Tag: music

By Bradley Stockwell

When I sit down at a piano I see a lot more than keys; I see an immense sonic spectrum ranging from sound frequencies of 27 hertz to over 4,000. A hertz, if you’re unaware, is one cycle of a wave per second, in this case a sound wave. When I press a C4 key, a vibrating string is displacing waves of air molecules at 260 times per second against my eardrum and my brain interprets those fluctuations as a middle C. And our amazing brain can do that with a range of frequencies about five times the size of a piano’s. It’s too bad our eyes are so limited in comparison.

While a human eye is an incredibly complex organ, it is severely tone deaf when it comes to the music of light. To understand what I mean by this, we must first change how you view light. On a sub-atomic level, light is made up of little spiraling packets of energy called photons. When these twisted little guys interact with one another they dance in a synchronized wave pattern and form light waves. This is how particles behave on a quantum-scale; they exhibit features both of a particle and of a wave. The varying energies of these photons, or how fast the little guys are spinning, produce differing light wave frequencies that our eyes detect as colors. For example the light waves that make up the color red cycle slower than the light waves that make up the color blue.

Just like there are sounds we can’t hear, either the sound waves are too fast or too slow for our brain to detect, there are also colors, or light waves, we can’t see. Of course just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In fact we interact with these colors all the time. When you tune into a radio station, you’re tuning into a signal being transmitted over a light wave called a radio wave. A radio station such as 95.5 KLOS is broadcasting their signal over a light wave with a frequency of roughly 95.5 megahertz; that’s 95.5 million oscillations per second, which is actually quite low. The lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength. That is how radio signals travel over long distances. Infrared light waves, just outside the lower end of visible light, is what your body emits as heat and changes the channel on your television when they are transmitted from your remote. If you’ve ever had a sunburn, that is the result of light waves just outside the higher end of visible light, called ultraviolet waves, overexciting the DNA that creates your skin tissue. If you’ve ever had an x-ray image taken, that is an inverted visual display of the high frequency waves, known as x-rays, which were shot through your body that weren’t absorbed by dense objects like your bones. A low energy wave called a microwave excites molecules of water inside your food to produce heat when you zap your leftovers. These are all things you’re familiar with and they all involve light, or in the language of physics, electromagnetic radiation.

Now just to give you a perspective of how limited our eyes are at detecting light I’m going to transpose the electromagnetic spectrum, the known frequencies of light from 1,000 hertz to one zettahertz (that’s 1 with 21 zeros after it), onto the sound frequencies found on an 88-key piano (this sounds more impressive than it actually is—only simple algebra involved). Radio waves, like the ones radio and TV stations use, take up the lowest 26 keys from A0 to A#2. Microwaves take up the next 16, B2 to D4. Infrared waves the next 14, D#4 to E5. Then visible light, which makes up our entire visual reality, takes up only one key, F5. The next eleven keys, F#5 to E6 are ultraviolet waves. The following ten, F6 to D7 are x-ray waves and the remaining ten are called gamma waves; D#7 to C8.*

*These proportions aren’t exact because where one type of wave begins and ends is debatable and I had to approximate for demonstration purposes. But it does accurately show the limited perspective of our vision.