Sofia & Isacco
philosophy · physics · music of the spheres · unanswered questions
“Sofia takes songs apart line by line, looking for the thread that binds them.
Isacco builds formulas to describe what he already feels.
Together they are looking for the same thing — they just don’t know it yet.”
Sofia / Isacco Monthly Song
One song a month — taking turns. Sofia picks the odd months, Isacco the even ones. And naturally they critique each other with affection, just as they do in the novel.
There’s no melody in the conventional sense. There’s a gravitational field. It pulls you toward the centre and won’t let go — like a philosophical question with no answer that you can’t stop asking anyway.
Teta would say it’s trip-hop. I say it’s physics of the soul.”
Isacco’s pick arrives in December.
Come back when the month turns.
Read Isacco’s note
And the line where he says he can read the other person’s mind — this is how I read it: it isn’t a weapon of control, it’s clarity and awareness. It’s someone taking their power back by trusting their own intuition. Control turns into clear-sightedness.
Then there’s Sirius. On the album the two tracks run into each other: the instrumental builds for almost two minutes and then, without a pause, opens into Eye in the Sky. Tension preparing the way for clarity, like a good proof: first you build the anticipation, then the truth arrives. (Yes, Sirius is the one the Chicago Bulls used to run out to. Even Jordan needed an intro.)”
Thoughts from the Journey
Reflections on the Manifesto, on the journey, on what they saw and heard. No schedule. When there’s something to say, they say it.
Planets don’t make sounds. But the idea that the universe has a harmonic structure — that everything vibrates according to precise proportions — is surprisingly hard to disprove. I spent three days in Cambridge thinking about it while Isacco timed songs with a stopwatch…
Planets don’t make sounds. I know, I checked three times because I didn’t want to believe it. But the idea that the universe has a harmonic structure — that everything vibrates according to precise proportions — is surprisingly hard to disprove. I spent three days in Cambridge thinking about it while Isacco timed songs with a stopwatch, convinced that was all it would take to dismantle my theory.
I didn’t tell him straight away, but what shook me wasn’t an astronomy book. It was an old man tuning a guitar outside a pub in Cambridge, by ear, no tuner, adjusting each string until something — I couldn’t say what — “clicked”. I asked him how he knew. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has asked something obvious and said: “You feel it when it’s right.” Pythagoras said the same thing, just with more maths and less beer.
Maybe Pythagoras’s mistake wasn’t believing in harmony — it was thinking it lived in the planets. Harmony isn’t out there. It’s in the way we look for it everywhere, even where it isn’t, until we really find it, in some small, unexpected place like an old man’s hands on an out-of-tune guitar.
Have you ever felt it, that moment when “something clicks” — in a song, in a conversation, in a room — without being able to explain why?
I analysed 23 Beatles songs looking for the point where the main emotional climax arrives. In 19 cases out of 23 it coincides with the golden ratio of the track’s total length. Lennon and McCartney didn’t know. Maths did…
I analysed 23 Beatles songs looking for the point where the main emotional climax arrives — that precise moment when a song stops “moving along” and starts “meaning something”. In 19 cases out of 23 it coincides, within less than 2%, with the golden ratio of the track’s total length. Lennon and McCartney didn’t know. Maths did.
Sofia would tell me I’m looking for order where there’s only well-trained human intuition — that musicians feel the right point without calculating it, exactly like the man with the guitar outside the pub. She’s probably right. But that’s precisely what fascinates me: if a precise mathematical structure keeps emerging from decisions nobody ever consciously calculated, then either chance is extraordinarily tidy, or the human brain does the maths even when it claims to “just feel it”.
I tried explaining it to a drummer I met in Liverpool. I showed him the graph. He listened in silence, then said: “Nice. But I feel that point in my shoulders, not my head.” I still haven’t found a way to measure shoulders.
If you knew that one of your instinctive choices — in music, in a life decision — hid a precise mathematical structure, would it change how you live it, or would you rather not know?
In Brighton there’s a bookshop that mostly sells books with musical references. No titles on the covers. The owner is called Aurelius and has a theory that books and music occupy the same space in the soul. I’m not sure whether to believe him…
In Brighton there’s a bookshop that mostly sells books with musical references. It has no proper sign, and the books on the shelves have no titles on their covers — just a number, pencilled on the spine. The owner is called Aurelius, he has a theory that books and music occupy the same space in the soul, and so — he says — there’s no need to tell them apart with a label. “A title is a label. Labels are for people in a hurry.”
I asked him how customers find what they’re looking for if there’s no way of knowing what each book contains. He answered with a question: “How do you find the right song when you’re sad, if you don’t already know the title?” I didn’t have an answer ready. I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, sitting on a stepladder while Isacco photographed every shelf “to analyse the statistical distribution later”.
I’m not sure whether to believe Aurelius. But I left that shop with three books I would never have chosen by their covers, and one of them — the one with just “14” pencilled on it — is probably the best thing I’ve read this year.
When you discovered something important to you without actively looking for it — a book, a song, a person — what told you it was the right one?
Teta left us a sheet of paper. Sixteen words. At first they looked like abstract philosophy. Then I realised they were operating instructions. Like the specifications for a physics project — but for living. The tuning fork wasn’t a symbolic object: it was a practical guide…
Teta left us a sheet of paper. Sixteen words, arranged in a circle around a red heart. At first they looked like abstract philosophy — the kind of thing you pin up in an office to look inspired without really having to think about it. Then I realised they were operating instructions. Like the specifications for a physics project, but for living.
Take “Tuning”. In a sound system, if you don’t tune before you play, every note that follows is slightly wrong, even if it’s technically correct. I spent years thinking that only applied to instruments. Then I watched Teta before a DJ set: he wasn’t choosing songs. He was listening to the room — the people, the background noise, the energy left over from the night before. He was tuning himself. Only then did he touch the first knob.
The tuning fork wasn’t a symbolic object. It was a precise instruction, and I — who usually need an equation before I trust anything — found myself trusting sixteen words without any proof at all. Sofia says it’s the first time she’s seen me believe something before checking it. I’m not sure it’s a compliment.
Have you ever “tuned yourself” before facing something important — a difficult conversation, an exam, a meeting — without calling it that?
Philosophy & Physics
The deeper themes of the journey — the ones that didn’t fit in the chapters but that they couldn’t stop thinking about. You’ll find them here, when they’re ready.
Bergson called inner duration “durée” — a continuous flow that isn’t measured but lived. Music is the only language that describes time from the inside. Maybe that’s why it changes us.
Bergson called inner duration durée — a continuous flow that isn’t measured but lived. Think about it: a minute spent waiting for a late train and a minute spent listening to the perfect solo in a song last, on the clock, exactly the same. But nobody, honestly, would say they’re the same thing.
I’ve started to suspect that music is the only human language that describes time from the inside, instead of just measuring it from the outside with a clock or a calendar. A track doesn’t tell you “three minutes and twenty-two seconds have passed”. It makes you feel those three minutes and twenty-two seconds in a way no number ever could. Maybe that’s why some songs change us and others, technically perfect, never touch us at all: they haven’t understood that the time they tell isn’t clock time.
Isacco would say I’m just describing the difference between objective time and subjective perception, and that there’s already a technical term for it. He’s probably right. But I find that calling it “melody” rather than “subjective perception of time” helps me live it better, not just explain it.
When was the last time time seemed to last completely differently from what the clock said — and what were you listening to, or living through, at that moment?
The answer lies in frequencies: when two notes vibrate in a simple ratio (2:1, 3:2) the auditory system perceives consonance. But the emotional shiver involves the limbic system. Physics explains the how — not the why.
The technical answer lies in frequencies: when two notes vibrate in a simple ratio — 2:1, 3:2 — the auditory system perceives consonance, “order”. The brain recognises the pattern and rewards it. So far, pure physics: measurable, repeatable in a lab.
The problem is that it doesn’t explain why I cry — yes, I cry, I admitted it to Sofia only once and she promised never to write about it, a promise I’m breaking myself right now — when a minor chord arrives exactly where I don’t expect it. The emotional shiver involves the limbic system, the part of the brain that handles emotions, not just the auditory cortex that processes sound. Physics explains how the vibration reaches the ear. It doesn’t explain why that particular combination of air molecules hitting the eardrum can make me think of my father, who listened to nothing but one worn-out old cassette in the car.
I started this research diary thinking I’d find the equation of emotion. I’m ending up accepting that maybe the equation only describes the front door, not the room we walk into.
Is there a chord, a note, a precise moment in a song that has the same effect on you every time — and have you ever worked out why that one?
Before every orchestral concert, all the instruments tune to the same A. Not to be identical — to be compatible. It’s the same thing that happens between people when they work well together.
Before every orchestral concert, all the instruments tune to the same A — 440 hertz, Isacco always corrects me when I tell this story, as if the number changed anything about the point I’m making. They don’t do it to be identical. A violin never sounds like an oboe, not even after tuning. They do it to be compatible — so they can hear each other without constantly translating.
It’s the same thing that happens between people when they work well together, and the same thing that’s missing when two people speak the same language and still don’t understand each other. You don’t need to become the same. You need to agree on a common reference — a shared A — before you start playing your own part.
I thought about this watching Isacco and Teta argue for a whole hour about something they both, in the end, already agreed on — they simply hadn’t tuned up first on what they meant by the words they were using. A physicist and a DJ arguing over the definition of “structure” for an hour, while I took notes, laughing silently.
How many arguments in your life would have ended sooner if someone had said, at the start: “wait, let’s agree on what we mean” before starting to play?
1.618. The golden ratio appears in petals and sunflower seeds; in seashells and galaxies, far less than people claim. And in the emotional climaxes of hundreds of songs. I’m building a database. The results are unsettling.
1.618. The golden ratio appears in the arrangement of petals and sunflower seeds. In seashells and spiral galaxies, far less than people claim: as a physicist, I have to admit it. And, as I began to suspect in Cambridge while studying the proportions of a sixteenth-century building, in the emotional climaxes of hundreds of songs. I’m building a database — I’m up to almost two hundred tracks analysed — and the results keep being unsettling, in the most literal sense of the word: they keep me awake at night.
The question that haunts me isn’t whether the proportion is there. It is, statistically, in too high a percentage of cases to be pure coincidence. The question is: who puts it there? No pop songwriter sits down with the golden ratio and a stopwatch. And yet the structure emerges, again and again, as if the human brain had an innate preference for that exact proportion and applied it without knowing, every time it has to decide “here, now, this is the moment”.
Sofia argues I’m trying to turn into an equation something that is, simply, beauty. I told her that maybe beauty is an equation we haven’t finished writing yet. She didn’t answer. She just raised an eyebrow, which, translated from Sofia, means “we’ll see who’s right”.
If you found out that something you consider purely “beautiful” — a song, a face, a landscape — actually follows a precise mathematical rule, would you find it less magical, or more?
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