Re: calling all boffins

[Jean-Christophe Ponsero <ponserj2@YAHOO.FR>]

Since some people are wondering how a "scientist" can
love music... Let me give a few insights about my own
case. By the way I'm a budding aeronautical engineer,
currently working on acoustics.

One of the things I find fascinating about music is
that it is at the same time extremely complex
scientifically and extremely simple in the way people
can enjoy it. It's not just the typical problem about
art and why it is difficult to justify why you like
such and such work. It is rather the problem of how so
many scientifically complex things such as identifying
a particular voice or instrument, finding a violin's
sound better than another's, etc, are easily performed
by the ear. Some, like tuning a piano, require some
training but are accessible to a lot of people.

If I were asked to tune a piano, of course I could;
I'd take a mike and a Fourier-transform filter and
adjust the fundamental resonance frequency of each
string - and the result would be a catastrophe.
Whereas the professional tuner, without any
instrument, will do better by simple listening, by
trial and error. And if I try to figure out how he
tunes each of the 3 strings corresponding to the same
note (in the upper part of the keyboard) to get an
interesting sonority, I won't be able to describe that
scientifically. However it works. The mystery of
Stradivarius' violin varnish poses the same problem.

I also think the problem of nature/nurture about our
perception of music captivating. The human ear has
logarithmic properties in terms of loudness and
frequency, reacts more to certain frequencies... but
we don't know much about our subjective perception. It
seems every culture has produced some scale systems
and a kind of harmony that goes with it. This is
nature. But the fact that we feel at ease with western
classical more than with chinese pentatonic scales is
definitely nurture.

Of course, as far as numbers are concerned, I think a
lot of scientists are fascinated by well-ordered
works, the best example being the Golbergs and their
incredible amout of symmetry. A fugue obviously
corresponds to a scientific mind: identifying patterns
in a bundle of notes, finding out how a single line
varies independently from the others, and finally
understanding the relations between superposed
melodies is really a research work, a heuristic
procedure just like reducing physical phenomena to
simple laws with few variables. For me the scientific
fascination about the Goldbergs (which is of course
not the only reason I like them) is the same thing as
the fascination about number Pi, in whose decimals any
sequence of digits can be found, however long it may
be. The Goldberg is one of these really universal
works.

Consequently every scientist should be a fan of serial
music, but I doubt it! I like the concept of the
fundamental Schönberg tries (selecting a "melody"
containing the 12 different tones, the series, and
playing around with it in only 3 allowed ways to get a
composition) or Xenakis' research efforts, but I need
emotion in music. Therefore I am delighted to hear
Berg's Angel violin concerto but I hate Boulez' 2nd
piano sonata, which is for me a succession of
outbursts and silences which I can't make head or tail
of, and hence I can't feel anything.

As for GG, it's perhaps due to my scientific side if
I'm always interested in what he does, even if I
dislike his interpretation sometimes. When I don't
like what he's doing then I still listen because he is
pedagogical, with no one else can I understand a piece
better, by hearing all voices and how they relate. It
almost saves me from buying the score.

Fortunately enough, I can enjoy Bach just by emotional
listening, without analyzing if I'm listening to a
Passepied or a Saraband. This was just to reassure
non-scientists who think we are a bit strange!

For those interested, here's a link about acoustical
illusions (Shepard's ever-ascending scale):
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/highest_note/ex.about.fr.html

For those who like number nerds, a bewitching book by
French writer George Perec, "La vie mode d'emploi". I
don't know how it's called in English. The book's
structure is haunted by numbers, following a knight's
tour on a chessboard. Perec wrote a book without the
letter "e" (les revenentes), another with only e's as
vowels, he made 15*15 crossword puzzles with only one
black square... And on top of that he is a literary
genius!

JC

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