In the February 23rd edition of New Scientist, there’s an article on Robert Schneider’s Non-Pythagorean musical scale and how it relates to other “flexible music scales” throughout history. An excerpt:

ONE of the stars of last year’s meeting of the Mathematical Association of America was Robert Schneider, lead guitarist of the indie band The Apples in Stereo. Delegates listened enthralled as he played a track from the group’s latest album, New Magnetic Wonder. From the very first notes the music sounds strange and almost eerie, a bit like a record played backwards.

Its ethereal quality stems partly from Schneider’s use of tone generators in place of conventional musical instruments. There is also a deeper reason why the music sounds strange: it uses an unusual musical scale in which the intervals between the notes are based on logarithms. Nevertheless, the more you listen to it, the more pleasing it becomes. “When we experience mathematical functions with our ears, we call it sound,” says Schneider. “When the math is particularly elegant and well ordered, we call it music.”

Schneider is not the first musician to invent a new musical scale, and some long-standing musical cultures, such the gamelan orchestras of Bali and Java, use scales very different from the standard western one. Even the scale used by medieval European musicians was different from the one familiar to modern ears. Which raises the issue of whether our preference for a particular musical scale arises because it’s what we are used to or because of something innate. Arguments have been raging for decades over the extent to which music is nature or nurture, but now some firm evidence has started to emerge.

You can read the full article here (third post down). Thanks to Daniella and Dan for the link.

Apropos of nothing, on an iTunes shopping spree yesterday I noticed that all of the Sunshine Fix videos are available in their store. For those who couldn’t find the limited edition Green Imagination CD/DVD bundle, here’s your chance to see them. And if you don’t want to pay $1.99 for each, a few more are now available on YouTube–at least, more than the last time I checked. Here’s one of them, “Innerstates.”

The Sunshine Fix – Innerstates