ALBERT Einstein is one of the few names in science that have become truly household. Travel to almost any part of the world and pick a random person off the street — chances are, they have at the very least heard his name. A fantastic book by Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, wonderfully shows how the progressions of the Arts and the Sciences have throughout history advanced together in an almost uncannily coincidental way. Certain conceptual era‐defining trends in Art have often coincided with complementary discoveries in Science — and sometimes even preceded them — followed for the most part by public opinion, and finally politics and legislation. It discusses how certain concepts in Science have become popularized, for better or for worse, hence why Einstein was eventually viewed as an actual celebrity. (For an interesting and entirely contradicting view by someone who wholeheartedly disagrees with Leonard Shlain, see Piero Scaruffi's Art and Physics.)
In addition to simultaneous conceptual advancements, there is also quite a bit that can be said about ideological mixing. Science is unceasingly all around us in the form of the very reality in which we exist, and so it makes sense that Scientific principles can be easily found in the constituents of normal life that would otherwise strike us as mundane, basic, and generally unscientific. The public at large customarily takes things even further by incorporating Scientific principles into its world‐view. People tend to look towards Science as if it were an objective wealth of inspiration guiding our subjective beliefs by the extracted moralistic data it sometimes can appear to provide.
Due to our brain's superior ability to draw metaphor, there is an abundance of found parallels between all human endeavors, especially when considered from an artistic point of view. “Art” itself is, at best, difficult to define. If I had to put forth a definition I like, it would be ‘meaning through abstraction’. Another definition I favor is ‘Art is what artists do’. Nevertheless, it is clearly understood what is meant when said that someone is going about their work artfully — be it a painter, electrical engineer, mechanic, musician, architect, mathematician, chemist, or chimney sweeper.
The idea of artful pursuit evokes a sense of beauty, as well as an appreciation for the artist's mastered skills. Likewise, artfully interpreting something which might not otherwise immediately be considered art can open our perceptual doors, making it possible to appreciate beauty where we may previously not have been able. The inverse is also true — art can be analyzed from a scientific point of view in an attempt to unveil the inner workings of the emotional effects it has on us. It is worth mentioning at this point that understanding more about something in an academic sense does not, in my opinion, detract from the magic — it actually enhances it. I turn for support to a quote of Richard Feynman's —
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
One of the most popular principles in Science that has made its way into the morals of society is Relativity. Via context, Relativity is the inescapable start to defining pretty much anything in the world. Music is a unique form of art because without the passage of time it could not exist. A painting, in contrast, exists physically in a describable state, though without time there won't be much of a chance to view it. One could argue further that nothing at all exists without time, or that everything exists irrespective of time passing (including the past, present, and future), however these arguments are better left for quantum physicists, string theorists, and the writers of Doctor Who. For now let's keep with the notion that music necessarily occupies a minimum amount of time — namely, the duration of the piece — in order to exist in full and be sensorily perceived by us (someone has yet to compose the Planck Symphony).
Time is also the aspect of reality that quickly breaks down when Relativity is explored more deeply. Without straying too far, the passage of time is also relative, depending on how fast the bodies in relation are traveling. As a body speeds up, approaching the speed of light, time from the perspective of the speeding body slows down. Upon arriving at the speed of light (impossible) time actually comes to a complete standstill. That means that from the perspective of light itself, there is no passage of time, because naturally light travels at the speed of light (in a perfect vacuum, etc.) Well, light is all around us as we move about at our relatively slow human speeds. From the perspective of light, however, or rather from the perspective of a conscious being who was riding on a beam of light (one of Einstein's favorite childhood thought experiments), we humans are traveling at the speed of light, for the light rider is relatively still, just as this planet we are riding on is motionless relative to us. This would imply that the passage of time is entirely subjective, depending from what point of view one decides to measure. It is clear that Relativity is deeply embedded in our perception of reality, regardless of how far around these strange concepts we can wrap our minds.
Fundamentally speaking, music can be said to comprise organized sounds along with some sort of rhythmic backdrop that either is, or isn't, ignored. Frequency can be reduced to a function of time, however with respect to human sensory apparatus it is considered categorically pitch. Rhythm is what's left — pretty easily measurable and countable with no special equipment. This is the beat, what we find ourselves moving to when we listen, markers in time that tend to feel almost physical in nature, even though they too are merely made of sound, given life through our own brains' projections as we fly through time at an unknown rate along with the music, forming an alignment.
Cultures all around the world have very different ways of embodying rhythm regarding the instruments used to create it, and the patterns employed. Some bang on stretched animal skin with a wooden stick, while others click a computer mouse in specialized software. I'm lately of the clicking type, and as a result of which, I’ve been exposed to what music can ‘look’ like in accordance with how it sounds. Various forms of visual representations of programmed music are available to electronic artists today, the primary one being linearly across a timeline. Zooming in as far as the software allows will reveal the waveform itself, a digital interpretation of analog sound formed by the computer via ‘sampling’ the sound waves 44,100 times per second (depending on your settings and equipment, this number can be much higher). Zooming all the way out again, and we can see the entire piece from beginning to end across the width of the computer screen — something that can only be visually accomplished, as there's obviously no way to listen to the piece from beginning to end all at once.
Before the entire piece gets summed into one single conglomerate waveform, music in the digital world is constructed in parts, or tracks. A track is analogous to an instrument in an orchestra, all parts coming together to form the complete idea. Sonically, they fit together as well. Instruments were crafted throughout history to occupy certain spaces in the sonic frequency spectrum so as to not clash when played simultaneously. Similarly, electronic music producers are responsible for meticulously crafting sounds, fitting them together in complementary ways, striving always to serve the whole.
Just the way instruments contribute to a textural landscape of sorts, elements of rhythm litter the temporal one, giving us nearly instant information as we travel together with the music along the everlasting timeline. As rhythmic patterns emerge, our brains immediately latch on and cooperatively make predictions, sometimes being confirmed — other times being violated — all the while remaining helplessly engaged. The incredibly physical nature of the rhythmic landscape, as mentioned earlier, explains in my opinion why with every advent of a new genre of music there is an associated advent of a new way to dance. This can be seen not only in modern times with countless genres and sub‐genres, but throughout history and its major periods.
What exactly is it about this rhythmic aspect of music that so physically grips us and makes us move — at the very least feel — in such specific ways? There is no denying that rhythm is a subset of time, and therefore fully subject to the rules of Relativity. There is no need to discuss the speed of light, matter, gravity, or anything else deeply scientific to see that rhythm relative to nothing = nothing. Rhythmic elements relative to a) time, and b) the other rhythmic elements happening give us the totality of information necessary for our brains to understand exactly what is going on sonically, and for our bodies to understand what is going on “physically”. This very experiential perception of rhythm does not always have to manifest exclusively in the physical. It is perfectly possible for me to trick only your brain by violating an expectation as you listen to a sonic work I've assembled. You will feel it nonetheless, perhaps made evident by nothing more than a subtle flinching muscle, or even just as an invasive thought — nevertheless, a momentary departure from the expected norm. This breakdown of expectation happens first and foremost by violating symmetry; more insights on why violating rules of symmetry result in a violation of expectation, and why that expectation is there in the first place, will follow in future writings.
