Radiohead Plays Fibonacci

October 22, 2007 By Tom

As all of the civilized world continues to delight in the heavenly soundscapes of Radiohead’s amazing new record, In Rainbows, rabid RH fans are hard at work analyzing the album with a fine-toothed microscope made of mixed metaphors and rock ‘n roll conspiracy theories. An article at Puddlegum delves into the mysterious recurrence of the number ten associated with the ten-tracked, ten-lettered-title In Rainbows, which, as their seventh studio LP, was released on 10/10/07, ten years after RH’s all-time masterpiece, OK Computer (also ten letters), came out — which allegedly had the working title Zeros and Ones. Now, all you skeptics hold onto your hats, because that’s just the beginning . . .

Fans on the boards at good ol’ GreenPlastic.com have discovered that our favorite Oxford-educated rock band has managed to encode the album’s title (In Rainbows) at the exact instance that the Golden Ratio strikes — i.e., at 61.8% through the album. I’ve listened to the record many, many times since the moment I received my download link (1:39am 10/10/07, after paying $82 for the forthcoming box-set, true fan that I am), and I never noticed Thom Yorke crooning the album’s title in the lyrics before, but it’s there. As the astute fan who discovered this hidden Fibonacci sequence said:

did anyone notice the

IN RAAAAAAAIN
IN RAAAAAAAIN
IN RAAAAAAAINNNNN IN RAAAAAAAIN
IN RAAAAAAAINBOWS

starts precisely at the albums golden section??? I’ve got fucking chills; can anyone concur?

The Golden Section, Golden Ratio, whatever you want to call it is appears at 1/1.618, or about 61.8% of the way through a work of art.

In Rainbows is 42m 34s, or 2554 seconds long. 2554/1.618 is the 1578th or so second of the album, which is 2m49.45s into “Reckoner,” precisely when the strings come in with the album title.

So what is the golden ratio? It’s complicated (all mathematics-like), but the Wikipedia entry includes this compelling quote:

“[The Golden Ratio is a universal law] in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.”
—Adolf Zeising, 1854

So is it a coincidence on Radiohead’s part? Or is it part of a grand, elaborately calculated design? While I certainly wouldn’t put the latter possibility past the gods of geek rock, there’s also something delightful about another fan’s take on the matter:

Well…it may not be such a remarkably calculated insertion. The other way to get that lyric to appear at the album’s Golden Ratio is: to record the album. Determine what occurs at Golden Ratio. Name the album after it.

Music is math.

At least we can all agree that Radiohead is brilliant, in both American and British uses of the word. And in honor of said brilliance, here’s a clip featuring the early prototype version of a song — from way back on 4/2/98 — that has taken a decade to finally get released on an album: “Nude,” my favorite song from In Rainbows . . .


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