"I had to go to Scotland to find a place where they would combine these (and thus add some music to all the science qualifications i accidentally got as a school boy). In Edinburgh it was roughly a 70/30 split between a straight Physics course and a Music specialisation. The music side covered the acoustics of instruments and spaces, the historic development of instruments, the principles of synthesis, the detection and cognition of sound by the ear and brain, and music technology. It was here i was introduced to the Max/MSP programing environment in which I prototyped the Soul Suit Project.
I have found there are two stock responses to Physics and music: "Oooh, thats a strange combination..." and "Hmmm, thats an interesting combination....". If you are of the latter I'm likely to warm to you. For some reason people find it easy to believe the music is mathamatical but are more likely to struggle with the idea that its also physical......
........yes, of course they're related! A sound is made by a mechanical oscillator (that can be modeled using wave equations), it travels into a room (which responds in a predictable way according to air volume building materials, damping effect of human bodies and so on), it is picked up by the ear (an extraordinary device that performs a spectral analysis on the sound) before being fed (via a chemical-cascade-amplifier) to the brain (which pattern matches the frequency bands, decibel level and so on, to infer sensory information that represents the original oscillator). "Ah yes, sounds like cat gut stretched over a thin low-impedance wooden frame with an automatic friction-feedback horse-hair driver system... played a little flat."
Perhaps people don't have a cultural cartoon character to pin the connection to - the 'wack-genius' archetype fits easily onto mathematicians and musicians, whereas 'scientist' are boring people who give us bad news and collapse our dream worlds into a string of well cataloged emotional fossils. Well not for me anyway. I guess I've always felt its a false dichotomy, and suspected that therein lies an awful lot of bullshit thats probably hurting us. A friend once said that, if there is a division between arts and sciences, that it must go straight down the middle of my body - between the eyes. Is that a curse or a compliment? I think the two practices might correspond to different uses of the mind, but even that's not as cut and dried as it might seem. "
I have found there are two stock responses to Physics and music: "Oooh, thats a strange combination..." and "Hmmm, thats an interesting combination....". If you are of the latter I'm likely to warm to you. For some reason people find it easy to believe the music is mathamatical but are more likely to struggle with the idea that its also physical......
........yes, of course they're related! A sound is made by a mechanical oscillator (that can be modeled using wave equations), it travels into a room (which responds in a predictable way according to air volume building materials, damping effect of human bodies and so on), it is picked up by the ear (an extraordinary device that performs a spectral analysis on the sound) before being fed (via a chemical-cascade-amplifier) to the brain (which pattern matches the frequency bands, decibel level and so on, to infer sensory information that represents the original oscillator). "Ah yes, sounds like cat gut stretched over a thin low-impedance wooden frame with an automatic friction-feedback horse-hair driver system... played a little flat."
Perhaps people don't have a cultural cartoon character to pin the connection to - the 'wack-genius' archetype fits easily onto mathematicians and musicians, whereas 'scientist' are boring people who give us bad news and collapse our dream worlds into a string of well cataloged emotional fossils. Well not for me anyway. I guess I've always felt its a false dichotomy, and suspected that therein lies an awful lot of bullshit thats probably hurting us. A friend once said that, if there is a division between arts and sciences, that it must go straight down the middle of my body - between the eyes. Is that a curse or a compliment? I think the two practices might correspond to different uses of the mind, but even that's not as cut and dried as it might seem. "
