BOSS Music Room

Like most grand houses, Bletchley Park, home of the Government Codes and Cypher School in World War II, had a ballroom, and music played an important role in keeping up morale. Music and mathematics have always been linked in nature if not in our imagination, with rhythm, tone and pitch the physical manifestations of deep mathematical processes that we now understand in terms of Fourier Analysis. The mathematics behind that idea now has a life of its own and is important in other ways, including image and video compression. Without it, it would be impossible to store and transmit the huge amounts of data in a movie and Netflix would be impossible. Southampton mathematician and admissions tutor, Dr Nick Wright, has a web page all about this where you can play with the Fourier transform to see what it does to pictures, and he gives a great talk about it at our visit days and open days, but until you can get here to see it, for your entertainment are some pieces written for the National Cipher Challenge over the years, and brought to you courtesy of mp3 compression. If you feel like writing or performing your own Cipher Challenge music, let us know! It would be great to extend our playlist.