Strangely, in sound and beyond, unison appears not as a simple shape but rather like a mandala : a spiral, a spiral drawn the same way over a spiral, and a spiral drawn the opposite way over a spiral

The harmonograph was in vogue toward the end of the 19th century— Victorians would attend soirées gathered round the strange machine converting sound vibrations into mysterious shapes

That’s just the first two pages from “Quadrivium”, a really fantastic collection of classical knowledge and art. Reminds me of one of my favorite videos on early cymatics research

My suggestion to anyone intimidated by mathematics and such is to sit back, relax, gaze at patterns and shapes as you would stars— very often our imagination and those little stories we all craft tell us something universal, very often following some sort of law in liberal arts

The third leg of a stool gives it balance; solstices quarter the year, animals walk on four legs; a water molecule consists of 5 atoms; bees instinctively arrange hexagonal honeycomb; seven planets, days of the week, endocrine glands; eight is the octave— what does it add up to?