Tom Lehrer – The Elements
If you only memorise one of these songs, make it Tom Lehrer’s famous list of all the elements in the periodic table sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major-General. Besides being a useful way to get to know the list, being able to sing The Elements gives you something to show off when in the company of nerds. It’s Daniel Radcliffe’s party piece. And he’s done all right.
To truly master The Elements, however, you should also get to know the problems with it. For one, the whole point of a periodic table is to see the elements ordered by atomic number, and this order vanishes in the song. For another, Lehrer wrote the song in 1959, since when a lot of element-discovering has gone on (if you want to be pedantic, and you should, it’s been mostly element-creating). Lehrer prepared an excuse by singing at the end: “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard/And there may be many others but they haven’t been discar-vard”. But that excuse doesn’t wash in 2016. For bonus points at nerd parties therefore, you might want to add Helen Arney’s extra verse including ununpentium, ununoctium and the rest.
Prime Composition – Daniel Jones
You can almost say – almost – that this music has been made by reality itself. It has to be almost, because an artist called Daniel Jones was also required to write the actual code that represents the numbers from one to 1,550 as a sequence of harmonic partials expressing each of their prime factors. “For example,” he explains, “the number 66 has prime factors 2, 3 and 11, which are the 1st, 2nd and 5th primes. With a fundamental (base) frequency of 60hz, this would therefore trigger sine partials of 60hz, 120hz and 300hz.”
I don’t know enough about harmonics to explain the explanation, but I hope – like me – that you get about half of the idea.
Decreeing that the music should cycle “through a Triassic sequence every 64 numbers” was Jones’s one “compositional decision” he says. He also got reality to help direct the video by representing each prime factor as a circle in scale with its size. Otherwise Prime Composition just does what numbers do, and sounds strangely good.
The Mosquito
Almost everyone loses at least some of their hearing as they get older – a process called presbycusis – but it doesn’t happen suddenly. Even in their twenties, people’s sensitivity to extremely high-pitched sounds generally begins to fade. The phenomenon is so reliable that almost no one in their thirties or above can hear the kinds of piercing whines that would have been insufferable in their teens. Such sounds rarely occur in daily life, however, so no one notices.
This is the principle behind the Mosquito, a device designed by an inventor called Richard Stapleton, who first understood the effects of presbycusis during a visit to his father’s factory in London when he was 12, and he alone found the noise in the welding room impossible to bear. In 2005 Stapleton launched the Mosquito as, to put it bluntly, a teen-repellent. A small (and robustly built) speaker, it emits a flickering shriek of 17KHz that is so annoying to young people that it drives them away from the vicinity – generally around a shop. Despite some concerns that the Mosquito may be discriminatory, and perhaps even illegal under human rights law, it appears not to cause any harm and remains on sale today. You can test your sensitivity to it here.
The gravitational chirp
It is one thing to know that space and time are not just concepts but actual stuff, which bends and ripples in response to the movement of matter, but it is another thing to hear that happening. In February, this became possible for the first time when it was definitely announced that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project had, of all things, observed gravitational waves.
In effect the experiment was carried out with two ultrasensitive microphones, one in Louisiana and one in Washington state. Rather than listening for ripples in the air – like normal microphones – they picked up the ones in spacetime caused by the collision of two black holes 1.3bn years ago. By converting the signal into a conventional sound wave, the researchers were able to make it audible to human ears. In future it seems likely that more of the universe will be studied this way, and other “sounds” of vast and ancient celestial events will be recorded. The chirp will always be the first, however.
Pluto, the Renewer
With its semi-astrological response to our solar system, not to mention its astronomically inaccurate running order, Gustav Holst’s Planets suite was never very scientific to start with. Nor when it was written, between 1914 and 1916, was there any knowledge of Pluto, and Holst did not rectify the matter even after the “ninth planet” was discovered in 1930, four years before his death.
In 2000, however, the Halle Orchestra commissioned Colin Matthews to compose a further movement, which he called Pluto, the Renewer. With impeccable timing, it was commercially released in 2006, just weeks after the International Astronomical Union announced that Pluto was not a planet after all. Matthews always knew its status was disputed, and in fact his fanciful and dramatic six minutes well suit what we now know of Pluto’s startlingly active surface – as does Leonard Bernstein’s improvised “Pluto the Unpredictable” from 1972. The fact that Pluto is now neither a proper planet nor properly a part of the Planet suite seems an apt reminder that science is seldom as neat and tidy as we’d like.
Sonifications
We are used to graphs that help us understand what data is saying, but some patterns make more sense as sounds – or even music, if that’s what you hear. Take earthquakes in Oklahoma, which have become much more frequent recently, some say as a result of fracking. It is one thing to know this, another to look at the numbers in a chart, and still a third thing to listen to a decade of data with each tremor recreated as a “plink” that grows louder and deeper in proportion to its power. This track, prepared by Michael Corey and Jim Briggs, creates a feeling of gathering catastrophe.
Or there’s proteins, which as you’ll remember do a lot of the clever stuff in living things, and which are essentially long strings of differently combined amino acids. Thus if you decide to assign pitches and instruments to different amino acids you can “listen” to any protein you like. Here’s the SRY protein, for instance, which makes babies male. And here’s a bit of the Sars virus. Perhaps it is possible to understand data more meaningfully by listening. Perhaps it is hard not to hear a meaning in almost any tune.
Kate Bush – Pi
Science makes a tempting challenge for musicians. Those who succeed, like David Bowie with his space songs, generally do so by taking inspiration from the big themes, but leaving the nitty-gritty to one side. This need not mean inaccuracy – being “past 100,000 miles” suggests that Major Tom is indeed about halfway to the moon when he sings these words about halfway through the song.
But Kate Bush addresses the subject of her song Pi more literally, by actually singing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter deep into the lower decimal places with feeling and intensity. It’s a great song, which does not just gesture vaguely at irrational numbers as a cool metaphor, but lets one of them actually write the lyrics. Unfortunately, as attentive Bush fans quickly pointed out, she gets pi wrong by singing “3,1” at the 54th decimal place where it should have been “0”, and later by skipping 22 decimal places altogether. Perhaps we’ll credit her with hiding these errors as a deliberate mistake to reel in true pi enthusiasts “with an obsessive nature” like the one she sings about. I don’t know if I believe it, but I’ll try.