Music of the Periodic Table: Recent Episodes
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These two recordings are from a recent performance in Viroqua, Wisconsin– July, 2023. Following the two recordings is a program with musicians and notes.
Combined Element Sound Sketches (1 through 6 in the program) {18 minute listen}
https://musicoftheperiodictable.com/wp-content/uploads/00-combined-element-sound-sketches-52923-4.08-PM.mp3Violin accompanied by Rahbi Crawford on Crystal Bowls https://rahbicrawford.com/ (Number 7 in the program) {6 minutes}
https://musicoftheperiodictable.com/wp-content/uploads/mark-rahbi-fe-mg-81923-9.01-PM.mp3Music from the Periodic Table
This collection of 7 soundscapes represents the tones of the colors of the spectral light signatures of the elements. Each element has a unique set of colors. This project converts wavelength to frequency.
Frequency can be converted from wavelength by using the following equation: f = c /L where f is frequency in Hertz (Hz), c is the speed of light in meters/second and L is wavelength in meters.
Light has a very high measure in Hz. (Trillions of Hz per second). Using the laws of harmonics one can continually divide by 2 to reduce the very high values to those that can be heard by us. With sound, every time a frequency is divided by 2 you get to the same tone one octave lower and if you double the frequency, you get one octave higher. Think about hitting middle C on the piano and going to the right to the next C, the pitch gets higher and going to the left the pitch gets lower. We hear about 40 octaves below the sound of light.
More poetically, the dance of the colors makes a sound 40 octaves above what we can hear. Imagine that sound, singing so high that only angels can hear. Through the law of octaves, we can take the angel song, call it down to the place where we can play it on our instruments, and dance it on the earth.
Rumi translations by Colman Barks https://www.colemanbarks.com/
- Dancing Particles in the Key of Hydrogen.
{Mark John on Violin and Larry Stephens on percussion}
Dancing Particles
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
[Rumi]
- The Key of Boron
{Mark John on Violin and Larry Stephens on percussion}
- Rumi’s The Guest House in the Key of Carbon
{Mark John on Violin, Siobhan Elia on Cello and Larry Stephens on Percussion}
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
[Rumi]
- The Key of Nitrogen
{Mark John on F# High Spirts Flute and Larry Stephens on percussion}
5.Rumi’s “Everything is Music” in the Key of Oxygen
{Mark John on Violin, Maya Bennardo on Violin, Siobhan Elia on Cello and Larry Stephens on percussion}
Where Everything is Music
Don’t worry about saving these songs.
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
Where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up,
there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
[Rumi]
- Tones of Water
{Mark John on Violin and sound effects}
- Improvisation in the keys of Iron and Magnesium
{Mark John Violin and Rahbi Crawford on Crystal Bowls} https://rahbicrawford.com/
Iron and Magnesium form the centers of Hemoglobin and Chlorophyll. The chlorophyll in plants inspires CO2 using sunlight to make sugar breathing out Oxygen. The hemoglobin brings Oxygen from our and our Kin’s inspiration to burn sugar. We breathe out CO2.. I am in awe how these two molecules mirror each other. Our relationship and interdependence sing together with these two elements as share our sentience together.
www.musicoftheperiodictable.com
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Improv in the key of Nitrogen
https://musicoftheperiodictable.com/wp-content/uploads/Nitrogen-w.flute-and-percussion-final.mp3Improvisation with a High Spirits, First Nation flute. This traditional flute is made in the key of F#. Percussion by Larry Stephens.
Nitrogen is the 7th element in the periodic table. It is one of the 6 elements that make up 98.7% of the human body. Approximately 3.2% of the total body weight is Nitrogen. Essential for life in almost all of its forms, Nitrogen plays a role as a member of DNA, RNA and ATP. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, all contain Nitrogen. It is also present in hemoglobin and chlorophyl.
Nitrogen is a colorless and odorless gas that comprises 78% of atmosphere by volume. Plants are our relatives that are able to “fix” Nitrogen into a form that can be used by other life on the planet. It follows a path known as the Nitrogen cycle moving from micro-organisms, to plants, to various critters, back into the soil and back into the air. At least this was the case before people discovered they could remove nitrogen from the air, form it into fertilizer and spread it ubiquitously across the planet. The disruption of the Nitrogen Cycle has added to the algal blooms and degradation of the homes of our water based plants and animals. It is estimated that the human body has 80% of its nitrogen from artificial fertilizers. It is a good reason to know your organic farmer.
In Alchemy, Nitrogen was named Sal Amoniac as a compound that when combined with sulfuric acid was called Aegis Regis and was the only substance known to dissolve gold.
Alchemical Symbols
Nitrogen has a color spectrum in the full range of what we can see. Rainbow. It has a scale that is very close to our F# major scale.
An Aside:
This is a point to try again to explain where the music of the elements comes from. In the field of spectrometry, every element has a specific set of colors that are emitted when observed. This is how astrophysicists can tell what elements are in a distant star. Each element always emits the same set of wavelengths. Some of the wavelengths are in the visible spectrum. The visible light is like a fingerprint of an element. Each set of colors makes a scale.
I am converting the light into sound. A well-heeled scientist will say that the electro-magnetic (light) cannot be compared to the vibration we hear (sound) because they are two different systems of energy. I feel okay about doing this because the folks at NASA have been doing this for a while. Follow this link for the sounds of a black hole:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-black-hole-sonifications-with-a-remix.html
{As an aside from this aside. Follow the winding path at this NASA site to listen to the sounds of Saturn. They are haunting. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html }
The light that we see between infrared and ultraviolet is one octave of the electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine a pole that is three feet high. At the bottom of the pole are the lowest wavelengths and at the top are the highest and most energetic wavelengths. Our eyes are able to see one-quarter inch of this pole. The rest have names like x-ray, radio waves, micro-waves (used in the kitchen to heat your food- among other things), and the list goes on and on. In the visible spectrum the lowest, meaning it has the longest wavelength, color is red and the highest that we can see is indigo-violet. Follow the colors of the rainbow. Just out of our visual field is the infrared and the ultraviolet. Some of our Kin on the planet see these colors.
The part that gets a little bit complicated is how wavelength is related to frequency. Wavelength is measured in vibrations per meter and frequency is measured in vibrations per second. Frequency is measured in Hertz. The healthy young person can hear between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Another way to say this is that we can hear between 20 vibrations per second to 20,000 vibrations per second.
Frequency can be converted from wavelength by using the following equation:
f = c /L where f is frequency in Hertz (Hz), c is the speed of light in meters/second and L is wavelength in meters.
Light has a very high measure in Hz. (trillions of Hz per second). Using the laws of harmonics one can continually divide by 2 to reduce the very high values to those that can be heard by us. With sound, every time a frequency is divided by 2 you get to the same tone one octave lower and if you double the frequency, you get one octave higher. Think about hitting middle C on the piano and going to the right to the next C, the pitch gets higher and going to the left the pitch gets lower. We hear about 40 octaves below the sound of light.
More poetically, the dance of the colors makes a sound 40 octaves above what we can hear. Imagine that sound, singing so high that only angels can hear. Through the law of octaves, we can take the angel song, call it down to the place where we can play it on our instruments, and dance it on the earth.
This parenthetic departure is yet another attempt to explain how this project finds its tones and the individual scales of the light for each element of the human body.
This perhaps, with a little luck, will help explain that Nitrogen is in the Key of F#. Coincidentally, the visible spectrum is also an octave from F# to F#, only in the trillion Hertz range. Perhaps the Native American flute tuning is an intuitive reflection of the indigenous knowledge.
The colors and tones of Nitrogen:
| Angstrom | Nanometer (rounded) | Color | Element Scale Hz | Our Scale | Hertz | | 7468.31 | 747 | Dark red | 365.09 | F#4 | 369.99 | | 7442.29 | 744 | Dark red | 366.37 | | 6610.56 | 661 | Red | 412.46 | G#4 | 415.31 | | 6482.05 | 648 | Red | 420.64 | A4 | 440.00 | | 5941.65 | 594 | Orange | 458.9 | A#4 | 466.16 | | 5679.56 | 568 | Yellow green | 480.07 | | 5005.15 | 501 | Dark green | 544.76 | C#5 | 554.4 | | 4630.54 | 463 | Blue | 588.83 | D5 | 587.33 | | 4447.03 | 445 | Dark blue | 613.13 | | 3995.00 | 400 | Indigo | 682.50 | F5 | 698.5 |
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The work of Joseph Rael, Tsluu-teh-koh-ay, Beautiful Painted Arrow. Over the last few months I have been reading the work of Joseph Rael, a Southern Ute and Picuris Pueblo First Nation mystic and spiritual leader. I was attracted to the titles of his books, Sound; being and vibration: entering the new world; and House of…
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5-Boron-B Image explanation:An image reflecting the importance of boron as an essential mineral for plants. The tree and its strange metallic foliage ‘grow’ from a ‘pure’ dark powdered cone of the element. Appearance:Pure boron is a dark amorphous powder. Uses:Amorphous boron is used as a rocket fuel igniter and in pyrotechnic flares. It gives the…
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The Tones of Carbon By Commons:Robert Lavinsky – File:Diamond-and-graphite-with-scale.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39385953 This recording is a sketch of the tones of carbon done by Xochi John on cello, Maya Bennardo and me on violin. There are two versions, one that is instrumental and another with a voice over with a poem by Rumi. Maya…
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There is a delight in following a stream of thought, seeing where it meets the next body of thought and how they dance together. The following composition is with my daughter, Xochi John (cello), Larry Stephens (percussion) and me on violin. The field recording is simple and done as a single take. The poetry of…
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Rumi in the Key of Hydrogen Hydrogen, the most abundant element, the lightest known element, the element that is in every part of our body is the framework for this composition. As I work with the tones from the elements, I find a beautiful consonance between the colors. It is quite mind bending to step…
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After what seems like an inordinate amount of time, I have finished working through the elements of the human body. The question now is what to do with this body of work? Or is it, work of the body? While traveling in Europe the summer before last visiting a dear family friend, her partner…
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This is the last element in this series that I am analyzing. Lead, Pb, (plumbum-Latin), element 82 is the second heaviest stable element. It is soft, malleable, blue-white element that tarnishes quickly in moist air to a dark grey. It may be the first metal that was ever smelted at approximately 7,000 BCE. The Wikipedia…
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Gold is the 79th element and one of the heaviest naturally occurring elements. It has been known since ancient times and artifacts from the ancient Ur (modern Iraq) civilization have been found and dated to 3,800 BCE, or 5,800 years ago. It is a shiny, soft, yellowish red, heavy malleable and ductile element. A one-gram…
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Iodine is the 53rd element of the periodic table. It is a black, shiny, crystalline solid that melts at 237 degrees Fahrenheit, just above the boiling point of water and boils at 361 degrees Fahrenheit, a good temperature to roast beets. Interestingly, it is important in the stability of the ozone layer and there is…
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Molybdenum is the 42nd element in the periodic table. It was apparently known to the ancient civilizations, though was often mistaken for lead as they have similar appearances. It does not appear as a pure element in nature or an easily identifiable mineral, hence, there is no alchemical symbol for this element. More is written…
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Arsenic is a metalloid meaning that it has characteristics between a metal and non-metal. It is number 33 in the periodic table. The references to arsenic go back to ancient times with numerous cultures using arsenic compounds, it is rarely found in a pure state. Our name comes from the Greek. Zosimos, the Greek Alchemist,…
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Zinc is a metal and number 30 in the periodic table. The earliest record comes from India about 3,000 years ago. The alchemist, Paracelsus, is thought to have named the element. Alchemical names include philosopher’s wool and nix alba. In current metaphysical texts zinc is related to the planet Mercury, the heart chakra, heart, circulation,…
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