Music and Science

Posted on May 5, 2021  •  3 minutes  • 634 words

Science is one grand sweet Music piece. Your curious explorer has observed this strange resemblance between Music and Science. So this is my topic for this blog. I shall make you explore the depths of Music, Science and their Homology. Let us begin this journey where you would open up your mind and explore the music of science.

Music, as defined in “Sangeeth Ratnakar“ is the Harmony of Rhythm, Notes, and Dance. I shall describe to you the characteristics of these three aspects. Rhythm is something similar to your heartbeat which gives a repeated harmonic sound within a time interval. A small pulse of sound is produced in a specific pattern divided through time. The percussion artists explore this aspect of beats to produce music. Interestingly, every animate and inanimate object has internal energy giving out beats in its own harmony.

Now I want you to think of rain. You could hear every drop of rain falling on a metal sheet giving beats. Once you find a transition of smooth rain to heavy rain, you start to hear a lot of beats at the fastest frequency. If this speed is made faster, you start to hear a continuous sound called the pitch in the musical language. It may seem counterintuitive, but rhythm and frequency are in a certain sense the same concept. It’s merely our perception of them that varies. Pitch is the term that musicians use for describing how high or how low a note is. Physicists would describe this element as frequency and measure it in cycles per second, or hertz. Mixed in different concentrations and gradients, these notes generate diverse feelings and emotions. Such music can be heard in a cool breeze, river streams, Volcanoes and many such natural phenomena produce notes.

Every musical piece produces emotion. Like a Shaligram which resonates with the emotion of a river stream, life too resonates to music through dance. Every pose is a reflection of emotion. A dancer strikes and strings various such poses through the succession of time revealing an emotive state (rasa), which resonates perfectly with the succession of notes (raaga). Dancing is the most natural outcome of the notes. Be it a lullaby sung to a baby in the cradle or a soldier with his gun marching in a parade ground, we can see that notes can produce emotions and that emotions find their outlet in dancing.

##Now, where do you find Science in this narration?

Science too is broadly divided into Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Here, I show you the Homology of these three branches of science with the three branches of Music.

While the Rhythm has energy filled in time, Physics finds mass harmoniously filled in space. These units of mass form momentum to generate continuous waves. We find matter being produced, which gets compacted to form atoms and chemicals. Dealing with these chemicals; manipulating and studying these chemicals lead to the branch of Chemistry. Diverse chemicals are vastly found in our nature with varied properties; as are the Notes filled by various frequencies in this vast nature. It is known that the chemicals tend to be disordered. Bringing the randomness of these chemicals into a perfect system with consciousness is achieved by life. While every chemical reaction leads to randomness, Life directs this randomness and strings these chemical reactions to create a defined system. The study of Life is called Biology. The author personally loves Biology and Dance. For, the touch of Life is clearly found in these both branches.

Personally, your “Curious explorer” finds Music to be the play of time and Science to be the play of Space. I conclude this blog post by asking you not to stop this flow of thought and let me know your opinion on the resemblance between Science and Music.