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Phonometrologist
“Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

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Music of the Universe

Posted by Phonometrologist - December 3rd, 2016


Is it any wonder that when we shot out a spacecraft to reach potential extraterrestrials that we put a disc of music to convey what it is to be human? With classical, rock, pop, and blues accompanying nature sounds and different dialects of earth people, it is only fitting that if an alien from out of this world would intercept our message that they could only get a more accurate picture of the human experience by hearing music that we have created.
Music has a way to welcome a listener to someone else's heart and mind.  Just like an astronaut exploring unknown frontiers, music can only allow us to observe and admire the experience. “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him?” - 1 Corinthians 2:11

And the more I understand about music, the more I appreciate the math hidden in our natural world and universe. 
Our duty as composers is to understand the patterns in sound so we can convey a story or play that hypnotic beat.  Speak to a Mathematician and they would tell you that they thrive in seeing patterns in numbers.  According to some Physicists, math makes up the universe.  So it is logical to assume that as we come up with a technique to create music that the most pleasing music to our ears best follow mathematical formulas found in the environment that we live in.
The Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci numbers found in nature have been inspirational to humanity in proportion to their music and in the creation of the instruments that make the music. 
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC), best remembered for the Pathagoras’ Theorem, discovered harmonic musical intervals by seeing its pattern through whole number ratios. He believed that the universe itself makes music, and oddly enough NASA may agree. 

The theme of my piece is that humans are destined to look beyond themselves.  Despite current affairs and how bleak a situation may seem, it is in the spirit of humanity that keeps us from constantly looking down and strive by looking up into the stars.  It is the imagery of space that I used to describe our journeys here.  I even added a sound from Saturn’s radio emissions for one of the musical breakdowns. And in case you're not already familiar with this concept, NASA records sounds from our galaxy through devices designed to transfer electromagnetic vibrations to audible frequencies for our ears. 


"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend." - Luwig van Beethoven


But even more fascinating than life itself, is the mystery of love, and thus why I dedicated this piece to my wife. Call me a hopeless romantic if you want, but it is love that makes this continual study worthwhile.  And if Math makes up the universe, then it is only fair to say that music shall transcend the stars… figuratively and literally. 
Stay inspired, romanticize the opportunity, and love one another. 
 


Comments

Take care not to put some skrillex or any generic popstar (annoying screaming dancing like monkeys radio type). Otherwise aliens surely will fire their lasers of wisdom and pop the earth^^

That would be hilarious and frightful, but I imagine that if there were some kind of alien listening to our music, it would probably have an effect like the following picture written by Oliver Sacks:
“What an odd thing it is to see an entire species–billions of people–playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call “music.” This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. Curiosity brings them down to the Earth’s surface to attend a concert, they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his “great ingenuity” –while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on with them. They themselves, as species, lack music. We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. This thing called “music,” they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans, central to human life. Yet is has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world. There are rare humans who, like the Overlords, may lack the neural apparatus for appreciating tones or melodies. But for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly “musical.” This propensity to music shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species. Such “musicophilia” is a given in human nature. It may be developed or shaped by the cultures we live in, by the circumstances of life, or by the particular gifts or weaknesses we have as individuals– but it lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate, music as E. O. Wilson regards “biophilia,” our feeling for living things.
... Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is “played in the mind.” The imagining of music, even in relatively nonmusical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and tempo. Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one’s early years may be “engraved” on the brain for the rest of one’s life. Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself–its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and “will”– and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations, mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multi-level neural circuitry that underlies musical perceptions and replay, we do not know yet.”

Musik bist kewl, jah ;V

музыка это круто, да

love this music great job :D

Thank you

Physics is what defines the universe. Math is not just the study of numbers, but the study of quantity, structure, space, and change where numbers are a byproduct of mathematics. Indeed mathematics is the language used to express and quantify physics, thus indeed mathematics describes the universe.

Music and math is more than making pretty sounds and crunching numbers, but working closer to uncovering the ultimate levels of generality and abstraction necessary to understand life in its entirety.

I had a music professor in the past tell me that music is first the study of our instrument, then the study of music, then the study of the universe, and then the study of oneself. Science is an objective, universal experience- while art is a highly personal, subjective experience. Both science and art attempt to communicate to everyone. In order to make art into an objective experience, we need to understand every infinite facet that compliments our subjective experiences. Then we can make sense of how our individualities, just mere infinitesimal blips in the scope of the grand universe, can be more complicated to understand than the universe itself.

As the article you linked states, we don't create mathematical structures, we discover them. By extension, we also don't truly create music, we simply discover sounds, find ways to put them together, and make relatively unique interpretations. Pythagorean's harmonic ratios is one method of finding an 'objective' bridge between music a subjective art and music as a universal science. I also find it profound that basically every early musical culture, being entirely sequestered from other cultures, each developed their own pentatonic scale where differences may be attributed to available material which yields different series of overtones.

Each organism is born with a single, pure sensory output (i.e. the five senses are unified) and depending on the organism these senses begin to separate into different (but still connected) outputs, and our environment further encourages segregation through learning systems of classification and categorization. It is true that we need different senses to adequately process the world. But we also need a degree of synesthesia to produce art and understand the connections between math and music (where there is vibration, there is light/color, sound, and some equivalent to taste, smell, feel, etc.) , and that we are all one and the same. Hatred, violence, and war upon one another is also to damage ourselves. It is antithetical to the reciprocal maintenance that is necessary for sustaining the world.

Emotion, namely love, is the fuel which drives our desire for knowledge, growth, and gives us purpose. Nice piece of music, you must love your wife very much.

Many thanks for your contribution, and I think it is interesting to see the parallels of the statement from your professor with our study of the universe and quantum mechanics. It was because of us studying first the universe that we were able to apply those principles to the technology we know today along with getting a better understanding of the DNA within.

I agree that music needs to be discovered whether it is a whole new scale/language or just an expansion to what was already found through writing another piece. Albeit music is a personal and subjective experience, it still needs to be coherent for another to understand the message if we want it to be objective as opposed to a completely abstract one. And that is done, I believe, by looking outside of oneself to find the tools to express what is within. It is a more eloquent speech than spoken word. My favorite depiction of this has been expressed by Philip Glass in the movie "Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts":
"Where does music come from? My experience with music is that it's like an underground river that's always there. And like an underground river, you don't know where it comes from and you don't know where it's going. The only difference is whether you're listening to it or not."
It's just like when Dmitri Mendeleev envisioned the elements in the periodic table and classified them according to their chemical properties. He wrote, "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary." That's an interesting example of discovering what is already there. How interesting that the elements in the periodic table that we are physically made of are also found within the stars of the universe.

I am reminded of Oliver Sack's "Musicophilia" when you mentioned having a degree of synesthesia to produce art, because it is true that our brains have to be wired a certain way to at least enjoy the sounds that we have discovered. That makes it even more interesting to me as to why we have that capability, but it just goes to show that there are many facets to understanding music and how it correlates to us and the universe. It makes me wish I had the time and patience to learn chemistry, physics, neurology, and composing at the highest level so I can be able to understand more intimately this life's journey as a whole. It's interesting to me to imagine such an individual mastering all these studies as opposed to just one mastering a particular craft just like a Renaissance man when it came to painting and sculpting. But it's not just about the brain in a subconscious level, but also about a particular web-image that is learned as it is associated with a particular sound. Why do people feel a certain way when they hear a particular sound? It is similar to actual words when we learn a new language. A child learns what the word "wet" and "dry" means when they are able to experience water. And so our brain is a series of more intricate webs when it comes to our association to sounds as well. Hence I think that is where nostalgia comes from when we can't explain it.

Last but not least is the cognitive brain and love that have been described as more complex than the universe itself by other physicists. Its funny when we hear someone like Stephen Hawking say that the biggest mystery in the universe to him is women. I do love my wife. Although we are still young in our relationship together, and as the high emotions pass while the years go by, love will later take up a deeper root. No longer will I be motivated because of chemical reactions to the brain, but rather it will be from the history, integrity, and dedication that we share because of faith. True love never ends. Love will then be a choice; it will have to be continually sought-after just like the rest of the mysteries of music, mathematical structures, and elements that are made of and hidden within the universe.

Congrats on the frontpage feature of your track! Very well deserved :)

Thank you for your words. Though, I'm not sure who's responsible of front-paging it, I still appreciate that. Not sure about it being well deserved or not, but I like it enough :)

The universe is cold but beautiful.

I would think so. Our universe isn't entirely made of an atmosphere that can hold heat within it, and so it certainly would feel cold to us. Moreover, if beauty is measured by subconsciously knowing that all things evaporate eventually, then yes the universe is also beautiful.