FACT: Dolly Parton is two amazing singers. If you slow her songs down (as if you were playing an old 45 at 33rpm) she sounds completely different and really terrific
Two examples at the link: 9 to 5 and Jolene
Inspired by this, I’ve spent a few hours playing around with some slowdown software, and there are some songs that are interesting when you play them at 3/4 or 2/3 speed, and others when you speed them up.
Whistle While You Work? Not in Space
Former astronaut Dan Barry has seven hours of spacewalking time to his credit. He tried whistling during his spacewalk on STS-96 in May 1999.
“It wasn’t something I hadn’t planned — I thought of it on the fly. It turned out that it didn’t work.,” he said.
Barry called down to Mission Control and said, “Houston, EV2. The science types might like to know that it is not possible to whistle during an EVA.”
Cool effect. Since this is not slow-motion, you might think it has to be basic aliasing: seeing a beat between the oscillations of the string and the frame-rate of a camera, often seen with wheels that look to be spinning slowly — or backward — on film. It’s not unlike the effect of a strobe light* that’s near the frequency of oscillation that make the motion seem slow or nonexistent, which sometimes happens with fluorescent (or rectified LED) lighting.
But it probably isn’t, or at least not in a simple way. When you strum a guitar the oscillations have a much longer wavelength. The fundamental mode is a standing wave where the string makes a half -wave (e.g. a 1m string has a wavelength of 2m), and there two nodes, one at either end. The next mode would have a node in the center and be a full wavelength. If the speed of sound is around 400 m/s, that gives a frequency of 200 Hz, or 400 Hz for the 2nd order mode. That’s about what we are hearing. The wavelengths shown in the video are much shorter, by more than an order of magnitude, and perhaps two. 20,000 Hz is way off. Plus the waveforms — you could get them by adding Fourier components, but that’s not going on here. This is a shutter effect, so it’s related to aliasing, but the sampling is happening as the exposure is scanned, i.e. each exposure is taking some time, and the exposure on the left side of the image does not represent the same time as the exposure on the right. This is called a rolling shutter and can have some pretty neat effects.
*Just bought a strobe. So I’ll be playing around with it.
Pick your isotopes from the Chart of the Nuclides. The program plays the energy level decay cascade as a series of notes that sound (to me) like a xylophone/marimba. You can change volume, pitch and tempo of each, as well as the waveform played — square and triangle waves sound more “techno” (I picked the isobaric combo of Ce, Xe and Cs, all -135). There’s also a visual of nuclei emitting the gammas. Interesting.
OK, a cymbal. Ooh, Bessel functions!
That post about Science on the Simpsons made me think about science in music. More specifically, science that’s wrong in song. This is actual problematic physics, not some mention of fantasy or fiction, in which the rules of science might not apply. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my iPod:
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Up Around the Bend
You can ponder perpetual motion
OK, so pondering perpetual motion may not be impossible, but is ultimately fruitless
Jefferson Starship, Girl With the Hungry Eyes
I like to move at the speed of light
Albert says I can’t, but I can
B-52s, Planet Claire
She drove a Plymouth Satellite
Faster than the speed of light
Barenaked Ladies, It’s All Been Done
The whole song is about immortality
A Google search shows there are a lot of lyrics using speed of light as a literary device, like “living at the speed of light,” but I don’t think those count. But I did find this one:
Coldplay, Speed of Sound
Look up, I look up at night,
Planets are moving at the speed of light.
Feel free to add more in the comments.
Discography of your favorite band
The record where they all wore matching costumes
