Parallels between music and science

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I was talking to an atomic physics major on the bus the other day. He was telling me about the uncertainty principle and how much it affects his work. Then he asked what I'm working on. When I was talking about open-score compositions that allow for some improv elements - e.g. by providing performers with a 'deck' of cards that each contain a riff that they can assemble in any order in collaboration with each other, common enough in 20th century music - he made a connection between that and the uncertainty principle. That is, in both, you sort of estimate the general area in which something will occur and allow for an element of unpredictability in the outcome, if I'm saying this right.

And then, he observed that when uncertainty started to become important in science in the 60s, it was also the time of more 'randomness' in literature, and was also rougly the time when Brown, Cage, and Cardew were experimenting with open scores. (And maybe when Dylan and the Beatles were working with more surreal lyrics?) Likewise, when the theory of relativity was developed in the 20s was also approximately the time when Joyce and Woolf were breaking down the unified narrative perspective and was also the time when Debussy was breaking down linearity in music.

This was interesting to me. I'd done a lot where I looked at homologies between art forms or between music and political or philosophical movements but had never really looked at it in terms of science. Is there something to this? Why? Is it just that our perspectives shift when we realize the universe may work differently? Is it possible that artistic movements can provide new perspectives that can influence the models scientific researchers use?

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Julio and Barry to thread, of course.

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:21 (twenty-one years ago)

er sundar, I need you here:

Qaballah - classic or dud

I've been much arguing the same thing in the context of Kabbalah, but everyone's been ignoring me except redfez and Trayce cos I know nothing really, I'm flying blind like the chancer I am.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:26 (twenty-one years ago)

Barry's over there too if you want to summon him.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Well Tempered Clavier & Archimedes to thread

― mentalist (mentalist), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Of course, there's a rich history of interplay between math, physics, and music. It probably starts with the Pythagoreans and continues strongly through the 17th/18th, with various astronomers looking to describe the solar system with models based upon the "Music of the Spheres". That is, some believed that the ratios between the radii of planetary orbits should organize themselves in specific musical intervals. Kepler even built some sort of (stringed, iirc) instrument in the early 18th century, whose open notes were based upon his geometric models of the solar system. Apparently it sounded like shit. He was quite dismayed over this.

(xpost)!!
For the 20th century examples you mention, I think the connections are tenuous at best, because scientists and musicians weren't really relating to each other. Einstein's theories became world famous, but I've never heard anything about his thinking spilling over into literature. Once you get past the 60's, there's a dearth of physics experiments that would have received wide exposure. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough for these connections, though.

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:38 (twenty-one years ago)

I mean, somehow, these scientific ideas would have to burrow their way over to music and literature. Since these ideas weren't widely publicised, then the most likely path would have been through academic channels. If so, who was responsible for this?

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:43 (twenty-one years ago)

Artists and musicians are notorious autodidacts.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:44 (twenty-one years ago)

Right, it might not be the case that Earle Brown or Bob Dylan was reading a lot of Heisenberg or Schrodinger (though it's possible). And it's very possible that Heisenberg has never heard of Cornelius Cardew. But don't you find it interesting if it is the case that similar approaches to things seems to come up roughly simultaneously? Maybe it's something broader, that there's a certain zeitgeist to an era for some reason that informs the models people use for art or for science.

I mean, coming from Romanticism to Symbolism and Impressionism in Music and High Modernism in literature - those are major shifts of perspective, like going from Newtonian to Einsteinian models is.

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:51 (twenty-one years ago)

And again, the challenge to classic modernism posed by Cage - another radical shift - is comparable, maybe, to the radical shift in perspective posed by uncertainty. It seems unlikely that it's pure coincidence that these happen around the same time.

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Also, the "uncertainty" in the "uncertainty principle" means something different from its everyday usage. In the improv excercise you described, there are many possible orderings of the riffs, but the total number of possible orderings is still finite. Things get more complicated as you add cards to the deck (and add players to the ensemble) but still, the number of possibilities is finite. And in principle, one could write out a list of each and every ordering. So there is uncertainty in the score, in that you doesn't know what it will be until you draw from the deck of cards.

The physics uncertainty principle places limits on what it is possible to measure, i.e. it would be impossible to write out that list of each and every possible score (or at the very least, the details contained in all those scores would be incomplete, and therefore, unplayable).

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Would it be fair to say sundar that they are major shifts when viewed from the ground where such theoretical battles are fought, but relatively minor ones when viewed from the arial perspective of a highly global, inclusive, syncretic, world view? (x-post x2)

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Barry: What about uncertainty vs Cage's chance pieces or silent piece? In that era, actually, a number of people did write absolutely unplayable pieces. (I'm just flailing of course).

Colin: Could you expand a bit? I'm not disagreeing but I'm not totally sure what your comment means TBH.

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:57 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost -- science developed at a breakneck pace during the last century. In large part, this is due to more rapid dissemination (sp?) of information. One could probably make the same arguments for literature, music, and other fields. However, most of it was intra-field dissemnation, with relatively little information leaking between different fields. If this were true, then each field would develop independent of the others, although if all of them were rapidly changing then it could appear that these changes were somehow correlated.

(xpost again, let me think some more)

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 04:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Barry: What about uncertainty vs Cage's chance pieces or silent piece? In that era, actually, a number of people did write absolutely unplayable pieces.
If memory serves, these pieces were unplayable in the sense that nobody had the ability to perform them, but in principle, they were playable. For instance, one could program a sequencer to play them (although they didn't have sequencers then).

Colin -- I think you expressed what I was trying to get at in the beginning. That is, academics in their own fields are micromanagers by default and will recognize changes within their field as being seismic, whereas anyone outside of their field can't see what the big deal is.

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 05:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Sundar, what Barry just said was what I was trying to say.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 05:10 (twenty-one years ago)

No, not exactly. For serious, Nam June Paik wrote a piece for example that instructed the performer to "crawl into the vagina of a whale" (which may, be possible to do in theory I dunno) or others which involved stuff like blowing up the audience.

Cage had some pieces where totally chance operations (such as rolling dice or letting a piece of paper with a design on it fall to the ground) were used to determine musical events - which isn't unplayable but is far more chance oriented than the improv piece I described. Or with the 'silent' piece - there is no way to predict the outcome because every sound that occurs during the 'performance' is part of the piece. You can't make an ordered set of these.

xpost: Right. I was just about to say that I'm not a scientist but relativity seems like a big deal to me. Then I realized that I don't even exactly know what relativity is!

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Friday, 17 September 2004 05:15 (twenty-one years ago)

No talki about physics just yet you two, or I'm going home. hold on for say 30 mins OK? Cos I want to talk about Cage and Zen.

What's no so well known about Cage is that he was caught up with that whole 60's Zen and Tibetan Buddhism thing of the 60's, and absorbed a lot of influence from the likes of Shunryu Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa. So, to understand his anti-conceptual systems and techniques, it really helps to delve into the Zen concept of no-mind.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Friday, 17 September 2004 05:19 (twenty-one years ago)

Music & Science you say? Voila:

http://www.an-irrational-domain.net/articles/sides/nature020904.html

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Friday, 17 September 2004 06:26 (twenty-one years ago)

And don't forget Bad Audio Dynamite did a song called "E=MC Squared"!!!!!

― Old Fart!!! (oldfart_sd), Friday, 17 September 2004 13:04 (twenty-one years ago)

Some performers have claimed to drop science.

― frankE (frankE), Friday, 17 September 2004 13:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Science and music traditionally seem to fall into the trap of exactness, precision or .. rules, self-fulfilling prophecies & foregone conclusions. So in any discipline like that, freethinkers and nutjobs both will push the boundaries - "what if?"

You don't see this much in medicine - I can see why, because of the ethical reasons .. but living organisms seem like they're so much more flexible & resilient than other areas of science. (Although, see Mutter Museum for arguments against experimenting on humans...)

Also, Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful.

― dave225 (Dave225), Friday, 17 September 2004 13:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Others, meanwhile, have been blinded by it.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Friday, 17 September 2004 13:31 (twenty-one years ago)

The sober-looking Piers is a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Jeremy 'Jaz' Coleman is composer-in-residence with the Prague Symphony Orchestra.
!!!!! How did I miss this article? Somehow I never got around to looking at that issue of "Nature"!

― Barry Bruner (Barry Bruner), Friday, 17 September 2004 14:55 (twenty-one years ago)

one month passes...

There is probably more correspondance between science fiction and music, where some of the imagery/concept are borrowed by musicians to get messages across in novel ways -- there are one or two articles on this. Also there is probably far more links between acoustic science -- Cage's experience in that chamber might be relevant to this discussion.

'What's no so well known about Cage is that he was caught up with that whole 60's Zen and Tibetan Buddhism thing of the 60's, and absorbed a lot of influence from the likes of Shunryu Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa.'

He was introduced to Zen by Lou Harrison but much of this originates from an interest by western composers in music from the orient - Debussy hearing the gamelan at the turn of the 20th century.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 1 November 2004 13:50 (twenty-one years ago)

Xenakis. 'Nuff said?

― Dadaismus (Dada), Monday, 1 November 2004 14:27 (twenty-one years ago)

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