The Science of Music

Stuart Isacoff

From at least the fifth century B.C.E., music was a way of knowing the world. Pythagoras was the first to describe the mathematics of musical beauty, proclaiming the simple ratios that produce concordances, and offering them as one element in the structure of an orderly universe. Yet, right from the beginning, vexing paradoxes arose. The formulas for producing octaves (two strings vibrating in the proportion 2:1) and perfect fifths (two strings vibrating in the proportion 3:2), generated very agreeable harmonies, their tones formed what seemed to be covenants under heaven's watchful gaze. And yet when these ratios are multiplied to higher and higher frequencies, the resulting tones become antagonistic, refusing to merge peacefully. The structure of musical space appears to warp.

For centuries, great scientists have attempted to solve this and other puzzles, with one eye on music and the other on the cosmos. Galileo tried, and failed, to offer a theory of musical consonance and dissonance. Newton tried, and failed, to find a correspondence between the spectrum bands of light flowing though a prism and the proper distances of tones in a musical scale. Kepler claimed that the planets in their orbits followed musical laws. Remarkably, in his quest to unravel the mysteries of creation, Newton's rival, Robert Hooke, suggested that the entire universe is actually composed of tiny vibrating strings!

Today there is a greater separation between artistic and scientific disciplines. However, as the writer Vladimir Nabakov famously wrote to Edmund Wilson, "there is no science without fancy, and no art without facts." In a sense, both the musician and the physicist are engaged in the search for what might be called a grand harmony of the elements, following paths that may lead to the moment when, like tumblers falling into place at the opening of a lock, a sense of clarity, elegance, beauty, and order suddenly emerge from the fog of ordinary experience.

This lecture will consider the connections between these two worlds.

The P/T Colloquium is
typically held each
Thursday, 3:45–5:00 PM.
Refreshments are served
at 3:15 PM.