music theory

The ‘Song’ of a Distant Black Hole

“Dr. Andrew Fabian and his colleagues at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England made their discovery using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting X-ray telescope that sees the Universe in X-ray light just as the Hubble Space Telescope sees it in visible light.

Using the piano keyboard’s middle C note as a reference point for the middle of the piano key music range, Fabian’s team determined the note is a B -flat. On a piano, the B-flat nearest middle C is located midway between 1/8th and 2/8th of an octave away. In musical terminology, this B flat is 1-1/2 steps from middle C.”

Source : https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/universe/black_hole_sound.html

Ostinatos, Early Western Repeated Rythmic Patterns

“Ostinato, (Italian: “obstinate”, )plural Ostinatos, or Ostinati, in music, short melodic phrase repeated throughout a composition, sometimes slightly varied or transposed to a different pitch. A rhythmic ostinato is a short, constantly repeated rhythmic pattern. Ostinatos appear in Western composition from the 13th century onward, as in the motet Emendemus in melius (Let Us Change for the Better) by Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500–53) and in the Concerto, Opus 38 (first performed 1925), of Paul Hindemith. Use of an ostinato was particularly common in 16th-century dance pieces, notably in the bass line, where it is called a basso ostinato, or ground bass (q.v.). A single-pitch ostinato governs the “Scarbo” movement in Maurice Ravel’s piano work Gaspard de la nuit (1908).”
https://www.britannica.com/art/ostinato

Ostinao Midi Files – https://www.d.umn.edu/~jrubin1/JHR%20MIDI%20downloads.htm