While researching the history of written music in western culture, I came across the story of Pythagoras (6th century BC) being responsible for developing our understanding of the harmonic series through the diatonic scale. The story claims that Pythagoras was passing a blacksmith’s shop when he noticed the sounds emanating from inside, the blacksmith striking an anvil and the different sound produced by using different weight hammers.

Pythagoras yearned to quantify and understand the beauty of the world and strived to apply mathematics towards a better comprehension of its elements. He declared that a mathematical equation had to be applied to the sounds made by the blacksmith’s anvil. Number therefore preceded harmony, with Pythagoras being responsible for the discovery that the relationship between the anvils and hammer were "simple ratios of each other, one was half the size of the first, another was 2/3 the size and so on."

This equation lead to “Pythagorean tuning” which is now a commonly recognised system forming the basic principles of all written music. I was artist in residence for 8 weeks, opening up the Blacksmiths shop as a laboratory to explore Pythagoras's findings