January 21, 2004
Library program gives off good vibrations
Physics of Music presentation explores science behind sounds
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Waves, frequency and vibration were the lingo of the hour during a Physics of Music Presentation Saturday morning at the Traverse Area District Library.
Geared to children ten and up, the program introduced basic concepts where the world of physics and music intersect. Led by Tom Kaufman, an area musician and educator, and David Chown, an area pianist, the program drew 32 attendees.
Kaufman led off with a brief lecture on the physical underpinnings of sound, noting that frequency and vibration control human lives. He demonstrated how sound from a pop bottle or wine glass changed as the water level increased or decreased, with the vibrating column of air changing accordingly.
"Bigger things vibrate slower," he said, adding that experimenting with making music using a pop bottle can be beneficial to an aspiring flute player: "Playing the pop bottle is exactly the same type of blowing as the flute."
Kaufman also demonstrated a Tibetan sound bowl, an oversized bowl played by rotating a mallet around its rim.
He noted that across cultures making sound and music was a universal trait, with technology basically unchanged until the early 20th Century.
"For thousands and thousands of years, the only way that people could make sound was by vibrating something," he said, bringing out a cow horn, a toy bugle and a conch shell to illustrate his point. "Until 1920, when the Russian physicist Leon Theremin invented the first synthesizer."
Kaufman, demonstrating a model of a Theremin synthesizer for the audience, noted that the physicist visited the United States and was extremely famous for a while. Then the scientist mysteriously disappeared.
"Turns out the KGB kidnapped him and took him back to Russia, where he lived in isolation for 20-30 years before he was rediscovered sometime in the 1960s," he said. "He was the grandfather of all modern synthesizers."
Theremin's breakthrough still resonates today, as consumers can to go Kmart or Wal-Mart and pay $100 to get a synthesizer that can make all sorts of sounds.
"The past 20 years has seen just an incredible boom with the birth of computers and the marriage of computers and music," Kaufman noted. "The technology is so phenomenal."
David Chown demonstrated some of this merger, showing off a composition program and walking users through the creation of a few bars of music. Using an electronic keyboard hooked up to the program, Chown composed an original snippet of sound and then played it for the audience and showed the computer-generated score. He and Kaufman also discussed the modern musical style of sampling.
"You can play something and it puts it into sheet music form," said Chown. "You can also change the key with the click of a mouse, say if I'm doing sheet music for a singer I can move it up to a new key."
These tools and technology are a huge contrast to the quills and parchment used by composers of past eras.
"You can hear what you're writing as you write each piece of music," Chown said. "Whereas, Beethoven and Mozart had to hear all the music in their heads."
Kaufman and Chown then turned the program over to the attendees, inviting them to use the myriad instruments to make sounds and music of their own. In addition to the Theremin synthesizer and electronic piano keyboard, Kaufman also brought along Boomwhacker musical tubes, a trombone, a singing tube, a rain stick and a thunder tube. He also helped participants make their own oboe-like reed from cut plastic straw.
Zackery Henley, 11, of Traverse City picked out a tune on a small guitar Kaufman brought. Already a veteran guitar player, Henley struggled to translate his knowledge onto this smaller vehicle.
"I'm used to having a big guitar to play," he said. "I don't know the physics of it, I just know how to play it."