Name and date signature
Every name and every date has its own short piece in the Pentametric Cycle. Each letter becomes a number, the number goes through the formula to its residue, and the residue becomes silence, a unison, an octave, a fifth or a fourth. Listen, then download it as a MIDI file or as a card to share.
Your signature
How it works
- A = 1 … Z = 26. Each letter is its place in the alphabet. Accents are ignored (í → i, ñ → n). Every letter lands inside one 25-step period of the cycle; Z = 26 continues into the next.
- Greek alphabet. The name is first written in Greek letters (l → λ, s → σ, th → θ, ph → φ, ch → χ, ps → ψ; Greek text is used directly) and each letter is its place in the 24-letter alphabet, α = 1 … ω = 24. The page also shows the name's isopsephy value, the number the Pythagoreans read in a word (α = 1 … ι = 10, κ = 20 … ρ = 100 … ω = 800). Those values are not used for the music: most are multiples of 10, and every multiple of 5 is a silence in the cycle, so names would be almost silent.
- Each letter n sounds the interval of H(n) = P(n) mod 5 above the root, one beat each. A space is a short rest.
- The closing interval comes from the sum of all the letters, held for two beats.
- The date adds three chords: the day, the month and the year, each through the same formula.