A few years ago, I had set out to write a series of posts on the recognition of patterns in math and software engineering in music. The root of that interest comes from my time being a student of Ramsey Ameen, who was a formidable mathematician and jazz violinist. I vividly remember sitting next to a poster in his 7th grade classroom that said “Music IS Math!”, while he taught our group of unsuspecting 7th graders the concepts of Symbolic Logic. While I struggled with it initially, I ultimately aced the final, and I had the pleasure of reconnecting with him as an adult to let him know that his experimental approach followed me into my profession, supporting my understanding of Boolean logic.
The interest is also connected to my earliest work in Education Technology, when I worked with professors from Marywood University on a cross-discipline online learning system. The reasoning is that crossing over the boundaries of subject categorization allows for deeper understanding and learning. When we recognize patterns across music and science – such as what Douglas Hofstadter famously did in his groundbreaking work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, (also known as GEB) – we open up new possibilities in our own fields of study and expertise, and facilitate understanding of concepts that may be otherwise hard to grasp until we find new connections to those ideas.
So, here is my first entry to this series, which I had posted before, but serves as an enticing gateway into the niche concepts I’d enjoy discussing with engineers, mathematicians, educators, and musicians alike.
The following is a diagram based on the Circle of Fifths by jazz pioneer John Coltrane. Coltrane was interested in physics and studied the work of Einstein. Dartmouth professor and astrophysicist Stephon Alexander says that “Giant Steps” and Coltrane’s Key Circle diagram “changed my whole research direction… led to basically a discovery in physics.”
From The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common:
Alexander describes his jazz epiphany as occasioned by a complex diagram Coltrane gave legendary jazz musician and University of Massachusetts professor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the diagram was related to another and seemingly unrelated field of study—quantum gravity,” he writes in a Business Insider essay on his discovery, “What I had realized… was that the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s theory was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram.”
The diagram is also a mandala, isn’t it? Coltrane not only connected music with math and physics, but he even touched upon mysticism in his observation. This opens up the potential for our explorations to even reach into visual art, where the symmetry and expression of what we may intuitively sense as a divine source could be rooted in a recognition of yet-to-be understood patterns in the universe.
And so begins, perhaps, an interesting exploration of an area full of potential discoveries. Stay tuned…