It began when I was seven years old and found my father’s college physics textbook. Inside was a picture of sound waves being depicted as nothing more than particles colliding with each other, causing compressions and rarefactions of air molecules. I looked up at my mother playing Debussy on our terribly out-of-tune upright piano and thought to myself, Wow.
That’s it?!
That beautiful sound is literally just … air molecules shoving each other around? !
That was the day I got kicked in the chest by Awesome. OK, I guess technically it was the day I got hit with a longitudinal pressure wave traveling at roughly 343 meters per second. My life can basically be divided into two categories: smelling roses and being punched in the existentialism by the sound knowledge.
Ever since that moment, I’ve toggled back and forth between feeling mind-blowingly awesome that simple molecules vibrating in the air can produce Bach’s Cello Suites and feeling utterly devastated that my favorite songs are scientifically just rhythmic air compression. Cognitive dissonance much? Yes, yes I know how sound works, Mei.
Sound waves are mechanical waves that travel by local interactions between particles in media like air (or water or metal, but usually air for us humans). Basically, sound moves when particles slam into their neighbors, passing the audible energy along until it reaches your ear and causes your eardrum to vibrate at the same frequency as the sound. Pretty cool, right?
Your brain hears music. Gentle reminder: Awesome punches. …I know.
It’s still mind-bending to me, too. In fact, I tried to explain this to Mei last week while we were at a live symphony orchestra concert. “That amazing swelling sound that just made your skin crawl?” I hissed.
“Air molecules colliding with your eardrum just slightly harder.”
She elbow-whipped me in the ribs so hard I thought she broke it. “Jamie, I have a PhD in engineering. Do I need to explain to you how sound works?” she whispered loudly.
“Please keep your big dumb nose inside your big dumb spreadsheet and just listen to the concert for once.”
See? Punches. Ever since I discovered the basics of sound waves, I’ve been experimenting on myself.
A few months ago, I put a thin membrane of rubber over one of our living room speakers, covered it in salt, hooked up a high-speed camera, and started playing different types of music while analyzing patterns formed by the salt. If you’ve never done this, just know that sound looks FUCKING AMAZING when you turn it into physical visualizations called “Chladni patterns.”
At one point Josh walked into the room and found me rocking on the ground staring at someone playing Rush through our speaker. “What are you doing, dude?” he asked, gesturing around the salt mines carefully making their way across the room.
“I’M WATCHING CLASSICAL MUSIC PHYSICALLY FORCES MOVE OBJECTS IN SPACE,” I yelled. To be fair, I was probably yelling. “DO YOU REALIZE WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?
BASIC FORSH SHUFFLING EACH OTHER ASYMPODIALLY DOWN THERE IS What Beethoven considered AWESOME.”
Josh sighed, bent down to scoop up some salt piles, and shoveled them into the trashcan behind me. “You’re going to be vacuuming salt off of this carpet for the next month,” he said. Dude was not wrong.
Anyway, patterns were cool. Each song produced different densities of nodal lines (essentially the lines the salt accumulated along) depending on their frequencies. Bassier songs made really simple starburst shapes, while more treble-heavy frequencies got seriously wild.
Nu metal created weird, asymmetrical patterns that shifted rapidly as we listened, while Beethoven made beautifully intricate geometrical designs that remained stable for long periods of time. I took somewhere around 42 GB of 4k footage of the salt listening to music and have watched it between five and seven times each. Point being, salt didn’t solve my existential crisis.
If anything, it made me ponder the cruelty of physics all the more. HOW DOES VIBRATING AIR MAKE US FEEL ANYTHING? The emotional impact of music is something I find fascinating.
There’s a beautiful article in the psychology of it that I won’t get into, but what I have wondered about is the acoustical side. How is it that small variations in air pressure can make me cry while listening to the right song? It just feels like violence should be involved.
So then I tried experimenting with acknowledging sound as just compression waves while I listened to music and watched its physiological effects on me. Experiment was simple: while listening to songs that normally elicit a strong physiological response from me, I would half of the time remind myself that this music was just air molecules slamming into each other and other times let myself just enjoy the song. Measure physiological response and voila!
Easy science. Side note: if you ever want to ruin someone’s favorite song forever, spend 30 minutes explaining the physics of sound to them as they listen to it. Half of Josh’s physical response data was unusable.
By the end of the experiment, he stared at me blankly while Radiohead played in the background and muttered, “Okay. Sure.”
“Great, how did it go?” I asked, because scientists ask these types of questions while their slightly strung out friend sits motionless on their living room floor. “Thanks for ruining my favorite song Jamie.
You know, the one I’ve emotionally connected with since the age of 15? You just destroyed it by telling me it’s literally just air collisions.”
He hasn’t listened to Radiohead with me since. Which sucks, because he had an otherwise perfect data set.
The weirdest part about this mental science is that it doesn’t always affect me. Sometimes I can just forget and be fully present listening to whatever beautiful song I’ve found. Other times, I am OH so rudely reminded that my favorite tunes are in fact literally just… air getting shoved around.
It was bothering me enough that I decided to run another experiment: could I control my ability to perceive music as simply compression waves or as music? Methodology was as follows: for one week, I would prime myself in different activities before listening to the same song (thank you Bach for your constants) and then measure which realm of perception I was in while listening to it. Did thinking about physics beforehand keep me in “IT’S JUST AIR REALM” or did emotion-centered activities make me forget about the colliding air?
Amazingly, there was a correlation between my mood and how the song made me feel. On days where I felt anxious or stressed, “IT’S JUST AIR REALM” took over my concert-going experience. It was almost as if my brain couldn’t take any more emotionally impactful stimulation and tried to downplay the music.
But on days where I felt happy and present, I could mostly forget that yeah, sound is literally just compression waves made of gas particles. But then something miraculous happened. I was laying on the ground of our living room (note to others: if Jamie is on the ground, something in their mind is assaulting them with existential dread), listening to Sigur Rós and forcing myself to visualize individual air molecules colliding into each other when—
…I get it.
Okay, so the waves make music “JUST” soundwaves vibrate-ing into each other. Big whoop. The amazing part is that we have the ability to perceive sound at all, which comes from SOMETHING as simple as beautifully shifting molecules.
It was one of those moments where I literally kicked myself in the chest. I called Josh immediately, who understandably answered with extreme caution. “I am never letting you drone on about science and music again,” he stated before I could even begin.
“But dude. It’s freaking amazing that it’s just air getting shoved around!” I explained. “Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me?
THE SOUND WAVEZ ARE JUST AIR! ?” I was now jumping up and down while holding the phone. “The miracle is NOT that we can perceive sound.
THE MIRACLE IS THAT air moving in patterns can create something as profound as, say, Bach’s Cello Suite!”
We spent the next 20 minutes screaming into the phone about how magnificent it is that SOUND IS AIR. There was a long silence. “Are you drunk?
Did you sleep yet?” he asked. He may have been onto something. It was about 31 hours to that point that I had been awake.
But nothing else felt drunker than realizing that all of our senses are simply physical things working together to give us the perception of life. Sight is just photons slamming into retinal cells. Taste is just molecules binding to tastebuds.
Touch is literally just collisions. And music, my friends, is just air getting shoved around. Since that day, I’ve found myself experimenting with this concept across all senses.
The “Complexity from Simplicity Framework,” as I’ve begun calling it. Don’t worry, Josh. I’ll never stop lecturing you.
Last night, I took Mei to a concert. “Don’t say anything about air molecules,” she pleaded before we left. “Promise?” She nodded.
Three songs in, she turned to me and whispered: “Isn’t it incredible that it’s just air getting shoved around?”
The air out of my lungs shot across the stadium. “YES! THAT’S ALL I’VE BEEN SAYING!”
“No, Jamie.” She chuckled.
“What you’ve been saying is thatit’s JUST air getting shoved around. What I’m saying is that IT’S AMAZING we have these physical things like air that CAN get shoved around in such perfect patterns that we perceive as music. There’s a difference.”
Well hell if she wasn’t right again.
Puts all the air molecules back in their place, doesn’t it?
And now I’ll never hear music the same way again. Don’t get me wrong—I still feel the punches, but it no longer causes me anxiety.
Instead I wonder at the amazing complexity of simple things, how beautiful patterns can arise from basic, scientific building blocks. Plus now I get to feel the euphoria of realizing this both when I hear music and when I’m watching someone move air molecules with their mouth. There’s beauty in both places.
We just have to remember to enjoy the space in between.
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