Music, Transience, Life

Can you imagine static everlasting music? Sounds oxymoronic. Imagine a single musical note sounded forever without change. Not only does this seem boring, it was almost impossible to generate before the advent of electronic music. The sound of a plucked string fades. The breath of a horn-blower expires. The clapped cymbal, loud on impact, disappears into the wind. But the dying sound of a musical note is what gives rise to the experience of music. One dying tone gives way to another tone, which in turn dies as yet another is given birth. And this tickles our ears with delight!

If the first tone did not die and new tones were simply added to it, you may briefly have harmony, but eventually added dissonant sounds will lead to cacophony. Distinct tones are lost; all becomes noise. There may be troves of hidden information in the overlapping waves, interfering with each other constructively and destructively, but the human listener cannot discern any underlying patterns. It’s the sound of a high entropy state, seemingly more dead than alive.

Perhaps there is an analogy between music and life where transience plays a key role. Just as music is alive when one tone gives way to another, so chemistry becomes alive as molecules transform from one to another, their concentrations constantly changing over time in a dynamic dance. A turns into B, which turns into C, then D, then E, then F, then G, and then A*, an excited form of the original A, its chemical bonds vibrating at double the frequency of the original. You might call it a scale or a cycle. The scale establishes a musical key while the cycle establishes a key metabolic process.

What makes music pleasurable? Anticipation, Expectation, Surprise, Resolution. The masterful composer cycles through themes – and for the greatest pieces of music, we do not get bored listening to them again and again and again. The dynamics that make the music so alive are rooted in larger underlying structures, cycles within larger cycles. The maestro teases us by building anticipation. An expectation is delightfully thwarted to reveal a surprise. And the resolution, when it comes later than expected, is savored.

How much time passed before seemingly simple molecules, handfuls of atoms connected by chemical bonds, turned into specifically themed repeating structures? I don’t know. But these delightful polymers, when located within an energy flow, build up and break down. Repeating units are taken apart and put back together. The prelude to this grand opus starts in simplicity – how can it not? We don’t know where it is headed. The maestro may have many hidden surprises. But as the chemical music proceeds, we begin to see the themes and the repeating structures, but before the first cell, it would have been difficult to predict how chemistry would give rise to biology – endless forms most beautiful, yet with the same underlying chemistry.

All living things die. Those that do not die, we do not call alive. But it is death that gives way to life. Without the transience of life, there would be no living. Dynamism is the feature of life. Dynamism is the feature of music. Music must be performed and listened to. It must be experienced bodily – not just through tiny hair-like structures in the inner ear, but through the cavities and substances of our entire human body. Waves of different frequencies resonate through different structures. You can read a musical score, see the squiggle of notes on a static page, and analyze its themes in great detail. But to truly delight in the music, you must bodily experience it. The notes don’t truly come alive until you experience them as transient tones passing through time.

In my lifetime, I’ve drawn many chemical structures on paper. I connect them to each other in complicated schemes. My mind’s eye imagines how these molecules, too small for me to bodily see, transform from one to another in an elaborate dance. One day, the community of scientists may draw out a grand scheme and call it “the chemical origins of life”. It might seem like a huge intellectual achievement, but it may be akin to writing out the score of a grand musical opus, one that has been played again and again, but it’s taken us so long to develop the notation. Drawn chemical representations are like musical notes. Are physical molecules like the tones of music?