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Synthesizer for thought | thesephist.com

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For most of the history of music, humans produced sounds out of natural materials — rubbing together strings, hitting things, blowing air through tubes of various lengths. Until two things happened. We understood the physics of sound. A sound is a combination of overlapping waves, and a wave is a kind of marvelous mathematical object that we can write theorems and prove things about and deeply and fundamentally understand. Once we started understanding sound as a mathematical object, our vocabulary for talking about sound expanded in depth and precision. Architects could engineer the acoustical properties of a concert hall, and musicians could talk about different temperaments of tuning. We also advanced in our understanding of how humans perceive sounds. We learned to relate our mathematical models to sounds in the real world. We built devices to record sound and decompose it into its constituent fundamental parts using the mathematical model of waves. We also invented a way to turn t

For most of the history of music, humans produced sounds out of natural materials — rubbing together strings, hitting things, blowing air through tubes of various lengths. Until two things happened. We understood the physics of sound . A sound is a combination of overlapping waves, and a wave is a kind of marvelous mathematical object that we can write theorems and prove things about and deeply and fundamentally understand. Once we started understanding sound as a mathematical object, our vocabulary for talking about sound expanded in depth and precision. Architects could engineer the acoustic

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