Why Pianos, and Monkeys, Can Never Really Play the Blues

One of the last things you’d expect to see at a physics conference is a physicist on stage, in a dapper hat, pounding out a few riffs of the blues on a keyboard. But that’s exactly what University of Illinois professor J. Murray Gibson did at the recent March meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore. Gibson has been doing these wildly popular demonstrations for years to illustrate the intimate connection between music, math, and physics.

While there is a long tradition of research on the science of acoustics and a noted , science and math have also influenced the evolution of musical styles themselves. For thousands of years, Western music was dominated by the diatonic Pythagorean scale, which is built on an interval (the difference in pitch between two different notes) known as a probably gets the idea of the perfect fifth, and can likely sing along with Julie Andrews: “Do, a deer, a female deer If you start on one note and keep going up by perfect fifths from one note to the next, you trace out a musical scale, the alphabet for the language of music. While a musical scale built like that includes a lot of ratios of whole numbers (like 3:2, the perfect fifth itself), it has a fatal flaw: It can’t duplicate another keystone of music, the octave, where one note is exactly double the frequency of the lower note. Contrary to Andrews’ lyrics, the scale doesn’t really bring us back to “Do.”