Related papers: Music and Astronomy
We have been congratulated on the stage by a Nobel laureate (he was our curtain raiser), played our music in planetariums, museums, observatories throughout Spain and at the end of the meeting of the ESO telescopes time allocation…
Most music theory books are like medieval medical textbooks: they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases. How does music, in particular harmony, actually work, presented as a real,…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
The after-dinner talk has by now become a tradition of this Conference series on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum. On this occasion, I have tried to combine a free-style and (hopefully) amusing presentation with deep questions of…
These are the preparatory notes for a Science & Music essay, "Playing by numbers", appeared in Nature 453 (2008) 988-989.
Scientists collaborating internationally have developed a new way to learn about our universe through gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time caused by the motion and vibration of celestial bodies. By analogy, gravitational…
We present the Cosmic Piano, an innovative outreach tool designed to detect muons from air showers produced by cosmic rays colliding with the atmosphere. The Cosmic Piano consists of scintillator-based modules with avalanche photodiodes…
In "On the Heavens" Aristotle criticizes the Pythagorean point of view which claims the existence of a cosmic music and a cosmic sound. According to the Pythagorean argument, there exists a cosmic music produced by stars and planets. These…
Music, enchanting and poetic, permeates every corner of human civilization. Although music is not unfamiliar to people, our understanding of its essence remains limited, and there is still no universally accepted scientific description.…
After presenting the general framework of 'mathemusical' dynamics, we focus on one music-theoretical problem concerning a special case of homometry theory applied to music composition, namely Milton Babbitt's hexachordal theorem. We briefly…
Popular culture plays a significant role in shaping public interest in science, and Taylor Swift's discography frequently incorporates astrophysics terminology. This study examines the occurrence of astrophysics-related words in her lyrics…
To date, calculating the frequencies of musical notes requires one to know the frequency of some reference note. In this study, first-order ordinary differential equations are used to arrive at a mathematical model to determine tonal…
With the availability of nice images and amazing, dramatic stories, the fundamental questions it addresses, and the attraction is exerces on many, it is often assumed that astronomy is an obvious topic for the media. Looking more carefully,…
Celestial objects, from earth like planets to clusters of galaxies, possess angular momentum and magnetic fields. Here we compare the rotational and magnetic energies of a whole range of these celestial objects together with their…
Spectroscopic transiting observations of the atmospheres of hot Jupiters around other stars, first with Hubble Space Telescope and then Spitzer, opened the door to compositional studies of exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope will…
In a context of increasing scientific specialization and deficiencies in the scientific literacy of the population, there arises a need to broaden the methods of scientific dissemination. This study proposes an approach that combines music…
Acoustic oscillations in stars can be driven by gravitational waves. However, at present it is not feasible to use the helioseismology data for their detection, since it is impossible to disentangle the uncertain driving contributions…
In this work we perform a fractal analysis of 160 pieces of music belonging to six different genres. We show that the majority of the pieces reveal characteristics that allow us to classify them as physical processes called the 1/f (pink)…
Over a quarter of white dwarfs have photospheric metal pollution, which is evidence for recent accretion of exoplanetary material. While a wide range of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this pollution, there are currently few…
In the production of modern music, the musical characteristics of the guitar or keyboard amplifier play an integral role in the creative process. This article explores the physics of music with an emphasis on the role of distortion in the…