I've always been interested in the physics of sound. Both the material properties of music instruments themselves and the way this interacts with the sounds produced.

Around 2017 I became aware of certain assertions made by anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lèvi Strauss about the relationship between the natural world and human cultural production. The relation to sound arts/music is quite fascinating.

In an essay titled "The Ethnologist's Jewels" 1991, Lèvi Strauss cites biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's observation in "On Growth and Form" 1917 - that the physical and biological worlds obey the same morphological rules based on fixed relationships that can be expressed mathematically - and expands on this premise to include human cultural production. Lèvy Straus also writes that ethnologic investigations have shown that the opposition between hard and soft or in physics terms - stable and unstable - occupies the foremost place in representations of the body by people without writing.

This is interesting when looking at musical instruments. Early instruments like drums which used animal skins to produce percussions and flutes that used bone or wood to fortify the human voice and create floating melodic elements fall in line with this analysis. The use of white noise and twin - t filters in early drum machines, or the popularity of the hard autotune voice effect also makes sense when looked at from this perspective.

In the physical world every material has innate physical properties which lend it to specific uses. There are certain universal rules that govern the relation between material, form and function. This is true even in cases where function seems to be determined primarily by what seem to be solely aesthetic values. How is it that across vast distances of time and space diverse cultures adopted the same materials and forms in jewelry making for instance? Why do certain sounds predominate over others in a popular music lexicon?

The reasons why cultural production and culture itself takes the shapes that it does might be numerous and complex, but not random.

When we look at electric sound, in the digital domain everything is an abstraction, an approximation, and infinitely repeatable. But in the physical circuits which the majority of digital signal processing and instruments are based on the inverse is true. There is a concrete relationship between the flow of electric energy through copper, carbon, ceramic, silicon(coming from sand), salt water and other materials in the various circuit topologies and the sounds and sound properties produced. There is the impossibility of exact repeatability due to a combination of human error and the actual physical material properties, but at the same time, in the unquantized unmediated exists a possibility for infinite precision and detail.





-NX