Eric Weinstein

You remember the residents who were this art group from San Francisco and nobody knew who they were.

They would have giant eyeballs as heads and they would play completely insane things like Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, but in angular, bizarre ways.

I missed that too.

Okay.

Did you miss it?

So Antoine de Portrain is this thing that took over, which doesn't sound like anything.

It's like that new thing.

So, you know, because...

So look at that guitarist, Fred.

Okay, Jamie.

The mathematics of this is that there's this freak fact, which is that if you take the octave, which is doubling of frequency, you take the 12th root of it, break it into 12 semitones, and then take 19 of them stacked.

Two to the 19 over 12 is equal to 2.996 something.

It's almost three.

And that means that you can force people into this quantized music where you come up with this number 12, which is magical.

for number theory reasons.

And you can fool the ear into thinking that 19 of these 12 semitones is a complete tripling of frequency.

And because of that, we've been in even-tempered music since the time of Bach.

And these guys are breaking us out together with Jacob Collier.

They're saying, why would you accept that as a prison?

And so how does stuff like this become popular?