In November 2013, SFI Professor Cristopher Moore took the stage at the Lensic Performing Arts Center with The Santa Fe Symphony. Together, before a backdrop of multimedia imagery, they offered an immersion in sound, sights, and ideas from the rhythms of molecules and planets to the harmonies of dolphins and the dissonances of the "devil's interval."
In 2017, Moore and the Symphony put on a second rendition of the performance while New Mexico PBS filmed the live event.
The documentary that resulted, The Majesty of Music and Math, premiered during a screening at The Lensic on August 5, 2018, then aired on NMPBS in early September.
"The ratios and rhythms and patterns that excite our minds and move our hearts are the same harmonies we find in subatomic particles and the motions of planets and stars," says Moore in the documentary. "When you come up with a melody or I find a new pattern in math, we're using the same parts of our brains and feeling the same feelings."
Online video courtesy NMPBS. If you live outside of New Mexico and would like to see the performance on television, contact your local PBS station to request it.
Media Coverage
- A story that ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican (Sept. 4, 2018) was picked up by the AP, whose version ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, US News and World Report, and several other outlets. (Sept. 9, 2018)
- Franz Joachim talks about "The Majesty of Music and Math," Santa Fe Reporter (Sept. 4, 2018)
- New Mexico PBS documentary explores relationship between music, math. ABQ Journal (Aug. 31, 2018)
Watch the Santa Fe Symphony's Science of Sound series with Cris Moore, for simple at-home experiments in math and music (ongoing)
Visit a related website, Music + Math, SFI's interactive resource for students and teachers (January 1, 2014)