{"id":532,"date":"2008-07-21T01:35:19","date_gmt":"2008-07-21T06:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2008-07-21T01:35:19","modified_gmt":"2008-07-21T06:35:19","slug":"musical-relativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"Musical relativity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Musical<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a neat idea for a concert that’s going to blow a few minds if it ever takes to the stage.<\/p>\n

A combination of three or more notes played together is called a chord. We know that certain musical chords sound happy while others sound sad (although nobody knows why). The mood of a piece of music then depends on the combination of chords being played. More than a few weighty tomes have been written about the way one chord can be transformed into another and the effect this has on the mood of the music.<\/p>\n

But Kaca Bradonjic, a physicist at Boston University, says that musicians appear to have ignored one of the fundamental ways of changing the pitch of a note: the Doppler shift. He points out that it ought to be possible for an observer moving at a specific velocity to hear a sad sounding note as a happy one and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Which means that the mood of a piece of music depends on the relative\u00a0 velocities of the audience and performers.<\/p>\n

He calculates for example that to hear a C major chord as a C minor, the listener would need to be travelling at about 43 miles per hour, directly away from the source. That’s a fair speed. And the accelerations necessary to vary this effect from one note to another during a concert would make this one helluva roller coaster ride.<\/p>\n

Talking of which, a (very quiet) roller coaster might be the perfect venue for\u00a0 the first concert of this type.<\/p>\n

Ref: arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.2493<\/a>: Relativity of musical mood<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a neat idea for a concert that’s going to blow a few minds if it ever takes to the stage. A combination of three or more notes played together is called a chord. We know that certain musical chords sound happy while others sound sad (although nobody knows why). The mood of a piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-seaside","category-hellraisin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}