Sweet sweet symmetry

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As humans, we innately like and crave symmetry and repetition. Expressions like "fallen out of their routine", "it's nice to get back into a routine" come to mind. We like structure and uniformity in our lives. We have evolved this way over many hundreds of years.

When we notice things without a sign of obvious design, we tend to stare at them until we see something that makes sense to our brains. Take the chilled out example of laying down in a park on a sunny summer's afternoon looking up at the sky. You lay there watching the clouds. Eventually, you’ll imagine that the clouds form the shapes of animals, faces and other familiar forms. As I said, we crave that sense of familiarity.

Not just the visual world

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And its not just in the visual world either and that's the point of my post today. We see this symmetry in sounds as well and most typically in most genres of music. This repeating melodic music is like art for our ear drums.

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To understand symmetry in its simplest form, stand in front of a mirror and you'll see a reflection made possible by the symmetry of the light waves that bounce off the smooth metallic surface and hit the back of your eye and are carried to the brain via the optic nerve for processing. You brian will register this symmetry in the form of your reflection.

Well, sound is also a wave and it too can be measured and adjusted in order to create pleasing harmonics that our ears pick up. After all sound is just vibrating air molecules travelling through space.

Image source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fibonacci-sequence-stock-market-180974487/

So in relation to music, symmetry has to do with likeness in sound waves that have been transformed. Like the physical world, there are several different perceptions of symmetries in music. These symmetries have been known about and studied for many years, especially in the classical music community. There was a famous Hungarian composer by the name Béla Bartók who used the well known mathematical repetitive sequence called the Fibonacci series to create symmetries in his musical compositions.

Image source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bart%C3%B3k

Symmetry in Modern Music

The musicians you listen to today most likely are not using the Fibonacci series and if they are, more power to them! They may however be using some or all of these or at least their producer and sound engineer are - things like pitch translation and reflection, octave translation and other methods of symmetry. Is it any wonder you want to play these songs over and over again. They are honey for your ears.

Image source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_recorded_by_the_Beatles

Another example of symmetry is the song writing itself, where the opening line and closing line are the same. That was not an accident. Then there are repeating choruses too of course. So even though you may think that making music is simply arranging sound waves so that they are perceived as pleasant to the ears of an intended audience, there is often more to it, like any craft. Underneath the hood, there is probably a lot going on.

It's a pretty cool area to think about and its perfect for my organised compartmentalised brain :)

I hope you enjoyed the read

Peace Out