The title explains it all.
Always a good science music clip, Neptune from The Planets, by Holst.
Very cool the way it keeps setting you up with E minor only to resolve to the the very remote key of G#minor. It leaves the conflict between these two keys unresolved to the very end. And the ghostly chorus coming in atop it...
More random youtube postings below. Post your own as you please in comments. This is just playtime for me.
[BRIEF SPAM: Thursday Classical Music is our regularly-scheduled classical music day. The past few weeks we've been on a Beethoven binge, this past Thursday being the first of four heavy diaries on the details of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony (if you missed it, go back and read it). No Beethoven today.]
... Now back Back to playtime...
Speaking of spooky otherworldly choruses evocative of the discrete non-Newtonian universe, I'm reminded of Sirenes, from Nocturnes, by Debussy.
If you hear sirens on a reef calling you to your rocky doom, you are mistaken. Those are W and Z particles. Trust me.
I always try to imagine what it must be like to be somebody who has never heard that piece before and is hearing it for the first time.
Of course, all music is based on physics, the ability of the ear to hear music at different frequencies and the HARMONIC whole-number relationships of notes from one to the other. The next clip is a little physics experiment/demonstration of that set to music by Philip Glass.
In 1619, the scientist and mathematician and musician Johannes Kepler published Harmonices Mundi, The Harmony of the World, a book that explored an interesting relationship between musical harmony and the movement of the planets -- and, oh, by the way, explains Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion. That, too.
From wikipedia:
While medieval philosophers spoke metaphorically of the "music of the spheres", Kepler discovered physical harmonies in planetary motion. He found that the difference between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of a planet in its orbit approximates a harmonic proportion. For instance, the maximum angular speed of the Earth as measured from the Sun varies by a semitone (a ratio of 16:15), from mi to fa, between aphelion and perihelion. Venus only varies by a tiny 25:24 interval (called a diesis in musical terms). Kepler explains the reason for the Earth's small harmonic range:
The Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi: you may infer even from the syllables that in this our home misery and famine hold sway.
At very rare intervals all of the planets would sing together in "perfect concord": Kepler proposed that this may have happened only once in history, perhaps at the time of creation.
Here's a neat little music clip demonstrating the changes in angular speed of the planets, as expressed musically, ala Kepler.
We shouldn't be surprised that Kepler was also a musician. He came from a family of famous violin-makers, and would have continued in the family business if given his father's druthers. The relationship between mathematics and music -- and even moreso, musical instrument-making, is so strong that going from musician to mathematician to scientist was a natural career migration path at that time.
Interesting things pop up from google... There's a course at GWU:
Phys 1007, Music and Physics (4), Staff. Primarily for non-science majors. A comparative study of music and physics, showing parallels in the history of the two fields
Of course there is. ... More googling shows many universities have similar courses. Interesting. Why didn't they have anything that cool when I was going? Here's a webpage for a UC Berkeley class LS70a Physics and Music taught by Saul Perlmutter, who just happened to win the Nobel Prize last October for discovering the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
"Interstellar Orgasm," a music video made for Ligeti's Kyrie (from the Requiem). Ligeti's Kyrie was the music used for the Monolith scenes in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's interesting to see what was space-travel music reinterpreted as space-sex music. This is the complete Kyrie movement, as opposed to the chopped up version in Kubrick's film.
Have fun. Check out last Thursday's diary on Beethoven's Ninth and be around next Thursday for part 2 of that.