Sound and music

I have been into music theory for about year and a half. And I must say I am amused/flabbergasted/amazed/and so many other feelings. In childhood, I had a thought about how on earth they come up with new songs every and then. What was the key to music making? Trust me, I am a million miles from knowing it. 

But nevertheless, my mind refuses to not think it in a technical way. We all know that there are seven elementary notes in music( A,B,C,D,E,F,G or Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa) . Just seven! And once can think how people come up with some many possibilities! But actually seven is not a small number especially when it comes to permutations and combinations. After all, we have an eighth variable, time!

So if you had to create a mathematical model to represent a three minute song, you'd end up with a pretty complicated diagram, almost impossible to visualize. Just imagine, a single axis of time from 0 to 3 minutes, and rest seven dimensions going up or down , based on the melody of a song. moving in their own separate direction/dimension. It would be pretty overwhelming. But thankfully, we don't need to do that, we can simply play the music and be done with it!

Just to give you an idea, how complex an eight dimensional thing would look like( there are many forms):

But what exactly is sound, by definition? How does it travel? Lemme do a quick search.

sound¹

/sound/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. 1.

   vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear.

Well, isn't it charming, sound's nothing but vibrations or mechanical waves. A wave, which is a "disturbance"  that transports "energy" from one place to another, only via a "medium".
Something like this:

 Great! So, sound is a disturbance in a medium. But we are hardly disturbed by the songs we love, aren't we? And we are madly disturbed by sounds which we don't like! I guess, when we like the song, we are in tune with it and vice versa.

Guess what, "in-tune" is a basic foundation to create music ( well most of the times )!

Did you know that historically, all musicians have grouped a set of frequencies which are "in-tune" with each other and they use it over and over to create gazillion number of songs! They call it "scales". All the scales are a set of frequencies( remember, sound was a vibration) which go together. The notes ( or sounds or vibrations or frequencies) when played together have similar frequencies and when we play'em together, they don't "sound" too bad. And when you play notes of differing frequencies together, you are out of "tune" and definitely will sound too cacophonous. So as a learner, you first thought ought to be - "Oh well, let's take this few frequencies and create music and become a musician". But only if it was easy.

Enough with the physics of music, another thing about music which got me amazed is how it works seamlessly when played together in  a band. In a typical band, you've got at least four different instruments played mostly by different people. You hear a song and feel, oh wow, a great song! But after being introduced to music theory, I am even more mesmerized by it's process. Different people with different instruments, playing in sync, creating a melody out of these only seven notes over a scale of time. Man o man, it's complicated! I heard musicians play their songs over and over for years altogether to get to a certain state of music "awareness". Their skill to listen to these different frequencies, ability to put this different frequencies together, sometimes add out of tune things ( which mathematically should not work) and make great tunes with it. And that's when I add the concept of "chemistry" in it. In layman words, I would call it the personal genius of the musician involved. They create music by breaking laws of music itself and yet create mind-blowing melodies. How it works? Well, I don't think that many can explain, but to hell with it, it works!

You'd have heard different kinds of musicians create different kind of songs, say for e.g. David Gilmour, let's say you never heard any of his song, if you decompose songs and find the tabs, you would find it extremely simple, but the reader of the tab cannot fathom the beauty of his creation until he listens to the song. How he takes very basic simple music theory and creates masterpieces, how. only he can tell! On the other hand, Jimi Hendrix, he's one of those guys who sounded very different than others in his time. He broke all musical rules and created music, purists would have hated him, and yet, wrote beautiful songs, some, best songs of all time. 

All I am trying to convey is that music is a very personal thing when it comes to creation. There are rules to music creation until you come to a certain state of awareness and soon when  you are there, there no rules! Quite interesting!, again this dilemma puts me into the thought of process of creation, not just music but the whole world.  I feel a strong connection between the process of music/sound creation to the process of the whole world's creation.

We all are made of same basic elements, no one has got a unique ingredient, we all breathe the same air, we all live on the same planet, we all are governed by same rules of nature and yet here we are, so different, so unique, so diverse, running along our own dimensions of life bound by the same axis, journeying through the time, creating our own identities, sometime creating good "disturbances", sometimes bad, sometimes we are happy and in-sync with creation, and sometimes we aren't,  until we come to a state of awareness, where there are no rules, no identities, no disturbances, no happiness, no sadness,  where all is one and one is all. And we'd call it bliss. \m/