Pie is a beautiful and gentle creature, and I'm happy to keep it on as a cultural phenomenon, even if it doesn't belong in equations.

No, today I'm not angry about pie.

I'm angry about a completely ludicrous copyright claim.

Pies inspired a lot of awesome things.

And as a math musician, I know so many people who have written pie that I've begun to think of it as a sort of rite of passage for minority composers.

Just as I expect that all singer songwriters have writing a song about love you see in music, we've got this thing called scale degree numbers where we write down what a note is based on where it is in the scale for C, Major sees one days to eat three and so on.

This is something that everyone with a formal Western music education is fluent ing.

Being able to translate instantly from numbers two notes is useful when looking at music theory texts, and this is skill I've employed in other areas as well, such as memorizing phone numbers, for example, my Google voice number 1537844 to 7.

Memorizing digits of pi is a popular pastime, and since numbers are natural, representation of melody for every trained musician is pretty much a no brainer to make it into a melody.

I didn't really mean to do it, but one day accidentally memorized the 1st 97 digits this way.

After adding some creative, jazzy rhythms, it becomes a fun thing to sing.

I know a few people who have performed or published pieces of music.

Using pie like this is awesome because the point is not hearing the digits of pi, but what the composer does Witham that makes it their own creative work.

Some play the melody straightened, figure out clever harmonies to go with it or change the rhythms and composed around that, or use a less obvious mapping than a major scale.

Or also have lyrics with words that have the same number of letters as the digits.

I'm sure there's money others, too, so if you've written a pie, please send me an email.

I have some favorites in this genre, and I was very excited at the reason.

What pie sounds like video by Michael Blake because he very cleverly canonizes the digits.

It's creative and awesome and very well done.

I was outraged to find out that his video had been taken down because another guy had written, incorporated a melody based on pie and felt that this gave him exclusive rights to the pie melody, or at least the 1st 32 digits.

Because, as he said, there's plenty of digits left for everyone else.

So while I can't sing you the beginning of pie, I can sing you this one too Fine 23 one.

I understand wanting to cling to your creative work as if it were your own child.

And I realize I'm probably being naive and optimistic and offering all of my music and videos for free and hoping it eventually comes back to me in the form of ad money, speaking fees and donations.

Still, I'm gonna go right ahead and say it.

This copyright claim is ridiculous.

You can copyright a piece of music that uses a C major chord, but that doesn't mean you own the C major chord.

He can copyright his orchestration and treatment of the melody, but not pie itself, just like if I were to choreograph a hand dance where the steps my hand took where the digits of pi converted to binary, I'd feel like my specific and dance choreography was my creative work.

But not the act of saying pi in hand binary, even though I seem to be fighting this guy.

In the end, I'm actually on his side because I can all but guarantee that many other people wrote music based on pie before he did.

And when that first person stepped forward and claims, actually, they did it first and have the right to pie.

I don't want this guy to have to take down his music and fork over.

The money has gotten for it.

He, like everyone else, should be able to creatively express his vision of the melody of pie.