SOUND WAVES
In high school, by far my favourite physics classes were the ripple tank experiments. Anyone remember those?
We’d be given a square tray of shallow water a bit bigger than a Scrabble board with a couple of little motors driving horizontal bars rapidly up and down to generate ripples—a wave pool for ants!
We’d study how these wave patterns intersected, and through the mists of time, I can still recall one central principle: when two peaks intersect, a peak of double their height is generated. Think of Iluka Breakwall, for instance, or other waves that bounce off rock groynes. The incoming swell collides with the side wave off the rock wall, and suddenly, a three-foot swell becomes a crazy, rearing, six-foot A-frame peak.
“It was like I was on bass and Tom was on lead.” – Nat Young
“Present surfing as a performing art rather than competitive sport.”
I suspect this principle helps explain why surfing and music make such happy bedfellows. Sound, too, is made up of waves, so when the oceanic kind and the sonic variety intersect—when a peak moment of surfing synchronises with a musical crescendo—the audience can be elevated to new heights of visual and auditory pleasure. And throughout surfing history, the pursuit of these peak moments has been an obsession for a select band of crazed surfing creatives.
My esteemed colleague Chris Coté has already penned an excellent history of surf music in the last issue of this very magazine, so I do not propose retracing that colourful tableau here.
But what I am interested in is the hard science, the mysterious art and the almost indefinable magic that happens when music and surfing are perfectly paired. Like a fine-wine degustation dinner, each element complements and elevates the other.
As Mr Coté graphically illustrated, surfing and music have always gone hand in hand, from the songs and
