Related papers: Thermodynamics of harmony: extending the analogy a…
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,…
It is well known that the mathematically accurate description of ordering and related symmetry breaking in statistical systems requires to consider the thermodynamic limit. But the order does not appear from nowhere, and yet before the…
Thermodynamics is a well developed tool to study systems in equilibrium but no such general framework is available for non-equilibrium processes. Only hope for a quantitative description is to fall back upon the equilibrium language as…
We develop a model of musical rhythm and meter based on optimizing the trade-off between human psychological preferences for perceiving repeated patterns in time with a desire for variety and complexity. By mapping these competing…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all isolated macroscopic systems must be in want of ever greater disorder, with due apologies to Jane Austen for plagiarizing the opening line in her novel {\it Pride and Prejudice}. This common,…
We develop a theory of the effective disorder temperature in glass-forming materials driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by external forces. Our basic premise is that the slow configurational degrees of freedom of such materials are…
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…
In this article, we present an approach for the thermodynamics of phase oscillators induced by an internal multiplicative noise. We analytically derive the free energy, entropy, internal energy, and specific heat. In this framework, the…
We provide a brief survey of quantum statistical characterisations of order, disorder and coherence in systems of many degrees of freedom. Here, order and coherence are described in terms of symmetry breakdown, while disorder is described…
This paper explores a novel connection between a thermodynamic and a dynamical systems perspective on emergent dynamical order. We provide evidence for a conjecture that Hamiltonian systems with mixed chaos spontaneously find regular…
It is probably not a coincidence that two of the pioneers of thermodynamics, Helmholtz and Mayer, were physicians. Thermodynamics studies the transformations of energy, and such transformations ceaselessly take place in all living systems…
The purpose of this study is to consider the near future of civilization in the framework of thermodynamics. Kardashev's proposal to evaluate the development of celestial civilizations by the amount of energy they are able to use was…
Peace means order, and war brings disorder and chaos to any society. But order and disorder are not only observed in wars, in many systems they are the dominant property. Understanding order and disorder enables us to understand the…
Adopting a performer-centric perspective, we frequently encounter two statements: "music flows", and "music is life-like". This dissertation builds on top of the two statements above, resulting in an exploration of the role of temporal…
We make some general observations about partial orders on quotient spaces, and explore their use in music theory, in two different contexts. In the first, we show that many of the most familiar chord and scale types in Western music appear…
Recently, a thermodynamic definition of time has been introduced. This definition is useful to find approach some open problems in physics. But, it was obtained by a phenomenological approach and a logical inconsistency appears in the…
The fact that a temperature and an entropy may be associated with horizons in semi-classical general relativity has led many to suspect that spacetime has microstructure. If this is indeed the case then its description via Riemannian…
We address the issue of the quantum-classical correspondence in chaotic systems using, as recently done by Zurek [e-print quant-ph/9802054], the solar system as a whole as a case study: this author shows that the classicality of the…
Disorder has been long considered as a formidable foe of theoretical physicists in their attempts to understand system's behavior. Here, we review recently accumulated data and propose that from the point of view of calculating…
Self-sustained order can emerge in complex systems due to internal feedback between coupled subsystems. Here, we present our discovery of a non-monotonic emergence of order amidst chaos in a turbulent thermo-acoustic fluid system.…