CaixaForum Seville vibrates with the link between music and mathematics in a new interactive exhibition
It is the central idea of Music and Mathematics. A Sound Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, which traces the history of sound from the Big Bang to the present day.
The exhibition makes use of its eminently interactive nature to help visitors understand the links between the two disciplines by visualising the waves generated by the vibration of a string, imitating the timbre of different instruments or playing with notes, rhythms and timbres to generate a harmonic sound.
The director of CaixaForum Sevilla, Moisés Roiz, and the exhibition's scientific advisor, Magda Polo, presented Music and Mathematics. A Sound Journey from Chaos to the Cosmos on Tuesday, a new exhibition exploring the indestructible link between music and mathematics, which will be on display at CaixaForum Sevilla from tomorrow until 1 June.
Mathematics is present in music, from the physics of sound to the making of instruments, from rhythmic patterns to tonal harmony. It is a close relationship that visitors will be able to understand better thanks to this exhibition produced by the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation.
Music and Mathematics is an interactive exhibition with lots of music and audiovisual material that invites visitors to reflect on practical experiences and accompanies them in their discoveries. It is an exhibition that questions, explains, suggests, discovers and makes us see music and mathematics as two equivalent languages, rational and beautiful.
More than twenty interactive modules and fifteen audiovisuals allow the public to get to know music from the inside and discover how sound is transmitted, how we hear it and what techniques composers follow to write music, with variations and transformations that have a mathematical basis. It is not only classical music or contemporary creations that are based on mathematics: pop music has the same foundation.
The exhibition is organised around a scale of seven concepts inspired by the seven notes of the stave. Like Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, the philosopher Pythagoras stole the secret of music from them: he experimented with a new instrument, the monochord, which allowed him to identify and define musical intervals. As a result of his research, music could be studied and the laws that articulate it were defined.
The relationship between music and mathematics cannot be analysed without taking into account physics, history, philosophy, biology, medicine and aesthetics, disciplines that are present in the exhibition. What do you think the Big Bang sounded like? How does the ear work? What are melody, tone, harmonics, timbre, resonance or rhythm? Science is behind all these concepts.
The exhibition delves into the mathematical foundations of beauty related to the golden ratio or Mozart's dice, a set of combinations that allows for an infinite number of compositions, all beautiful. And it invites us to discover the beauty of mathematics, which is the abstract version of music.
The final section, dedicated to the music of the cosmos, introduces a metaphysical dimension to the exhibition. The universe is a mystery. To capture its complexity and beauty through the work of the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in the 16th century, visitors will be able to enjoy a cosmic symphony in a room isolated from the rest of the exhibition.
The exhibition has benefited from the scientific advice of Magda Polo, professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Barcelona and professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory, History of Music and Philosophy of Music; and Carlos Calderón, musician, music educator and architect, specialist in the monochord and the music of the spheres. In addition, the artist Michael Bradke has also participated in the exhibition. He has 25 years of experience in the creation of interactive elements to explain music in museums and has provided a dozen interactive elements of great beauty and museographic power that reveal the intense relationship between music and mathematics.
Music and mathematics: afterlife of the exhibition hall
The exhibition is complemented by activities that allow visitors to delve deeper into the subject, such as lectures by pianist and mathematician Laura Farré Rozada, one on how to use mathematics to distort our perception and another on the musical facets of chaos theory, from its most basic foundations to its creative potential.
Laura Farré Rozada will also be the star of a concert that will offer a sound journey along the same lines as the exhibition: from silence we will pass through chaos, sound and music until we reach the cosmos. The programme includes pieces by Dimitar Nenov, Gayane Chebotarian and Claude Debussy, a composer who appears in the exhibition and who claimed that ‘mathematics is the basis of music’. The performance will be completed with the visual accompaniment of the creations of Alba G. Corral, a visual artist and computer engineer known for integrating coding and processing in collaboration with musicians in real time.
Activities have also been prepared for family audiences, such as the new show La sandalia de Pitágoras (Pythagoras' sandal), which will introduce Pythagoras (Pi for the centre's audience), a character who lives in a town where mathematics and music, mythological goddesses and mobile phones, jazz bands and popular festivals all mix together. Accompanying the show and the exhibition, the centre will have a family space where they can experiment with books, games and other types of materials to bring the world of music and mathematics closer to the public.
Likewise, families will be able to enjoy the workshop ‘Notes of science’, where small experiments will be carried out which, combined with musical examples, will serve as a common thread to bring us closer to concepts such as sound waves, the propagation and production of sound, timbre, frequency or amplitude. Likewise, the workshop ‘The sound of the wind’ will allow us to explore the main mechanisms that make air vibration possible, which will help us understand how wind instruments work, and ‘To the rhythm of numbers and figures’ will allow participants to practise surprising mathematical games, learn to calculate with an abacus and send encrypted messages to their classmates. In addition, based on experiences centred on the relationship between the plane and space, inExperience mathematics situations will be analysed that demonstrate the relationship between mathematics and everyday life and mathematical logic will be applied to interpret apparently paradoxical situations.
In addition, to mark Pi Week, which takes place from 14 to 16 March, the centre will screen Counted Out for schoolchildren, a documentary film that investigates, through personal stories and interviews with experts, the greatest crises of our time through an unexpected lens: mathematics. The film will be presented by a mathematician specialising in education and dissemination. On 14, 15 and 16 March, CaixaForum Seville will host other workshops and activities aimed at all audiences to celebrate this anniversary.
The exhibition will be complemented by guided, family and educational visits that will allow an approach to the content of the exhibition with the help of an educator. As before, on the occasion of this exhibition, guided visits with a thematic menu are offered, in which, after seeing it with an educator, visitors can enjoy a gastronomic experience specially designed for this exhibition.
