You learn something new every day, or so the saying goes. Today I learned that the lyrics from the song “Lateralus” by Tool form a Fibonacci sequence.

[1] black
[1] then
[2] white are
[3] all I see
[5] in my infancy
[8] red and yellow then came to be
[5] reaching out to me
[3] lets me see
[2] there is
[1] so
[1] much
[2] more and
[3] beckons me
[5] to look through to these
[8] infinite possibilities
[13] as below so above and beyond I imagine
[8] drawn outside the lines of reason
[5] push the envelope
[3] watch it bend

For those that don’t know (read: aren’t a maths genius and/or haven’t read The DaVinci Code) Fibonacci numbers follow a recurrence relation that, after two starting values, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The sequence starts as follows:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610 …

In the case of “Lateralus”, the sequence steps back and forth through the above sequence; The number of syllables progress to the sixth step, then back down to the first step; up to the seventh step, and then back to the fourth step. For those that care, the formula is as follows:

Food for thought. Now back to more meaningful tasks…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.