The Continued Overlap of Nature and Maths, in Music
In May this year I heard a track by Matmos called “Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith”. I listened to the piece, and it sounded amazing. Afterwards it was explained how the track was made; with snails.
“they aimed a laser at a light sensitive theremin, and then got snails to crawl across the path of the laser, triggering changes in the theremin’s pitch”
This then released a flood of continued thoughts about trying to understand nature to ‘perfect’ life. The Fibonacci sequence(made famous in The Da Vanci Code) was the next example I found. A study of nature’s pine cones and sun flowers lead to that formula (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21).
Bee’s behavior is being studied/used to improve Robot AI. Kids are learning music through transposing notes to the sequence for Pi(22/7 or 3.14…)
But what inspired this post, is something from Nova’s blog about the creation of Protein Songs.
By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein. And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear.
I am simply amazed at all of this for many reasons:-
1) Nature holds so many mysteries, behind such beauty
2) Man is using nature’s pattern’s to create it’s own machines
3) Music is being used to represent formulas of Nature via Maths
4) The beauty of (some of) said Music which was created not for it’s sound but for it’s numbers
5) Everything can come back to basic formulas, we just don’t know the formula