ARTable

In 2019, I started music lessons – guitar, specifically. The instructor taught me about notes and harmonics and chords. I learnt 3 weeks into the lessons when my instructor asked me if I can feel the difference in the notes, that I do not have an musician's ear. What I do have is an unimaginable stubbornness to learn new skills. So I resorted to science and physics, the crutch that's helped me understand why things are the way they are, something that has remained elusive to me all my life. Physics helps simplify the world for me. So this is an attempt to put my journey with music in the universal nerd language.

The first question we need to answer before we even think to pursue music is, what exactly is music? A classically trained person might find jazz discordant. A person who enjoys metal or punk rock might find pop facile. Yet somehow one simple term seems to encompass such a wide range of pitch, styles, expressions, subjects and instruments! So what is music, universally? Music is the art of arranging sound to create harmony, rhythm, melody or some other form of expressive content. In Physics, sound is defined as a longitudinal wave – a mechanical disturbance in an elastic medium. Sound may also travel as a transverse wave in solids, since these materials are denser. We hear these sounds when the vibrations reach our eardrums and our eardrums start vibrating in tandem. The key word being vibrations or simply put, mechanical disturbances in a medium, or in my love language (that is the language of physics) waves.

Sound waves are depicted as sine waves. We start our music journey by familiarising with the terms of music. A partial (in music. A simple periodic wave, in physics) is any of the sound waves comprising a complex tone. A complex tone is a collection of partials with individual frequencies, amplitudes and phases. Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is the quantification of the fluctuations of the wave or vibration in terms of time. In music, frequency affects the physical property called pitch. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. Higher pitch is perceived as a shrill, tinny sound. Amplitude is the maximum extent of a vibration measured from the position of equilibrium. So in your sound wave, which is a sine wave, amplitude is the height/depth of tour waveform. This is perceived as loudness. The higher the amplitude, the louder the sound we perceive. Phase specifies the location or timing of a point within a wave cycle of a repetitive waveform. It can essentially tell us where the wave begins. As you shift the wave forward or backward in time, the wave’s starting point moves through each possible position in the shape before it repeats again with ghe next period of the waveform. Forward or backward changes in the start point are called phase shifts. In music, it isn't the particular phase that we're concerned about but how the amplitudes of different waves interact at different phases. Particularly, we're concerned with interference. Destructive interference happens when two identical waves are superposed with one of them having a 180 degree phase shift. This implies that the crest of wave 1 will be interfering with the trough of wave 2 and will be perceived as silence. For example when recording a bass guitar with a DI box and a mic’d up amp, the sound takes time to travel through the air and reach the microphones. So it may be out of phase with the DI, resulting in distorted sounds.

So far we can control the shrillness, loudness and the quality of the music we produce simply by understanding the basic components of a wave. Simple and beautiful, isn't it?