What is the relationship between music and math?

Music is richly mathematical, and an understanding of one subject can be a great help in understanding the other.

Geometry and angles

My masters thesis is devoted in part to a method for teaching math concepts using a drum machine organized on a radial grid. Placing rhythms on a circle gives a good multisensory window into ratios and angles.

Wave mechanics

The brain turns out to be adept at decomposing sinusoids into their component frequencies. We can’t necessarily consciously compare the partials of a sound, but we certainly do it unconsciously — that’s how we’re able to distinguish different timbres, and is probably the basis for our sense of consonance and dissonance. If two pitches share a lot of overtones, we tend to hear them as consonant, at least here in the western world. There’s a strong case to be made that overlapping overtone series is the basis of all of western music theory.

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 in musical terms as well.

Logarithms

Octave equivalency is really just your brain’s ability to detect frequencies related by powers of two. The relationship between absolute pitches and pitch classes is an excellent doorway into logarithms generally. You also need logarithms to understand decibels and loudness perception.

Symmetry

Music is really just a way of applying symmetry to events in time.  See this delightful paper by Vi Hart about symmetry and transformations in the musical plane.

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How is Earth’s gravity generated?

Gravity is the warping of spacetime by mass or energy. A mass like the Earth warps spacetime so that the shortest path, the “path of least resistance,” for inertial movement is towards the Earth’s center.

Using instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s possible to literally see the warping of spacetime by very massive objects like galaxies and huge conglomerations of dark matter. When you’re looking at a very distant object and there’s a large mass along your line of site, it warps spacetime to produce a visual effect known as gravitational lensing. Here’s a schematic diagram showing how it works.

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Is Richard Dawkins helping science through his attacks on religion?

I would wish for Dawkins to use more emotional sensitivity and compassion when dealing with religious people, because his hostile tone gets in the way of his invaluable message. His condescending attitude toward believers, epitomized by calling atheists “brights,” is seriously counterproductive. I’m concerned that he’s unnecessarily confrontational and inflammatory in his TV appearances, op-eds and so on. He’d benefit from taking a page from Jesus and turning the other cheek when religious people attack or misrepresent him.

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My top five SoundCloud tracks

The internet has spoken! These are the tracks of mine that you like the best, in order of listens. It comes as no surprise to me that three of them involve Michael Jackson, and two involve the Beatles.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

Building a better dopamine awareness campaign

I’ve been intrigued by Charles Lyell‘s self-described “dopamine awareness campaign,” trying to show how all of our social behaviors boil down to a desire for gratifying dopamine shots. The campaign doesn’t seem to be going so well; see, for example, the collapsing of his recent answer to Why do people contribute reviews of restaurants/theatres/events etc? what is the human motivation to do this? I voted it back up, but gently satirized him in a comment:

I appreciate your awareness campaign, but it does seem like all of your answers boil down to one word. “Why does anyone do anything?” “DOPAMINE!”

Charles wrote me back:



I’m not trying to annoy or bore people, but part of my awareness campaign is to help spread the word that everything we do we do for dopamine. 

Imagine a world where the fear/power/esteem addicts wreaking havoc and destroying the planet are revealed to be desperate addicts who need treatment for the same brain disease plaguing heroin addicts. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that everything comes down to dopamine appeal and that trying to explain dopamine appeal has zero dopamine appeal. As a result, I’m working a couple of new approaches. 

If you can think of a way to make explaining dopamine appeal more appealing, please let me know.

That’s such a good question that rather than respond in a comment, I thought it merited my first-ever Quora post.

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Why hasn’t the recording industry sued Girl Talk?

Last year, I spoke on a panel about sampling with a few academics and copyright lawyers. One of the panelists was Martin Schwimmer, a partner in a law firm practicing trademark and copyright law. A big part of his job is going after copyright infringers. Schwimmer assured the audience that no one will ever sue Girl Talk, regardless of the legal merits, because in terms of real-world consequences, it’s a lose-lose proposition.

[iframe_loader width=”480″ height=”270″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/WK3O_qZVqXk” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

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What does the human brain find exciting about syncopated rhythm and breakbeats?

Predictable unpredictability.

The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry because they engage our pattern-recognizers. But we only like patterns up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention again. And if the pattern-breaking happens repetitively, recursively forming a new pattern, we find that extremely gratifying.

The Amen Break in time-unit box system notation

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Tune-Yards

Anna and I caught one of the best performances we’ve seen in years the other night by Tune-Yards.

My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me feel more optimistic about the possibilities of life in America.”

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Why do fake rumors such as vaccines causing child autism work?

Imagine you’re a parent with a young kid, and you’re hearing all these stories about vaccines and autism. Who do you trust?

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Is Dan Savage’s internet campaign against Rick Santorum moral?

Oh my, yes.

From Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia entry:

A controversy arose following Santorum’s statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press that was published on April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum said the priests were engaged in “a basic homosexual relationship”, and went on to say that he had “[…] no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts”; that the right to privacy, as detailed in Griswold v. Connecticut, “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution”; that, “whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family”. When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality”.

Rick Santorum is guilty of hate speech. In a perfect world, Dan Savage would have addressed Santorum’s ignorance and bigotry in a loving, Gandhi-esque fashion, but I give Savage credit for creativity and effectiveness. His Google bombing campaign might be juvenile and vengeful in tone, but he’s fighting speech with speech in an exceptionally clever way, and has drawn a lot of attention to a worthy cause. What’s more moral than protesting hate speech nonviolently?

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