Ear of the Beholder--Part 2

So the students and I faced an ongoing struggle that is created when an objective scientist is trying to reach a group of subjective musicians. They often were skeptical of the scientific material in our text. Luckily, I was teaching a laboratory course, so I was able to introduce them to the experimental method, wherein they could prove to themselves the truth of the physical properties of their musical instruments.

I ran into stiff resistance when we studied acoustic properties of their instruments that sometimes countered the message they were given by the conservatory staff. For example, brass players had been taught that the specific metal alloy of their instrument had a defining role in its sound quality. Woodwind players had been taught that the quality of sound they made was strongly dependent on whether the clarinet or oboe was made of an exotic tropical wood or a good grade of plastic. In fact, tests have shown that the material of a musical instrument has minimal influence on its tone. It’s much more a function of the shape of the instrument’s inner air column and the qualities of the player’s embouchure (the way that the player applies her lips and tongue to the mouthpiece). Unfortunately, there are no unequivocal tests that we could conduct in a college lab that would unambiguously evaluate sound quality, so our credibility gap in that area remained.

I did manage to come up with one lab test that was able to refute one of their main beliefs. We were studying in our text the subject of what distinguishes the sound of one musical instrument from another. How does one tell the sound of a violin from a trombone, or a clarinet from a trumpet? The answer seems obvious to anyone who has listened to music. They are very distinctive. The author of our text described that the main distinguishing characteristic was not the nature of the tone of an instrument, but unique qualities that can be heard at the very beginning and ending of a note. It’s not the steady tone that is distinctive, it’s the transient sounds on each end of a note.

This result seems to go against the experience of anyone who is at all familiar with music. As expected, the students were very resistant to the message. So, together we designed an experiment to test it out in our next lab. They all brought their instruments—clarinet, trombone, flute, trumpet, guitar, violin, cello, French horn, oboe, saxophone, and even voice. We picked a note that every instrument could play at the same pitch—I think it was A above middle C.

Each student stepped to the microphone and played that note for about 30 seconds, as we recorded it on tape. We chose one student to go alone into another room and erase the first and last couple of seconds from each recording—leaving only the steady, middle part of the note. He then scrambled the order of the recordings—making his secret notes as to the new sequence.

He then came back into the lab and played the 20-second samples, as the students listened and made their choices of which instrument made which tone. It surprised me at how similar the notes sounded, as I watched looks of consternation and perplexity cross their faces. They were clearly taken aback. When all tones had been played, I asked them if they wanted to listen to them again, before making their final choices. All heads nodded approvingly, brows knitted.

At the end of the second round, we tallied the scores. It was quite astonishing: on average, the class had correctly identified only one-third of the instruments. Their response to the test was somewhere between being awestruck and disbelief. I don’t think they became instant converts to the scientific principle, but it sure made an impression on them. They had proved to themselves something about the physics of sound that countered their subjective experience. For the rest of the course, the communication gap between us seemed a bit narrower.

Icy Morning

Ear of the Beholder--Part 1

For centuries, violinists have sung paeans to the accomplishments of the Cremona master violinmakers—especially Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu. These two geniuses constructed instruments that are regarded as the zenith of their art. The violinists of today—at least those of appropriate means—will pay several million dollars for an original 300 year-old Strad or Guarneri violin. Do these instruments warrant such a price?

For many years, scientists have studied these venerable violins, trying to figure out what makes their sound so special… or is it special? Is it the varnish they used? Is it the wood? Does an instrument improve with age, as its body absorbs the vibrations of its own music? Was there some kind of magic that the masters had that is a lost art? Various tests have been made, but none so far has shed any real light on the quandary. The owners of the surviving violins are not open to someone dissecting their precious treasures, so the years pass, without an answer. In the meantime, musicians remain convinced that there is something transcendent about a Cremona violin that escapes today’s artisans.

Finally, last year a French acoustician partnered with an American violin maker to design an experiment that shed some new light on the issue. At an international violin competition in Indianapolis, they recruited 21 professional violin players to participate in the experiment. (Previous listening tests had never used professional players, so they were open to criticism that lesser talented players were not adequate for the job.) The researchers were able to talk owners of three precious old violins to allow their instruments to be used: two were Strads and one was a Guarneri. They added three new, high-quality violins to the package, so the players had a total of six instruments to compare.

The tests were conducted in a darkened room and the musicians wore dark goggles, so they could not see which instrument they were playing. Two different kinds of tests were conducted: (1) each player was handed two random violins (one old and one new) and was asked to choose the better one, and (2) each player was allowed to play every one of the six violins and pick the one that they’d like to take home.

The results were startling. In the first test, there was no clear winner of the six violins, but there was one clear loser: one of the precious Strads. For the second test, only one-third of the 21 professionals chose an old violin as the best. In fact, two-thirds of them preferred the sound of a new violin. The musicians were flabbergasted at the results. Before the test was conducted, they were convinced that they could readily tell the difference between an old jewel and a new violin. Some of them expressed the feeling that the test was the experience of a lifetime.

So what’s the message here? It seems to be obvious that some kind of mystique surrounds the preference for the old masters. Like similar findings in blind tastings of wine, people can delude themselves about the superiority of expensive items. When it comes down to an objective test, when inherent biases are avoided, maybe there is nothing so special about those high-priced violins. Sure, those old masters were pioneers in making superb violins, but maybe today’s makers are doing as good a job.

This comparison fascinated me, because it is similar to a test that I conducted a couple of decades ago, when I taught a course on musical acoustics at the local university. I loved teaching this course, since it brought together two of my passions: physics (which I was also teaching at the time) and music. The basic focus of the course was the study of how musical instruments make their sounds. The course was a challenge for both the students and me. Most of them were music majors trying to brave their way through an intimidating science course (foreign territory to them!) and I was struggling to make the material comprehensible to non-science types.

My biggest obstacle was to try to convince the music majors to accept scientific truths about their instruments. These truths had been arrived at over many years by conducting experiments whose results provide insight into how Mother Nature works. In science, one accepts the validity of propositions only after repeatable experiments end with the same results. Anyone can conduct these experiments—whether neophyte student or experienced scientist. It’s a democratic process. One is delving into the facts of how the physical world behaves, and these facts are independent of any human perception.

The topics that music students study, however, are quite subjective. Their perceptions and emotions play a central role in how they discern the quality of a musical performance. It’s in the ear of the beholder. It’s what one senses or learns to appreciate over time, as one’s ear becomes educated. There is no scientific instrument, for example, that can tell which of two flute players is the better performer. Music students learn to accept the word of their professors as truth, even the gospel. They rely on the reputation or talent of their teachers. Faith and belief can play a large role in their discriminating tastes.

More on musical instrument sound quality next time…

Cobweb Frost

Lucretius' Prescience--Part 2

Greenblatt chronicles the miraculous rediscovery of Lucretius’ tome On the Nature of Things, 15 centuries after he wrote it—literally pointing humanity once again in the direction of truth. It blows my mind when I think about how much more knowledge we could have today about the reality of the universe, if not all this time had been lost.

Not all of Lucretius’ theories of the workings of nature were accurate. For example, his ideas on vision were quite off base, but his descriptions of the basic properties of matter are astonishingly on target.  

Several Lucretius’ theories on spirituality remain controversial. They touch on concepts such as the nature of the soul, the existence of an afterlife, the nature of free will, and the influence of organized religions in the world. These ideas were what brought him into disfavor with both the religious beliefs of Greece and Rome in his time, as well as those of Christianity that followed. In fact, I think that some of these postulates may never be proven right or wrong, since they tread into the realm of the supernatural.

So let’s stick to the natural world, and to the theories he proposed, that science has subsequently verified—to demonstrate how prescient his insights were:

1.    Everything is made of an uncountable number of “invisible particles.” (He tended to avoid the word “atom.”)

2.    These particles are limited in their variety (sort of like just so many kinds of Legos blocks or letters of the alphabet) and each kind will combine with only a limited type of others (just as there are only so many letter combinations that make useful sounds).

3.    The particles are capable of forming an unlimited number of material objects (just as we can form an unlimited number of words from a limited alphabet).

4.    The particles (i.e., atoms) are eternal, but the things they form are constantly coming into being and then disintegrating (just as a tree or person is born and then later dies and decomposes back into their constituent atoms). These first four ideas correspond very closely to chemistry, as we understand it today.

5.    Nature ceaselessly experiments and, in the process, creates some living beings or plants that will quickly perish and others that will succeed and endure. This is an ancient insight into the process of evolution.

6.    Humans are not unique. We are much like any other animal. We have awakened to this truth only in the last few decades.

7.    Our early human ancestors lived a difficult life. They struggled to survive and did so primarily by cooperating with one another.

8.    Humans today are different from long ago. We are constantly changing and evolving.

All these ideas were described in a very long poem—over 2000 years ago! How could anyone have conceived of such an accurate picture of reality that long ago? I have a suggestion that I cannot prove, but seems logical to me: The truth about the nature of the universe and the details of how things are, exist independent of the human mind; they don’t just sit around, ever since the Big Bang, waiting for us to uncover them or for us to draw up laws that explain them. The universe just is; and we slowly discover its qualities.

It’s as if there is a conscious ether that permeates all space and contains the complete truth of everything. Some people might call it the mind of God, but I wish to avoid the inevitable and controversial dogma that follows such a call. I prefer to view it simply as an unnamable, inconceivable cloud of knowing that the human mind is capable of tapping into, either by dint of spiritual maturity (through plain, hard work) or by grace. In any case, our individual consciousness is, I think, capable of connecting to and getting glimpses of the truth from this universal consciousness. It is as if it was The Complete Book of Knowledge, just waiting for us to wake up and explore. We don’t create it or formulate it; we simply tune into it.

From time to time, we can receive insights and ideas from this ultimate-knowledge reservoir. When we “discover” something, we are often inclined to think that these ideas are ours, that we own and created them—when in fact, they’ve been around all along. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for Lucretius’ fantastic insights as to the reality of the universe: On the Nature of Things. Whatever the truth is, it's an amazing accomplishment.

Snowy Creek

Lucretius' Prescience

Nearly 2100 years ago—a generation or two before Jesus was born—a Roman poet created an astounding work of art and science. Although it was regarded at the time as an achingly beautiful poem, it was also a prescient description of the workings of this universe—literally a scientific treatise that would require nearly 2000 years to prove its veracity. The Roman author of the work was Titus Lucretius, and he titled it De rerum natura in Latin, which translates to On the Nature of Things. It’s an extensive work, running some 7400 lines of verse, grouped into six books.

Lucretius based his insights on earlier Greek schools of thought, some of which taught that everything in the universe is made of invisible building blocks, which they called atoms, from the Greek word atomos, which means “indivisible.” The notion of the existence of atoms had originated over 400 years before Lucretius came along. It began with ancient Greeks such as Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These atomistic ideas competed with several other theories of matter, but eventually faded; losing out to the Greek schools headed by more wealthy and aristocratic scholars—particularly Aristotle. In addition, the concepts promulgated by Aristotle and his cohorts fit more comfortably with religious teachings of the time, and then were embraced by the Christian Church, after it came to power.

Lucretius expanded upon the teachings of the early Greek atomists and incorporated several other ideas, laying out an astoundingly accurate description of the physical world, long before humans had the scientific instruments to prove the truth of his writings.

Science has historically developed its understanding of how the universe behaves in two contrasting ways: via intuition and by experimentation (as well as by some combination of the two). Those who made intuitive discoveries usually puzzled over some natural phenomenon for a lengthy period, before an insight suddenly came to them. Einstein brooded about relativity for years—nearly losing his mundane job because of his daydreaming—and then the elegant answers suddenly came to him, almost like in a dream. Isaac Newton had escaped London’s black plague and for months sat scribbling safely at his country desk, before realizations came to him of the nature of forces and their effects on bodies.

Both of these men’s insights were expressed through elegant descriptions and mathematics. It was many years before other scientists could conduct the necessary experiments that could verify their theories—either because the necessary instruments had not yet been invented or no one had even conceived of such experiments.

The second principle way of scientific exploration is by experimentation. With instruments in hand, an experiment is conducted, that explores some aspect of the natural world, and often leads to some new understanding of how nature works.

What is astounding about Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things is that he was two millennia ahead of his time—rather than just a couple of decades, as in Einstein’s case. It fascinates me that, strictly through mental effort, Lucretius and his cohorts could have had such profound insight, so far ahead of their time. How could they have anticipated that everything in the universe is composed of endless combinations of tiny building blocks that were far beyond their ability to see or touch? Not only that, but Lucretius also anticipated evolution (1800 years before Darwin!) and expounded a philosophy that touched on spiritual matters. His thoughts in these areas are amazingly modern in tone.

A just-published book by Stephan Greenblatt (The Swerve) describes how Lucretius’ book barely escaped being lost to history; it was remarkably discovered in a German monastery some 1500 years after he had penned it. His insights had lain dormant until the 15^th century, and, when rediscovered, played a major role in fueling the scientific achievements of the Renaissance, and giving modern science its kick-start.

Why had Lucretius’ prescient ideas not become the foundation of scientific understanding during his time? Primarily because they clashed with the philosophical and religious beliefs that came to prominence in the centuries after the early flourishing Greek culture. For centuries—up to and throughout the so-called dark ages—the Western world based its views of the natural world on dogma that stifled scientific discovery.

More on Lucretius’ insights next time…