Delia Derbyshire Interviewed by Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom (From the Archive)

This is an aside titled 'Delia Derbyshire Interviewed by Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom (From the Archive)' dated 8/19/08

In 1999, Sonic Boom (of Spacemen 3, now Spectrum) interviewed Delia Derbyshire for Surface magazine and it gets good and geeky near the middle. “There’s been, since the ancient Greeks, a very close link between music and mathematics… People think that composers sit there with their pen over the manuscript paper, and God sends his inspiration down the top of the pen onto the paper. Well, in some cases it seems perhaps they did; perhaps Mozart. But in other cases one has to impose a discipline, and the discipline of number is an excellent discipline. The Fibonacci sequence people have been using for centuries…Nature’s numbers; the number of leaves on a fern, the number of seeds on a sunflower head, and how they are arranged… this is the Fibonacci sequence, used in art and architecture and music. Although when you hear it in music, it is not recognised. Even George Gershwin used it in Porgy and Bess. Now who knows that?”

Posted by Joanne on Aug. 19, 2008

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