Aliens and Music

Surely Bach would be accessible to all intelligent species!

Given that they are a spacefaring/time travelling race, I think their culture will be purely mathematical/science based. A 24/7 lab work kinda life. Thus, if they encounter our music, it will be just an oddity for them.

a reply to: PolyCottonBlend

youtu.be...

a reply to: ElOmen

I think aliens created music to hypnotize us all.

I think they would find our music "schwifty"


Honestly, I can't imagine how would alien music sound to our ears, but we have so much diversity of genres and styles here that I don't think it would be too drastically different from anything we already have.

Even the variance within us humans is pretty amazing.

You can go to Scotland, some guy in a kilt, belting out a jig on bagpipes. Go off to India, there is a snake charmer playing an oboe looking thing to a snake. Now both instruments, timing, and tuning are totally different. But slap an air bladder on that thing in India, BAM! bagpipes! Standing behind the piper, twirling fuzzy clubs, is a beefy guy also in a kilt, thumping out da Bass. Go to Alaska; some little native dude is being tossed high up into the air while a crowd of elders beat out a tempo on a flat, circular seal skin drum. That is something somebody who never heard Alaska Native music before totally grooves on if they are a visiting Scotsman and piper! I know because I heard the story of that very thing happening. Different cultures, similar ideas, similar instruments, and a fundamental grasping and appreciation of what the other is doing.

Would an alien be so different? (Except the heavy metal abduction story of course! LOL)

I think Jimi Hendrix could be an alien. And if he wasn't he heard like somebody not of this earth!

Many people have commented over the ages on the similarities between mathematics and music. Leibniz once said that "music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting". But the similarity is more than mere numerical. The aesthetics of a musical composition have much in common with the best pieces of mathematics, where themes are established, then mutate and interweave until we find ourselves transformed at the end of the piece to a new place. Just as we listen to a piece of music over and over, finding resonances we missed on first listening, mathematicians often get the same pleasure in rereading proofs, noticing the subtle nuances that make the piece hang together so effortlessly.

.plus.maths.org - The Music of the Primes.

I was off reading about Riemann for the heck of it and saw that quote. If numbers are the language of universe it would seem that music would be equally enjoyable. I mean 3/4ths is always 3/4ths, right?

Anyway, thought I would share the quote about music, math, and history.

Slightly off topic, but it does involve aliens and beautiful music.



One of the more haunting and harrowing moments of my gaming days of yore...

Sigh...

BT