Whenever I get stressed, I turn to music.
“So what?” you say. “Everybody does that.”
Listen, if you don’t quit interrupting me, this is gonna take a lot longer than it has to. I turn to music because sometimes I’m listening to a song, and it’s just so spot-on to what I’m going through at the moment that I’m taken aback. I ask myself, did I write that and then time travel to the past to sell it to Jerry Garcia?
So then, I waste a bunch of time researching time travel (read: setting all the clocks in my house back 20 minutes), and I’m not stressed anymore!
I turn to music because it’s the purest form of human emotional expression. It is our best way to evoke the innate structural beauty of the universe. And that’s not just some hippie s--- that I’m spouting off with no basis in fact.
Music and mathematics are entwined rather deeply, and mathematics is the most basic method we, as humanity, possess to understand our universe.
I’ve heard before, from some of the folks I used to tutor in math, things like, “Math is all made up. It’s not real. Math is stupid. My arm hurts; when can I stop turning this generator?” (That last one is what my roommate just said to me. Our electricity isn’t really out, but don’t tell him that.)
And it’s true, there are things you learn in math that seem to have no equivalent in the real world. I remember in seventh grade, when I first learned the formula for the volume of a sphere.
“This is stupid,” I thought. “This is just totally made up. How did they get such a weird formula?” Then I got to Calc 3 and triple integrals and spherical coordinates. My teacher innocuously gave us an example problem integrating a spherical area of radius r.
When we got to the very final step of the problem, I dropped my pencil and stared at the paper in amazement. I had just unwittingly derived for myself the formula that had filled me with middle school angst such a long time ago. I shouted for joy.
Everyone in the class gave me a weird look because my shouts for joy last thirty minutes and consist mostly of unorthodox combinations of expletives.
Music is just as orderly and just as connected to the inner workings of the universe. Tons of people way smarter than I (e.g., Kepler, Pythagoras, Grover from “Sesame Street”) have done lifetimes worth of research on the way music is mathematically codified by natural frequency.
Man didn’t invent music: He discovered it.
Take scales. No caveman just sat down and invented the hypophrygian or mixolydian modes.
“Oog. Me invent music.”
“Cool, Scott. I worked on the past tense and adverbial phrases all day.”
The notes we use in all of our various scales are separated by frequency in such a systematic way that it seems like they have to be man-made. Then, you look at acoustic waves and how they mimic the sinusoidal waves you used to graph in high school trig. Then, you hear someone play the goje, a traditional Hausa instrument developed with little or no influence from Western musicology.
Music, like math, is just something we humans do. We don’t have to try. Music happens to us.
I say all that to say: When it’s 4 a.m. and your neighbor has been blasting music too loudly through the walls for the past three hours, don’t call the cops.
They’re probably just doing math!
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column runs on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
