FEATURE:
The Maths of Music
PHOTO CREDIT: mahdi chaghari/Pexels
Exploring and Pondering the More Analytical and Fantastical Side of A Beautiful Artform
_________
I have been thinking about…
IN THIS PHOTO: Professor Hannah Fry
how, when we talk about music, we often do so in very personal ways. There is passionate journalism and brilliant discussions. How analytical do we get about this incredible artform? In terms of using numbers, equations and mathematics to look at different sides of music. Some may say that seems quite dry, cold and uninteresting. That is not the case. I have been thinking about Professor Hannah Fry and how she applies numbers and mathematics to subjects from love and life. She appears on Lauren Laverne’s BBC Radio 6 Radio morning show for The Maths of Life. Where she applies probability, statistics and numbers to a range of unusual and fantastic thoughts, subjects and scenarios. It is always revealing and fascinating. I guess The Maths of Life is a natural extension from The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation. This is Fry’s 2015 book:
“The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that maths has nothing to offer.
This book pulls back the curtain to reveal the patterns in love that can be explained through maths and offers up a valuable new perspective on matters of the heart: What’s the chance of us finding love? What’s the chance that it will last? How does online dating work, exactly? When should you settle down? How can you avoid divorce? When is it right to compromise? Can game theory help us decide whether or not to call?”.
Professor Hannah Fry also presented Magic Numbers. This was a multi-part series where she took viewers through the evolution of maths. Thinking about that title and, in musical terms – according to De La Soul – how three is the magic number, it made me think about how Fry can reveal so much about important events, figures and sides of life through mathematics. It is not purely about numbers. However, when even thinking about the number three and how this can apply to so many different things in music. In terms of albums, songs and chart successes.
I am not sure whether it is her area of expertise and passion. I was wondering about music and how there is not a podcast or series where maths is applied to music. In terms of its history, popularity and more unusual sides. I love Fry’s essays for The New Yorker like Why Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death. Making mathematics and its importance perhaps more accessible. So many people think it is an inaccessible, difficult, one-dimensional or unnecessary subject. How it doesn’t really apply to life and have any significant meaning. Mathematics runs through everything in life. From the everyday to the decisions we make to wider world events, I wonder whether this can be applied to music. I am going to come to that in a second. First, from an interview earlier this year, Professor Hannah Fry spoke about mathematics’ broader appeal and making it more accessible. After their bio (“Hannah Fry is the IMA President for 2024 to 2025. She is a professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London. Hannah is an author and presenter, who hosts numerous podcasts and television shows, including The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, The Secret Genius of Modern Life and Uncharted with Hannah Fry”), there were some interesting discussion points:
“What advice would you give to a mathematician who aspires to communicate their research to a wider audience?
OK, buckle up because I’ve got some tips.
The very first rule of communicating, before you do anything, is that you have to start off with who your audience is. What is it that they want? What is it that they know? And what is it that they’re interested in? If you start off with identifying that, then you can plot a path to where you want to take them.
Almost always when I see communication done, it goes in the opposite direction. It starts off with people saying, ‘This is what I want to tell people.’
Really good communication is not about you. It should never be about you, and it should never start with you. It has to start with the people you’re talking to. And maybe that even starts with listening before talking to find out where people are. I think that’s the absolute number one rule.
The second thing that’s worth saying is that a lot of mathematicians think the public or non-technical people won’t really understand or aren’t really interested in big ideas. I’ve never found that to be the case. I’ve never once found a limit to the level of technical detail that people are interested in finding out. The only limit is their motivation to do so.
Let me see if I can give you an example. During the pandemic I was still recording programmes and so I would get taxis into town. Once when I was in a taxi, I had this really long conversation with the cab driver (who I’d never met before) about exponential functions, logarithmic axes and basically differentiation. Essentially, you know, like the rate of change and the rate of rate of change. We had this really long conversation about it.
Can you imagine me having this conversation with somebody where they’re quizzing me about this stuff in 2019 or even in 2024? It would never happen in a million years, but during Covid a random person asked about logarithmic axes. There was a reason to care so he was motivated to understand, and then actually there was no limit to how much he wanted to know about it.
When you’re trying to communicate technical ideas to people, you have to create a motivation instead of starting with the technical idea. I think that’s really essential. You have to put in the work to get people to commit to listening to you. You have to get their permission. That’s a better way to phrase it. You have to get their permission to talk to them, and that’s something that’s earned, right? Not demanded. I spend a lot of time thinking about how you do that.
Ultimately, I think right at the heart of it, every human is fundamentally the same. We all like surprise, we all like intrigue, we all like mystery, we all like humour and we all like wonder as well. If you can use some of the narrative storytelling tricks that appeal to every single person, then I think that you can very easily dress up technical ideas in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re just giving a boring lecture.
How important do you think the work you do is in broadening the appeal of mathematics?
I hope it makes a difference. It’s really difficult to tell. I do get lots of amazing letters from young people and a lot of families as well. I always joke that my two main audiences are middle-aged men and teenage girls.
When panel show requests come in, I do think about them because I am stepping quite far away from my original intention of something (like documentaries) that is quite a worthy cause – actively changing the perception of this subject, which you and I both know to be so much more, so much deeper, so much more joyful, so much more glorious than the average person thinks it is.
What I decided was that actually you’re not going to change everybody’s mind. Obviously. You’re not going to suddenly make everyone in the country into mathematicians. But I think that if you can just have a positive association with the idea of a mathematician then that in itself can have some positive benefit”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lum3n/Pexels
Most of the writing we read about music is from a personal perspective. Reviews and interviews. You do get features that look at different subjects and news breaking. How often do we apply subjects like science and mathematics to music? Professor Hannah Fry uses mathematics and applies it to areas of love and life. Whether it is statistics, graphs, data or anything else, it brings to life some fascinating ideas and discussion points. Really quite engrossing, educational and thought-provoking. I have never seen this done with music. Whether it is a mathematical study of decades of music, the number three, the changing nature of love songs – with statistics and graphs to back up some interesting findings -, I would be really fascinated to see a podcast or series where something akin to Professor Hannah Fry’s The Maths of Life/Mathematics of Love applied to a music landscape. I love how she can bring universal and obscure themes, people and subjects to life in real, passionate depth through mathematics. I don’t think we really look at the common and obscure of music in an analytic or scientific way. It is always the same sort of approach discussion and narrative. I am not sure, whether it came to life, who would present such a thing. Exploring music through a more mathematical lens would be engrossing. Changing how we discuss and uncover the full beauty of music is important. Making these discoveries. Reframing assumptions and questioning how we see and perceive music. Going deep and broad. Discovering, what in fact, is…
THE magic number.