Dr Maurice McCartney worked for many years in the School of Mathematics and Physics administration offices. When Dr Brian McMaster from Pure Mathematics was about to retire in 2011, Maurice decided to write a piece of music to mark the occcasion. Trying to think of a theme that would be relevant, he hit on the idea of converting the digits of pi into notes, initially just to see what happened. (Pi is one of the numbers that governs Mathematics and Physics in our Universe.) And he was quite taken aback by the results!

Although Pi is represented by an infinite non-repeating sequence of digits, Maurice's tune takes it as far as this:

π = 3.1415926535897932384626433

If you take those digits and play the equivalent note in the scale of C (C = 1, D = 2, E = 3 and so on) you get the piano tune that opens and closes the piece (leaving out the decimal point, and using the D above the high C to get number 9).  Maurice then simply harmonised the tune that emerged, and added a couple of other melodies for variety.  But he insists that for the core of the piece, the credit belongs to our Universe. Let’s call it the music of the spheres!