Friday, December 16, 2011
A musical pitch is a blend of many different frequencies beside the fundamental. Here’s a visualization of the different vibrational modes of an ideal string. The string’s movements are the sum of all these different modes simultaneously.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this: The picture shows a stylized nucleus with red protons and blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image. It makes a nice logo. Unfortunately, it’s also totally wrong. There’s an extent to which [...]
Filed in Math, Music Theory, Physics, Science
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Also tagged chemistry, einstein, electromagnetism, harmonics, linkedin, Music Theory, orbitals, Physics, quantum mechanics, visualization
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Friday, September 30, 2011
Here are the areas of math that can most easily be understood in musical terms. Wave mechanics The concept of orbitals in quantum mechanics made zero sense to me until I finally found out that they’re just harmonics of the electron field’s vibrations. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Einstein conceptualized wave mechanics [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged bellringing, circle of fifths, combinatorics, discrete math, graph theory, linkedin, logarithms, modular arithmetic, Music, neal stephenson, quora, recursion, school, symmetry, wave mechanics
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Friday, September 9, 2011
If you had to name the most influential drummers in contemporary music, who would you pick? If you’re a rock fan, you might go with Ringo Starr, John Bonham, or Keith Moon. A jazz fan might talk about Max Roach, Elvin Jones or Tony Williams. You probably wouldn’t think to name Gregory Cylvester Coleman. He [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Math, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged amon tobin, aphex twin, copyright, curtis mayfield, david bowie, digging the crates, dillinja, drum n bass, drumming, eighties, electronica, futurama, golden ratio, hip-hop, jungle, looping, luke vibert, lupe fiasco, mantronix, memes, nineties, nwa, powerpuff girls, recycle, reggae, rnb, salt n pepa, Sampling, snow, soul, the impressions, the winstons
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Saturday, August 13, 2011
Probability is a deeply weird and disturbing topic. The harder I look at it, the weirder and more disturbing it becomes. I find the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be the least weird and disturbing way to think about it.
Computers can only do a few very simple operations consisting of flipping electrical switches on and off. You can represent numbers in patterns of the on-off states of sequences of switches. By flipping switches on and off in particular patterns, you can perform simple mathematical operations on the numbers. You can do more complex mathematical [...]
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
If you’re a guitarist, you may have noticed that it’s hard to get your instrument perfectly in tune. This is not your imagination. If you tune each string perfectly to the one next to it, the low E string will end up out of tune with the high E string. If you use an electronic [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged autotune, guitar, harmonics, harmony, history, Music, Music Theory, tuning
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Friday, February 25, 2011
Last night I caught a lecture by David Kirkpatrick on his book The Facebook Effect. This post is going to be about Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the book, not the book itself, since I just got it last night and haven’t started reading it yet. But his talk certainly conveyed the flavor. Kirkpatrick had one significant [...]
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
I’ve picked up some new guitar students lately, so I’m once again doing a lot of explaining what a tritone is and why people should care. Whenever I find myself explaining something a lot, I like to encapsulate it as a blog post. So here we go. A tritone is the interval between the notes [...]
Filed in Emotion, Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, busta rhymes, chords, irrational numbers, melodic minor, michael jackson, miles davis, Music Theory, psychology, scales, simpsons, sonny rollins, stevie wonder, thelonious monk, tritones
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