Music and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Music is the universal human language. The language of the universe, hypnotizing everything from celestial bodies, humans, and animals.

Neural networks like NSynth and Riffusion are using algorithms to generate music. The output might not be the next radio banger but that may be due to the training models being less effective than the art generation models. The music models have been trained on copyright-free and voluntarily provided music samples. Because diffusion models are prone to memorization, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in problematic legal issues. You can listen to some AI generated music samples at beatoven.ai

Am I being too poetic when I say music is the language of the universe? Here is a quote from Johannes Kepler about his third law of planetary motion:

I first believed I was dreaming… But it is absolutely certain and exact that the ratio which exists between the period times of any two planets is precisely the ratio of the 3/2th power of the mean distance.

Harmonies of the World by Kepler

3/2 is a Pythagorean interval otherwise known as a perfect fifth.

Seven musical notes: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol (Sol is Sun in Latin), La, Si found even on rotating planets in our solar system singing like a chorus.

It is even more bizarre now that scientist have found potential exoplanets also have harmonic orbits.

Computers can out math us quite easily. It is both encouraging and terrifying that AI may unlock secrets of the universe at a pace we will struggle to understand. I leave you with a recording of the oldest song that we humans have a record of, the Seikilos epitaph. Enjoy the tune and the lyrics.

While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and Time demands his due.

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