What is it about?
The arrangement of pitches in music can be understood as an ordered phase of sound, analogous to the ordered arrangement of atoms in a solid crystal. We have borrowed techniques from the physics of phase transitions to simulate such a musical phase transition, and study how the structures of musical harmony, such as scales, chords, and chord progressions emerge.
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Why is it important?
We have found that when sound undergoes a phase transition from disordered noise to ordered harmony, a process unfolds that was first described to understand a cosmological phase transition predicted to have occurred moments after the big bang. This Kibble-Zurek mechanism would result in a network of "cosmic strings" threading throughout the universe. In the musical context, we found that the pitches surrounding these strings closely resemble the pitches and chords used in music. The branching network of strings therefore provides a new way to understand musical harmony, or to generate new harmonies for composition.
Perspectives
It was particularly exciting to see how concepts and methods from a wide range of areas of physics - not just cosmology, but also superfluids and solid state physics - can be used to understand a very different system. This has echoes of Pythagoras' music of the spheres, or Kepler's planetary harmonies. In my view, this is not a mystical connection, but instead a demonstration of the universal nature of the language of mathematics.
Jesse Berezovsky
Case Western Reserve University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Critical behavior and the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in a musical phase transition, PLoS ONE, January 2023, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280227.
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