Worship Musician Magazine September 2020 | Page 144

CHURCH TECH
MIXING MUSICALLY:
BECOMING PART OF THE MIX | Jeff Hawley
Six minutes of pure musical bliss. A live
performance video of the band Wilco, featuring
guitarist Nels Cline and his epic solo on the
song “Impossible Germany.” The song builds
and progresses through a number of musical
sections until Nels pushes us off the musical
cliff of the guitar solo climax at around 5
minutes 30 seconds. As I was listening for the
127th time this month, I was reminded of an
interesting tidbit from my college music history
days — there are song forms built around the
Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci series.
What is the Golden Ratio and what does an
Italian mathematician from the Middle Ages
have to do with modern mixing techniques?
Well, the Golden Ratio is defined as such:
The Golden Ratio is obtained when two segment
lengths have the same proportion as the
proportion of their sum to the larger of the two
lengths. The value of the Golden Ratio, which
is the limit of the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci
numbers, has a value of approximately 1.618.
Leonardo Bigollo Pisano (aka Fibonacci)
popularized a sequence of numbers which
appear throughout nature. Fibonacci numbers
show up in rabbit population growth, the
arrangement of leaves on a stem, birds of
prey flight paths, pine cone bracts, etc. The
sequence goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,
21, 34, 55, …
Fibonacci numbers tie back to the Golden Ratio
mathematically and they are used today to
describe patterns in atomic motion, movements
of celestial bodies and even financial markets.
According to many musicologists, works
by Bach, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and
Bartók were structured in close alignment to
Fibonacci sequences and the Golden Ratio.
Whether you think of this sequence guiding
the design or following as an observed ‘just
144 September 2020
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