which town Leonardo is named, of course.
There are many sketches and paintings of Leonardo's at The WebMuseum, Paris too.
When I was giving a talk at The Eden Project in Cornwall in July 2007, Patricia Bennetts and Mary Miller of Falmouth
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introduced me to using Fibonacci Numbers in Quilt design. (Let your mouse rest on their names to see their email
addresses.)
Their two designs are based on the pattern in the middle where the strips in the lower half are of widths 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and
13 in brown which are alternated with lighter strips of the same widths but in decreasing order.
Woolly Thoughts is Steve Plummer and Pat Ashforth's web site with many maths inspired knitting and crochet projects,
including designs based on Fibonacci numbers, the golden spiral, pythagorean triangles, flexagons and much much
more. They have worked for many years in schools giving a new twist to mathematics with their hands-on approach to
design using school maths. An excellent resource for teachers who want to get students involved in maths in a new
way and also for mathematicians interested in knitting and crochet.
Billie Ruth Sudduth is a North American artist specialising in basket work that is now internationally known. Her
designs are based on the Fibonacci Numbers and the golden section - see her web page JABOBs (Just A Bunch Of
Baskets). Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School has a good online introduction to her work (January 1999).
Kees van Prooijen of California has used a similar series to the Fibonacci series - one made from adding the previous
three terms, as a basis for his art.
Pietro Malusardi and Karen Wallace have a web page showing some elegant applications of the golden section in
furniture design.
Custom Furniture Solutions have a Media cabinet designed using golden section proportions.
A recent edition (Jan/Feb 2003) of the Ancient Egypt Magazine contained an article on Woodworking in Ancient Egypt
where the author, Geoffrey Killen, explains how a box (chest) exhibits the golden section in its design but is not sure
if this is coincidence or design.
Fletcher Cox is a craftsman in wood who has used the golden section in his birds-eye maple wooden plate.
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Fibonacci in Films
The Russian Sergie Eisenstein directed the classic silent film of 1925 The Battleship Potemkin (a DVD or video version
of this 75 minute film is now available, both in PAL format). He divided the film up using golden section points to start
important scenes in the film, measuring these by length on the celluloid film.
Jonathan Berger of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics used this as an illustration
of Fibonacci numbers in a lecture course.
Dénes Nagy, in a fascinating article entitled Golden Section(ism): From mathematics to the theory of art and
musicology, Part 1 in Symmetry, Culture and Science, volume 7, number 4, 1996, pages 337-448 talks about whether
we can percieve a golden section point in time without being initially aware of the whole time interval. He gives a
reference to his own work on golden section perception in video art too (page 418 of the above article).
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In English, we tend to think of poetry as lines of text that rhyme, that is, lines that end with similar sounds as in this
children's song:
Also we have the rhythm of the separate sounds (called syllables). Words like twinkle have two syllables: twin- and -kle
whereas words such as star have just one. Some syllables are emphasized or stressed more than others so that they
sound louder (such as TWIN- in twinkle), whereas others are unstressed and quieter (such as -kle in twinkle). Dictionaries
will often show how to pronounce a word by separating it into syllables, the stressed parts shown in capital as we have
done here, e.g. DIC-tion-ar-y to show it has 4 syllables with the first one only being stressed.
If we let S stand for a stressed syllable and s an unstressed one, then the stress-pattern of each line of the song or poem
is its meter (rhythm). In the song above each line has the meter SsSsSsS.
in Sanskrit poetry, if all lines take the same amount of time to say, what combinations of short (S) and long (L) syllables
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can we have?
This is just another puzzle of the same kind as on the Simple Fibonacci Puzzles page at this site.
For one time unit, we have only one short syllable to say: S = 1 way
For two time units, we can have two short or one long syllable: SS and L = 2 ways
For three units, we can have: SSS, SL or LS = 3 ways
Any guesses for lines of 4 time units? Four would seem reasonable - but wrong! It's five!
SSSS, SSL, SLS, LSS and LL;
the general answer is that lines that take n time units to say can be formed in Fib(n) ways.
This was noticed by Acarya Hemacandra about 1150 AD or 70 years before Fibonacci published his first edition of Liber
Abaci in 1202!
Acarya Hemacandra and the (so-called) Fibonacci Numbers Int. J. of Mathematical Education vol 20 (1986)
pages 28-30.
Virgil's Aeneid
Martin Gardner, in the chapter "Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers" in Mathematical Circus (Penguin books, 1979 or
Mathematical Assoc. of America 1996) mentions Prof George Eckel Duckworth's book Structural patterns and
proportions in Virgil's Aeneid : a study in mathematical composition (University of Michigan Press, 1962).
Duckworth argues that Virgil consciously used Fibonacci numbers to structure his poetry and so did other Roman poets of
the time.
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Various composers have used the Fibonacci numbers when composing music, and some authors find the golden section as
far back as the Middle Ages (10th century) ( see, for instance, The Golden Section In The Earliest Notated Western
Music P Larson Fibonacci Quarterly 16 (1978) pages 513-515 ).
The section on "The Violin" in The New Oxford Companion to Music, Volume 2, shows how Stradivari was aware of the
golden section and used it to place the f-holes in his famous violins.
This is the title of an article in the American Scientist of March/April 1996 by Mike May. He reports on John Putz's analysis
of many of Mozart's sonatas. John Putz found that there was considerable deviation from golden section division and that
any proximity to golden sections can be explained by constraints of the sonata form itself, rather than purposeful
adherence to golden section division.
The Mathematics Magazine Vol 68 No. 4, pages 275-282, October 1995 has an article by Putz on Mozart and the
Golden section in his music.
In Mathematics Teaching volume 84 in 1978, Derek Haylock writes about The Golden Section in Beethoven's Fifth
on pages 56-57.
He claims that the famous opening "motto" (click on the music to hear it) occurs
exactly at the golden mean point 0618 in bar 372 of 601 and again at bar 228
which is the other golden section point (0.618034 from the end of the piece) but
he has to use 601 bars to get these figures. This he does by ignoring the final 20 bars that occur after the final
appearance of the motto and also ignoring bar 387.
Have a look at the full score for yourself at The Hector Berlioz website on the Berlioz: Predecessors and Contemporaries
page, if you follow the Scores Available link. A browser plug-in enables you to hear it also. Note that the repeated 124
bars at the beginning are not included in the bar counts on the musical score.
Tim Benjamin for points out that But there are 626 bars and not 601!
Therefore the golden section points actually occur at bars 239 (shown as bar 115 as the counts do not include the repeat)
and 387 (similarly marked as bar 263).
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The 626 bars are comprised of a repeated section of 124 bars - so that's the first 248 bars in the repeated
section, the "exposition" - followed by 354 of "development" section, then a 24 bar "recapitulation" (standard
"first movement form"). Therefore there can't really be anything significant at 239, because that moment
happens twice. However at 387, there is something pretty odd - this inversion of the main motto. You have
some big orchestral activity, then silence, then this quiet inversion of the motto, then silence, then big activity
again.
Also you have to bear in mind that bar numbers start at 1, and not 0, so you would need to look for something
happening at 387.9 (rounding to 1dp) and not 386.9. This is in fact what happens - the strange inversion runs
from 387.25 to 388.5.
But bar 387 is precisely one that Haylock singles out to ignore!
So is it Beethoven's "phi-fth" or just plain old "Fifth"?
There are some fascinating articles and books which explain how these composers may have deliberately used the golden
section in their music:
Duality and Synthesis in the Music of Bela Bartók
by E Lendvai on pages 174-193 of Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm G Kepes (editor), George Brazille, 1966;
Some striking Proportions in the Music of Bela Bartók
in Fibonacci Quarterly Vol 9, part 5, 1971, pages 527-528 and 536-537.
Bela Bartók: an analysis of his music
by Erno Lendvai, published by Kahn & Averill, 1971; has a more detailed look at Bartók's use of the golden mean.
Debussy in Proportion - a musical analysis
by Roy Howat, Cambridge Univ. Press,1983, ISBN = 0 521 23282 1.
Concert pianist Roy Howat's Web site has more information on his Debussy in Proportion book and others works
and links.
Adams, Coutney S. Erik Satie and Golden Section Analysis.
in Music and Letters, Oxford University Press,ISSN 0227-4224, Volume 77, Number 2 (May 1996), pages 242-252
Schubert Studies, (editor Brian Newbould) London: Ashgate Press, 1998
has a chapter Architecture as drama in late Schubert by Roy Howat, pages 168 - 192, about Schubert's golden
sections in his late A major sonata (D.959).
The Proportional Design of J.S. Bach's Two Italian Cantatas,
Tushaar Power, Musical Praxis, Vol.1, No.2. Autumn 1994, pp.35-46.
This is part of the author's Ph D Thesis J.S. Bach and the Divine Proportion presented at Duke University's Music
Department in March 2000.
Proportions in Music by Hugo Norden in Fibonacci Quarterly vol 2 (1964) pages 219-222
talks about the first fugue in J S Bach's The Art of Fugue and shows how both the Fibonacci and Lucas numbers
appear in its organization.
Per Nørgård's 'Canon' by Hugo Norden in Fibonacci Quarterly vol 14 (1976), pages 126-128 says the title piece is
an "example of music based entirely and to the minutest detail on the Fibonacci Numbers".
The Fibonacci Series in Twentieth Century Music J Kramer, Journal of Music Theory 17 (1973), pages 110-148
There is a very useful set of mathematical links to Art and Music web resources from Mathematics Archives that is
worth looking at.
The Golden String is a fractal string of 0s and 1s that grows in a Fibonacci-like way as follows:
1
10
101
10110
10110101
1011010110110
101101011011010110101
...
After the first two lines, all the others are made from the two latest lines in a similar way to each Fibonacci numbers being
a sum of the two before it. Each string (list of 0s and 1s) here is a copy of the one above it followed by the one above
that. The resulting infintely long string is the Golden String or Fibonacci Word or Rabbit Sequence. It is interesting to hear
it in musical form and I give two ways in the section Hear the Golden sequence on that page. In that same section I
mention the London based group Perfect Fifth who have used it in a piece called Fibonacci that you can hear online too .
John Biles, a computer scientist at Rochester university in New York State used the series which is the number of sets of
Fibonacci numbers whose sum is n to make a piece of music. He wrote about it and has a link to hear the piece
online. The series looks like this:
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It has some fractal properties in that the graph can be seen in sections, each beginning and ending when the graph dips
down to lowest points on the y=1 line. Each section begins and ends with a copy of the section two before it (and moved
up a bit), and in between them is a copy of the previous section again moved up.
I've written more about this series in a section called Sumthing about Fibonacci Numbers on the Fibonacci Bases and
other ways of representing integers.
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Miscellaneous, Amusing and Odd places to find Phi and the Fibonacci
Numbers
TV Stations in Halifax, Canada
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, there are 4 non-cable TV channels and they are numbered 3, 5, 8 and 13! Prof. Karl Dilcher
reported this coincidence at the Eighth International Conference on Fibonacci Numbers and their Applications in summer
1998.
Joerg Wiegels of Duesseldorf told me that he was astonished to see the Fibonacci numbers glowing brightly in
the night sky on a visit to Turku in Finland. The chimney of the Turku power station has the Fibonacci
numbers on it in 2 metre high neon lights! It was the first commission of the Turku City Environmental Art
Project in 1994. The artist, Mario Merz (Italy) calls it Fibonacci Sequence 1-55 and says "it is a metaphor of
the human quest for order and harmony among chaos."
The picture here was taken by Dr. Ching-Kuang Shene of Michigan Technological University and is reproduced here with his kind
permission from his page of photos of his Finland trip.
Designed in?
Sometimes you will read that clocks and watches set at ten to two have their hands positioned so as to form
a golden rectangle and that this is "aesthetically pleasing".
But it is easy to calculate that the angle between the hands at this time is 0.3238 of a turn (or, the larger
angle is 0.6762 of a turn) both of which are nowhere near the golden ratio angles of 0.618 and 0.382 (=
1–0.618) of a turn.
There are eleven distinct times in any 12 hour period when the hands of a clock mark out a golden ratio on the
circumference.
What times are they?
Other authors say the hands at 1:50 or 10:08 form a golden rectangle using the points on the rim.
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This also is not true even if one could imagine them projected on to the
rim and then making a rectangle - not an easy visual exercise!
Here are the clocks with hands extended to the rim and a golden rectangle
superimposed on the clocks. When the hour hand points at the right place, it
is about 10:04 and when the minute hand gets to the correct position, it is
about 10h 9m 35s but then the hour hand does not point to the right place.
The time when the hands are exactly symmetrical is 10 hours 9 minutes and 13.8462... seconds and also 1 hours, 50
minutes and 46.1538 seconds. So 10:09 and 1:51 are both reasonably close, but even with the visual gymnastics, it
seems unlikely that the eye recognizes such a golden rectangle construction at those times, in my mathematical opinion!
Chris Carlson's Mathematica Blog and Mathematica code was used to draw the clocks in this section
Things to do
1. What other logos can you find that are golden rectangles?
2. Where else have you found the golden rectangle?
Email me with any answers to these questions and I'll try to include them on this page.
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A Controversial Issue
There are many books and articles that say that the golden rectangle is the most pleasing shape and point out how it
was used in the shapes of famous buildings, in the structure of some music and in the design of some famous works of
art. Indeed, people such as Corbusier and Bartók have deliberately and consciously used the golden section in their
designs.
However, the "most pleasing shape" idea is open to criticism. The golden section as a concept was studied by the Greek
geometers several hundred years before Christ, as mentioned on earlier pages at this site, But the concept of it as a
pleasing or beautiful shape only originated in the late 1800's and does not seem to have any written texts (ancient Greek,
Egyptian or Babylonian) as supporting hard evidence.
At best, the golden section used in design is just one of several possible "theory of design" methods which help
people structure what they are creating. At worst, some people have tried to elevate the golden section beyond what we
can verify scientifically. Did the ancient Egyptians really use it as the main "number" for the shapes of the Pyramids? We
do not know. Usually the shapes of such buildings are not truly square and perhaps, as with the pyramids and the
Parthenon, parts of the buildings have been eroded or fallen into ruin and so we do not know what the original lengths
were. Indeed, if you look at where I have drawn the lines on the Parthenon picture above, you can see that they can
hardly be called precise so any measurements quoted by authors are fairly rough!
So this page has lots of speculative material on it and would make a good Project for a Science Fair perhaps,
investigating if the golden section does account for some major design features in important works of art, whether
architecture, paintings, sculpture, music or poetry. It's over to you on this one!
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Golden Section(ism): From mathematics to the theory of art and musicology, Part 1, Dénes Nagy in
Symmetry, Culture and Science, volume 7, number 4, 1996, pages 337-448
Section 2.1 says there are at least nine different theories about the shape of the Great Pyramid of Pharoah Khufu
(the Great Pyramid of Cheops), two of which refer to the golden section:
The angle of the slope of the faces is
although a better fit is provided by a mathematical problem in the Rhind Papyrus which, in our notation is
All of the material at this site is about Mathematics so this page is definitely the odd one out! All the other material is
scientifically (mathematically) verifiable and this page (and the final part of the Links page) is the only speculative
material on these Fibonacci and Phi pages.
Key:
a book
an article in a magazine or
a paper in an academic journal
a website
Music
Gamelan music
Gamelan
is the percussion oriented music of Indonesia. The American Gamelan Institute has lots of information
including a Gongcast recorded online music so you can hear Gamelan music for yourself.
New music
from David Canright of the Maths Dept at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA; combining the
Fibonacci series with Indonesian Gamelan musical forms.
Some CDs
on Gamelan music of Central Java (the Indonesian island not the software!).
Other music
Martin Morgenstern has a large and interesting list of books and articles on the golden section and music with
abstracts, some of which is in German.
The Fibonacci Sequence
is the name of a classical music ensemble of internationally famous soloists, who are the musicians in
residence at Kingston University (Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK). Based in the London (UK) area, their
current programme of events is on the Web site link above.
Casey Mongoven is a composer who has used Fibonacci numbers and golden sections in his own musical
compositions. You can hear them and read more on his web site. Casey has an impressively large collection
of pieces, most of them a few seconds only in length but they are fascinating to listen to and very different
from conventional music. The pitches of his notes are often based on powers of Phi and their order is fixed by
a number sequence, such as the Fibonacci numbers, or R(n) - the number of Fibonacci representations of n
or on many other sequences that are described here on my Fibonacci site.
His scores too are images that illustrate many of the series you will have seen here. You can experiment for
yourself with the Fibonacci Sequence Visualiser that was designed specifically for Casey's works.
Ted Froberg explains how he used the Fibonacci numbers "mod 7" (that is the remainders when we divide
each Fibonacci number by 7) to make a "theme" which he then harmonizes and has made into a Fibonacci
waltz.
Art
A Mathematical History of the Golden Number by Roger Herz-Fischler, Dover 1998, ISBN 0486400077. A
scholarly study of all major references in an attempt to trace the earliest references to the "golden section",
its names, etc.
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