"Scientific songs"

                

by Clare Tan, 2013-14912

                  Science and music are two things that aren’t often placed together. And when they are, the result could mean anything – nerdy songs with unsingable lyrics, sci-fi movie soundtracks,

or an hour in a lecture class listening to supposedly “scientific” songs.

                Scientific songs, in this case, mostly meaning anything remotely related to outer space. Oh and with a few songs about fossils and atomic bombs thrown in.

                 Now before you quit on me and rant about how you wanted something better, about the endless possibilities that run up when you hear the phrase “science and music”, about the fact that “Fly me to the moon” is not what you pictured as a scientific song – believe me, I understand how you feel. And that’s why I’m here, writing this reaction paper about one of the strangest series of musical pieces I have ever been forced to listen to.

                 So let’s start with the good bits – what did I learn from this lecture on science and music? Well from what I managed to pick up, science and music are interrelated because science can affect the way people feel about the world, and whenever people feel anything about the world it ends up in a song. So discovering new planets in outer space leads to Holt’s “The Planets,” or detonating atomic bombs leads to songs about how atomic bombs shouldn’t be detonated. And this does, in fact, make sense.

                But even though it was proven that science and music are related, I didn’t feel like that was enough. I like music and I get science, and I just didn’t feel that the songs we listened to did either subject justice. I mean we listened to Herschel just because he was a composer who happened to have discovered Uranus. Now I can’t claim to be an expert on this, but in my opinion, discovering Uranus does nothing for your musical ability.

                And it’s not just whether I liked the pieces or not. The ones by Camille St. Saens were good. The “Fossils” piece really sounded like fossils; the aquarium piece successfully showed the light dancing on the top of the water. But I can’t help wondering, is that all that science and music can do for each other? Would pieces about furniture and trees also be considered scientific?

I don’t really know what I expected. But what I wanted was to be shown the beauty of science and of music. I didn’t want to be shown weird sci-fi songs, I wanted songs that could evoke the feeling scientists must get when they go out there and explore the world and discover things. Or at least songs that try to discover things, by being different and unique. And perhaps we could have had a little discussion on how music affects the brain or something scientific like that?

I’m probably asking too much of this particular topic, and this particular session. But somehow, I think music and science deserve at least that from me. Because they’re both so much more than a song about purple people eaters with a weird talking puppet thrown in.