From: Jim McCarthy Check this out, Formula 1 team programs engine to play music. I quote from a previous email: http://astro.temple.edu/~kmr/Chauffe2.mp3 My father is a music professor who's raced cars for many a year. Here was his comment: I wondered when someone would do something like [that]. I (mis)used my musical training a lot when I raced. You could, for example, determine whether intake runners or exhaust header pipe lengths were *really* equal by playing each one like a trumpet, although your mouth looked a little strange afterwords, what with that perfect circle of carbon around it. I also used to tell my competitors what gear ratios they were running by comparing their cars' pitch with mine when we were adjacent on the track, identifying the musical interval between the two pitches (minor 2nd, Major 3rd, etc.), and then using temperament ratios to figure out the difference in RPM. It got a little busy out there sometimes with all the braking, cornering, multiplication and division. do you have the ratios for all the intervals memorized? Or did you carry a slide rule in the car? :) I had the usual suspects memorized. Piece of cake - a major second is 9/8, major 3rd is 5/4, P4 = 4/3, P5 = 3/2 etc. For minor intervals I'd just interpolate from the nearest major/perfect. So if I was at 7000, and the bloke next to me was a M2 higher: 7000 X 9/8 = 63000/8 = About 7800/7900, or about 800 - 900 more RPM than me. I'd have to return to the paddock to compute the gear or differential ratios the guy was running... The fun began when it was clear that my competitor was running an illegal diff (specified by the rules) or gearbox (also specified. One common way to, ah, get competitive was to slip a 5-speed in where a 4-speed used to live, and you'd have different/closer/better ratios for both the straight and twisty bits).