Hello all, back again and this time we are going to talk about the quantum relationship of god particles in the surrounding universe and their effect on the snail population of Earth. Of course I made that up but I’m sure someone was interested by that subject; I mean seriously snails are pretty darn amazing. Seriously though today we learn about that crazy thing hipsters do, something called music? I don’t know what the craze is all about, just seems like a cacophony to me, sad face. For those of you who don’t know what a cacophony is, I don’t either but a smart person I met today said it so I decided to use it, I hope it fits in context. Back on track now, it seems I go on a lot of tangents or maybe they are sinusoids, I guess I can’t really know which it is. Speaking of this, music is sinusoidal! Yeah that’s right, all you music majors thought you wouldn’t have to know math, HA. So how does listening work, we’ll figure out music once we figure out how we hear.
Long, short, stiff, limp, sensitive, and funny feeling, all of these adjectives describes an interesting body part. The Ear, that’s right my dirty minded readers, the ear is what we are talking about. So back on track, what happens when sounds go into the ear? I’ll try to refrain from all the boring medical mumbo-jumbo. Well once they are inside the ear these sounds, which from now on we will refer to as “Good Vibrations” travel through the ear to the ear drum, the good vibrations make the ear drum vibrate which makes three bones in the ear vibrate. These bones can amplify, or increase the vibrations from the ear drum. These bones then send these “Gooder Vibrations” to the inner ear also known as the Cochlea which is this weird Fibonacci-spiral-esque part of your ear, when the gooder vibrations get in here essentially they make the water in your Cochlea vibrate and make waves. These waves then hit a membrane and send an electrical signal to the brain, which then gets translated into the sounds we know and love! The way I imagine it is like a stage floating on a lake. The microphone is the eardrum, the three bones are the amplifiers and the lake is the water in the cochlea. As the singer sings into the microphone the water in the lake vibrates and creates waves in a beautiful display or aquatic-music-integration, which is a word I just made up.
So from this we know that music is just “Really Gooder Vibrations” that end up pleasing to our brain . Well what do most people think of when they think of music? Probably the stuff you listen to on your ipod by random artists. Well that’s a small fraction of true music. If we use the oxford definition of music we see that music is “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion:”. I believe this definition is too narrow. I think of music more as an assortment of sounds that when combined at correct times create a pleasing sound. Perhaps you don’t know what I mean. Well imagine we were in space but we had a magic device that could hear anything anywhere on the world at any time. Now we turn this device on so it can hear everything at once, it sounds like someone is killing a narwhal or something, but say we only took the basic sounds, the sounds of the wind and the trees. Then we added some sounds and eventually we created a medley song of just random sounds we found on Earth. What if every day you could pick out sounds and hold them in your head, and when you hear another you add that and eventually you have your own song! Makes the world a little more beautiful right?
There is more to music though! Imagine we assigned each music note a color. And each octave lowered or raised the color a tint. When that note is played that color appears on the screen. Imagine your favorite song in color form and how amazing that would be. Why stop there though, what if we imagine that we assign music notes to colors? When you click a color a different music note plays. What if you made a self-portrait and played a symphony of you? I can almost guarantee you it will sound bad but it was a good idea!
For tonight this is all I share with you my fellow mathemites but fear not. Even though the reason I started this blog is ending this week I shall continue to bring you all the mathy goodness I can, in small doses of course, wouldn’t want to injure my loyal reader.
P.S. that last word was not a typo.
Look for music in the world and remember the math behind it. Maybe one day you’ll be able to see how beautiful the world is to me. Bye for now friends I’ll be back, with math-pons? Weap-maths? Whatever.
Hmm, so I guess that other things like the Fibonacci numbers and the Lucas numbers can be used to make beautiful music? I wonder if we hear the Fibonacci symphony in everyday life? I guess if we think of all of the music and sounds in the world it really is a large world. Or is it?
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