The Kate Bush song written by science
There’s really no limit on what can inspire music. Even the strangest or smallest things can provide that initial spark, giving the world some of its greatest songs born from little more than a minor moment. While love and life are always big ones, anything from art to food, nature to disaster can be the jumping-off point. For Kate Bush, one song was drawn from what might be considered to be the utter antithesis of art: science.
Maybe that comment is misguided. It would be easy to view science as stale and uninspiring. When you consider the umbrella term, you might simply think of dull, confusing terminology, classrooms you hated or cold, sanitised labs full of egg-heads without a creative bone in their smart heads.
But think a little deeper. What is more artistic than playing with the elements like material? What is more creative than looking at the universe and daring to consider something bigger or attempting to find a pattern that no one else has ever seen before? In many ways, science is art on a planetary scale, on the biggest and boldest canvas of all.
That’s what Kate Bush thought. Throughout her career, she’s found inspiration in some niche places. She has songs inspired by everything from Oppenheimer’s bomb to the magic of a woman’s womb. Her albums tell weird and wonderful stories with vast influences as she regularly steps into the shoes of different characters. That was no different on her 2005 album Aerial, which stood as her comeback after a long hiatus. On that one record alone, she wrote songs about laundry, the sky between sunrise and sunset, her son Bertie and pi, a fundamental mathematical principle.
Singing “3.14159 26535897932 3846 264 338 3279…” in place of a chorus, Bush reels off the first batch of numbers. Discovered by Archimedes in around 250 BC, pi is the “mathematical constant ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter,” according to its online definition. At some point or another, during school mathematics class, I’m sure we all knew what that meant. But now, I do not have a clue.
Bush’s song isn’t helpful there. Instead, her track ‘Pi’ imagines falling in love with Archimedes as his genius discovers the number after cracking a curriculum-changing equation. “He does love his numbers,” she sings in a giant understatement about the mathematician. Under the tongue-twisted numbers, the song is a beautiful ode to watching your loved one do the thing they love. But while that could be a universal love song about the beauty of dedication and personal interest, Bush makes it hyperspecific, imagining watching her love attempt to crack the “circle of infinity” and “put a number to it”.
It’s a fascinating contrast to juxtapose the unemotive world of science with the most emotional thing of all: love. “I really like the challenge of singing numbers, as opposed to words because numbers are so unemotional as a lyric to sing and it was really fascinating singing that,” Bush said of the track. “Trying to sort of, put an emotional element into singing about…a seven…you know and you really care about that nine,” she continued.
After a lengthy career of unrivalled creativity, it could be said that ‘Pi’ stood as the final frontier for Bush, trying to turn science into art. Allowing her imagination to run wild on a subject matter that is focussed only on fact, the application of her interest in science leads to a unique result.
But it doesn’t lead to a factual one. The more intellectual fans have pointed out time and time again that Bush actually messes up. There are 62.8 trillion digits in Pi, as the number is really an unending figure representing relative infinity. That wouldn’t make for a good song, though, so the singer limits it to only 200 digits or so. But even still, her dizzying recall of the numbers as she attempts to wrap her mouth around endless digits is incorrect.
As she reached the 54th decimal place, Bush sings “3.1” where it should have been “0”. Later on, she skips 22 decimal places altogether. So, while the song is inspired by science, an accurate formula it is not.
