
12/01/2025
This particular spiral isn’t an idle curiosity nor just an interesting pattern—It is in fact a map of the harmonic sequence.
This is how music works - actually how everything works.
It’s a visual depiction of musical intervals and their relationships, in the context of a harmonic or tuning system. At the core of the diagram is the fundamental note (C), with frequencies doubling for each octave.
Each interval is also associated with specific mathematical ratio, first calculated by Pythagoras.He discovered that two notes that made an interval always had a ratio of 2 to 1. The perfect fifth’s ratio is 3 to 2, and the perfect fourth is 4 to 3.
Pythagoras combined these intervals and then created other notes to make up the major scale. With his mathematical calculation, the theory of music had been born.
All frequency whether its sound, light, planetary motion, etc. can be related to these cycles. The same spiral pattern appears everywhere in nature, our DNA, plants, galaxies, weather patterns… so does in music.
Spiral is repetition, but with accumulated experience, it embodies fundamental processes of creation and growth.
Photo credit: WhatTheChord via Quantum Physics