The Link Between Jazz and Physics | Hacker News Reader

The Link Between Jazz and Physics

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53 pointsazazqadir11 comments

Not sure how much rigorous examination this kind of connection can really hold up using modern science, tools, resources, etc, but as far as intuition goes, this seems like a natural fit.

In graduate school, I did work through some published educational experiments that, in short, concluded having music time in the average school week was an improvement in nearly all other study fields, and particularly pronounced in Math of all things. Even compared to an alternate test group with extra Math time, the Music group did better than that one. The control group got neither and showed no improvement, if I remember it correctly.

The relationships between long-form, technical musical proficiency and abstract, logical thinking should be complimentary I think. Lots of the same mental pathways I'd imagine. One guy I knew from finance - a real genius in the synthetics / derivatives arena - had originally gone to University on a full-ride music scholarship. Jazz saxophone and piano I think. After having an, um, trippy experience, he discovered a new-found love of Math and switched majors almost immediately, with great success. Anecdote, sure, but that's how we can make connections for such obtuse notions.

Many employers will tell you that music grads make excellent employees. It's usually easier for a music grad to learn coding to an undergrad standard than vice versa.

But I'm underwhelmed by these kind of fluffy semi-literary linkups between otherwise beautiful things.

No matter what science people tell you, music is not math. It's much more complex than that. :)

No matter what science people tell you, music is not math. It's much more complex than that. :)

After three semesters of majoring in music, I made things easier for myself as a student and switched to computer science, with a hefty dose of math on the side. (I also thought that might be better for employment prospects; I think I was right.)

I've continued to pursue music as well, but wow, those classes are intense.

I had a similar thing happen, where I had this insane aspiration of dual majoring in computer science and engineering and music. After doing marching band my first semester, which was 6+ hours of work a week ignoring games, and seeing how hard the music majors were working, I realized how difficult that'd be.

I still do the occasional ensemble, but the time you need to commit to those courses are insane.

Random idea: I wonder if you could set up an education track, perhaps for homeschoolers (?), that transitioned from music study to music performance in a group to computer programming to programming in a team.

Thought I'd just leave this here. Cracked me up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTYzYpb1MY0

On Einstein - https://www.quora.com/How-did-Einsteins-musical-practice-inf...

That second link has a lot of really cool quotes and reference points for Einstein and music!

>Thus Albert directly attributes the Theory of Relativity to his study of music and how it allowed him to access his intuitive thinking. He once said that "the highest form of musicality in the realm of thought" (Paul Schilpp, 1979) as a way to explain to "mathematical" students that thought in its highest form is not mathematical but musical.

This is the quote I've been needing for so long - it's hard to put into words, but I've gotten into XX arguments with people that "Math is the universal language" is wrong and it should be "Music is the universal language." Math is a form of notation. Music is a form of communication.

Such groundbreaking harmonies in Giant Steps! :D

This reminds me of one of the best music lessons I ever received. It was from one of the guitarists of a moderately well-known band from the CBGB's era of American music. He linked the Circle of Fifths (a basic musical concept of western harmony) to both its underlying mathematics and the more esoteric side of Christian theology. Consonance and dissonance became our relationship between Heaven and Hell. Intervallic relationships could be measured both mathematically and theologically, and both tied directly to our intellectual and emotional response to the music.

It's a short and obvious step from the mathematics of harmony to the structure of Kabbalah, and from Kabbalah to theology.

I followed all the links in this article and watched Alexander's TEDx talk. The only "link" I could find is a rather loose one, mentioned at the end of the TEDx talk[1]. A cyclic ('big bounce') cosmology is proposed as a solution to the fine-tuning problem, and this is likened to a jazz soloist trying different things over a repeated chord progression.

The associated paper[2] doesn't mention jazz or music.

Perhaps a tighter crossover between physics and music lies in the use of Grassmann algebra to study both scattering amplitudes[3] and musical scales[4][5].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9_ZzY99-6U&t=14m5s

[2] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.00727.pdf

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5605

[4] http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/Regular+temperament

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Ward_Smith#Music_theory

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