According to hard science, the hippies weren’t wrong: everything is made of vibrations.
We all remember Pythagoras for his right triangle theorem. But he made another discovery, arguably just as important. The story goes, he was passing a blacksmith shop. He realized the tone produced by striking different bars produced a pitch inverse to the bar’s length — long bar, lower pitch, and vice versa.
Like all profound insights, this seems obvious in retrospect. But the power of the insight comes from assigning an objective measurement to a subjective quality. This power extends far beyond sound.
Pythagoras measured notes which sound similar (octaves) as having a 2:1 ratio. Think of the first two notes of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” — the lower and higher notes for ‘some’ and ‘where’ have this ratio. The scientist Hertz measured these vibrations per second, and they’re labeled with his name. If ‘some’ is at 440 Hertz, ‘where’ will be at 880. Going down, you’ll find 2:1 pairs again at 220, 110, and 55Hz.
The note name for 440Hz is ‘A4’, because it’s right in the middle of the range that most voices can sing. 220/110/55 are A3, 2, and 1. Conventional names for the notes stop at A1, because the lowest voice type, Basso Profundo (literally ‘deep bass’) can’t sing much below that. Human hearing ends around 20Hz, or put another way, a pattern repeating 20 times per second is the slowest vibration ears can hear.
We can still perceive vibrations below 20Hz, they’re just not sounds anymore. Between 3–20Hz, we feel it in our chest. Remember the glass of water vibrating as the T. Rex approached in ‘Jurassic Park’? That was a genius visual cue to link to the embodied sense of feeling a vibration below the range of hearing, around 5–10Hz.
Between 1/2–2Hz, we perceive patterns of vibration as rhythms. We experience those patterns not in our ears or chest, but in our short-term memory. A clock ticking once per second — 1hz, or 60 beats per minute — sets the pace we’d call mid-tempo music.
Longer than once per second, alternating rhythm becomes the pattern. Contrasting feel like verse/chorus or upbeat/downbeat several times per minute causes a sensation of theme and variations.
Longer patterns in the range around 1–10 minutes we perceive in long-term memory, with names like songs, tracks, or in classical music, movements. Those roll up into longer categories: album, playlist, sonata, symphony.
Longer. You wake up and get ready, you go out and do something, you have a little free time, then you rest. We experience this pattern as a day. Longer. An artist’s entire body of work could take a whole day to listen to, but follows the same pattern: exploration, engagement, exposition, summary. Longer. Your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents. History.
Longer. The followers of Pythagoras called the motion of the planets musica universalis because the ratios of the planets’ orbits closely matched the ratios of pleasing harmonies. The concept fell out of favor after Kepler as better measurements showed that ‘close’ was not exact, and in some cases not all that close.
But modern astronomy has found new examples. Bodies locked in ‘orbital resonance’ perform a gravitational dance extremely close to exact ratios. Asteroseismology studies sound waves within stars. And we know the solar system itself completes an orbit around the galaxy every 260 million years.
The longer the vibration, the deeper the note. The universe resonates as the ultimate Basso Profundo, the deepest voice.
