India, April 12 -- Numbers can explain everything, even music, the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras believed.

His 6th-century-BCE experiments of plucking stretched strings of different lengths reportedly led him to stumble upon the harmonious connection between frequencies and their ratios.

Certain simple ratios of vibrating string lengths produced consonance, or a pleasant-sounding combination of notes, he found. The most fundamental interval in music, the octave, occurs when the sound wave frequency between two notes is such that one is double the other in a ratio of 2:1, creating a sense of completeness.

Similarly, the interval of a perfect fifth and perfect fourth reflect simple ratios of whole numbers, respectively, ...