MUSICAL PHYSICS - Feeling Vibrations
MUSICAL PHYSICS - Feeling Vibrations
It all started in 2012...
Interested in becoming a music composer, I began reading the first chapters of “The Craft of Musical Composition” by Paul Hindemith. Book One opens with 6th century Greek references, the presence of harmonic overtones, and how the 12-tone scale derived its chromatic scale based on the multiplication and division of the fundamental frequency of a pitch. This mathematic discovery was eye-opening to say the least; sparking an interest in the physics and history of sound - something I would keep on the back-burner throughout the following ten years of research and development as a musical artist, producer, and performer.
Fast forward to 2022, I spent between four and five months compiling ten years’ worth of research on the science of sound and put together a presentation called, “Musical Physics: The Phenomenon of Resonance.” Pre-artificial intelligence and the use of chatbots, majority of the research came from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Webster’s Dictionary, with some odds and ends from Wikipedia and YouTube documentaries and tutorials. In this lecture, I cover a wide range of subjects related to physical and audible resonance including how we feeling vibrations, how sound works, how a sound gets its character, the movements of soundwaves, and the concept of string theory in quantum mechanics.
J. Golko presents “Musical Physics: The Phenomenon of Resonance” at Poplar Creek Library in 2022.
Before getting into the existence of sound, we contemplate resonance in its most relatable form: the psychological response of “feeling.” As it pertains to humans, we typically categorize feeling as either something we physically touch or process as emotions. In etymology, “feeling” derives from the Middle English word felen – circa 1150 A.D. – meaning “to perceive by touch” or “by palpation.” In psychology, the 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant, of Germany, likens feeling to emotional conditions of pleasantness and unpleasantness, also referred to as “affect.” This form of feeling harks back to the ancient Greek word pathos, meaning a person’s experience, misfortune, emotion, and condition.
Along the lines of pathos, we encounter three types of feelings: empathy, compassion, and sympathy. These pillars of reception play a core function in the consumption and connection an audience feels when they listen to music. Both instrumental and lyrical music have the ability to convey and invoke an emotional reaction from the listener. Though an instrument may not communicate in words, mastery of various techniques allows the musician to imply an emotion context, whether it be uplifting and energizing, heart-broking and anxious, angry and belligerent, or calm and serene. In contrast, lyric-based music put heavier emphasis on the verbal content of storytelling. The listener can interpret the artist’s message in terms of language, and sync their emotional state with the atmosphere of the musical composition.
In modern English, we sometimes describe our feelings as getting a “good vibe” or “bad vibe” depending on the context of the interaction – be it with another person or a particular location. The bigger picture that “Musical Physics” seeks to acknowledge is the extent to which we can actually register vibrations at the psycho-organic level, from emotional to cellular. And the depth that vibrations can reach can elicit physical responses that can be either healing or destructive.
J. Golko resonants the strings of the Earth Harp on Quantum of the Seas in 2015.
In regards to the three pillars, empathy is the ability for a person to imagine being “in another’s shoes,” as the old saying goes. An empathic person is therefore able to align their emotional state with the aesthetic of another person’s feelings or experience. In a musical context, this could be resonating with a songwriter’s challenges or successes. This form of empathy comes in all kinds of figurative shapes and sizes - whether it be the message of a complicated breakup, bragging about personal wealth, euphoric love, or hyped up self-empowerment. Empathy is the syncing of an emotional state with the fundamental vibration.
A deeper sync than empathy could be described as compassion. This feeling gets to the psychological extent of bonding more intensely with the fundamental vibration. The literal meaning of compassion being “to suffer together,” this implies that the person goes a step further than just understanding another’s situation, and they reach a point where their emotional being is directly influenced by the vibrational source. In sports, this could be if a fan’s team loses the game and the person allows that loss to negatively affect their attitude and energy over the next day. However, not all suffering implies a negative bond. To suffer, or go through, an event together builds towards a power-in-numbers situation. With musical performances being a visceral human experience, this level of “vibe-getting” leads to devoted fan clubs of an artist. In extreme cases, we may see large collective acts of charity, vandalism, support systems, or inspired violence.
Where empathy is based in the mental cognition of understanding and relating to a vibrational state, sympathy involves a more subtle and physical relation. This gets more directly to the sensation of feeling an energy as a vibration, through the mode of communication. Perhaps easiest to explain, using a hypothetical situation, would be to say you have just met a person. You know nothing about them (negating empathy, compassion, and general understanding), and yet you a good or bad “vibe” from them, just based on their physical energy.
This sense-driven interpretation of a vibration takes into account the visual attire and hygienic upkeep of the person. Often, people will silently express themselves by employing a specific color combination in their clothing, spraying a perfume or neglecting their natural odor, and sporting a character-defining hairstyle. This all contributes to the ambiance of a person, in tandem with their underlying physical health. Ultimately, we’re talking about the fated “first impression” a person makes on the world by leaving the privacy of their home to interact in the public world.
In music, sympathy takes on two roles. There is the emotional response where person’s mood is physically altered by what they hear. Common examples could be like when a department store plays hypnotic house music at a rate of 128 beats per minute, which has the effect of increasing the listener’s heart rate and subliminally encourages the person to remain actively shopping. Another example would be when a person is exercising at a gym and is listening to a recording involving a fast tempo, dramatically loud instruments, confident and powerful lyrics, or a repetitive and mindless rhythm as to inspire a high-energy flow-state.
The other sympathetic role involves physics at the molecular level. This is where we transition from a place of contemplation and a philosophical view of resonance, recalibrating to a view that is more scientific and quantifiable. To observe this physical reaction, we explore the strings of a piano and a phenomenon called sympathetic resonance.
A single piano string, while suspended without any dampening or muting, will resonant its pitch when another chord is struck that shares a common pitch center. For example, gently pushing down on a low C at 32.70 Hertz (Hz) so that the hammer is off the string, allows the string to hang freely, then if we played a C major triad around middle C - at 261.63 Hz - it would send a physical vibration across the other strings of the piano and physically vibrate the freely suspended low C, resonating the string to perform its dedicated pitch.
This can also be seen and heard in guitar strings, which, if left unmuted, can appear to spontaneously resonant their pitch when vibrations in the air sympathetically cause them to move, oscillating them back and forth at their given pitch frequency (analyzed in terms of “Hertz”). Here we witness that a sound vibration can travel as a physical-though-invisible wave through a medium, such as the air, and literally resonant another sound source when it is in sync with its fundamental frequency.
To wrap up this introductory overview of vibrations and how we feel them, we start to look at vibrations in more tangible forms beyond the emotional and psychic state. Vibrations, in terms of travel and communication, move in the form of waves. There are several kinds of waveform-resonance we unknowing live amongst in our daily lives, such as electromagnetic, nuclear magnetic (NMR), electron spin (ESR), mechanical, quantum, and in relation to our subject of music and sound, acoustic waves.
The next excerpt from “Musical Physics: The Phenomenon of Resonance” will be centered around the wonders of psychoacoustics, the discovery of sound waves, the measuring of frequencies, and we take a visual look at a major triad chord and learn how the human ear translates a complex sound wave into an audible, musical sensation.
Until next time, Hark On!