Music, maths, and aliens

[pood]

This thread was inspired by a light derail in the thread about famous classic movies you have never seen.

It involves the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which string-bean aliens manage to communicate with humans via music. The claim was made that this is because the mathematical structure of music will be intelligible to all technological aliens regardless of their evolutionary background.

These claims are strongly contested here, in chapter five of a book by Norman Swartz, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Simon Fraser University. He argues that it is highly unlikely that intelligent aliens would share our taste or comprehension of music, but even more important, it is quite possible that maths are not universal and that their maths and ours might be utterly incomprehensible to each other. He specifically addresses Close Encounters.

He makes a number of other intriguing points, including that own particular brands of maths, science, music, and the arts in general were hardly inevitable. Note his discussion about Newton and the concept of mass.

This chapter of the book and indeed the entire book is a master class in advanced analytic philosophy, which guarantees that @steve_bank will find it useless.

 

[steve_bank]

There is scifi fictional plot devices that are not likely, yes.

But, that does lead into communications.

Our music does have mathematical structure. If we knew nothing about music and had a library of ET music we would find the math behind it and conclude an intelligence.

In western music tempered tuning, scales, modulation. But there is also unstructured music.

I'd say possible.

How would two alien species learn to communicate? Sounds(words), punctures, gestures, facial expressions.


STNG had an interesting episode. Enterprise meets an ET who communicate in metaphor.

The ET places Pickard and the ET captain in a dangerous situation to provide a common experience to begin understanding ET metaphors.

Morse Code is an example. Groups of non verbal sounds for characters and numbers.

Drum communications.

Drums in communication - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Talking drum

While the tone and articulation of the hourglass-shaped talking drum can be finely controlled, it cannot be heard at distances beyond a gathering or market-place, and it is primarily used in ceremonial settings.[2] Ceremonial functions could include dance, rituals, story-telling and communication of points of order.

Some of the groups of variations of the talking drum among West African ethnic groups:

Slit gongs
Message drums, or more properly slit gongs, with hollow chambers and long, narrow openings that resonate when struck, are larger all-wood instruments hollowed out from a single log. Slit-log drums are common in the drum communication systems of Papua New Guinea, where they are known in Tok Pisin as garamut.[4] Variations in the thickness of the walls give varying tones when struck by the heavy wooden drum sticks. While some are simple and utilitarian, they can also be highly elaborate works of sculpture while still retaining their function.

Under ideal conditions, the sound can be understood at five to eleven kilometres (3–7 mi),[5] but interesting messages usually get relayed on by the next village. Drums used by the Bulu people of Cameroon might be heard as far away as 10 to 15 miles at night, compared to three to four during daytime.[6]

Philosophically and aesthetically music is non verbal communication.

 

[steve_bank]

A blast from the past. Great movie scene.

Google Search

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

I find this implausible for two reasons. Firstly our basic maths is based on nature and physics.
Secondly, we ourselves have variant forms of maths, many of which are incomprehensible to an ordinary person.
In regard to the music question, sound is a form of energy. If aliens have computers and sensors they can convert sound to other energy forms, just like we do with radio transmissions of sounds. Also we have many other forms of energy conversion.

The above is a reply to the OP post in this thread, which is a copy of my post that was in the thread that this thread is a divergence from.
Incidentally, in doing this I discovered that CAN quote a thread that is in one thread and post that quoted response in a different thread.

 

[Bronzeage]

It will be just our luck that the first alien species to make contact with Earth will be a race of arthropods similar ants, which are deaf to airborne sound waves, so when we start the mix tape, all they will sense is the bass thumping through the ground.

They will certainly be confused when we show no reaction to their carefully formulated "We come in peace" pheromone.

 

[pood]

The movie Arrival explores the theme of communicating with extraterrestrials hugely different from ourselves, and also aliens who remember the future. Great sci-fi and philosophical movie.

 

[Swammerdami]

I am not generally a fan of sci-fi, so dislike Close Encounters. (I DO like Deja Vu and Ghost where sci-fi or supernatural is introduced to make a good story rather than for its own sake.) I agree that the brief melody meme in Close Encounters is silly, BUT the aliens already knew enough about humans (acoustic sense, musical scales) to adopt such a meme. Thinkers like Carl Sagan seem to imagine a sense of acoustic beauty to be universal, sending a recording of Bach on the Voyager probes. ("Messages" to aliens in the 1970's were famous. Are there better (smarter) messages developed today?)

I'm afraid I find much to disagree with in the chapter linked by OP. To start with the trivial: The ancient Babylonians DID have a place-value number system. I posted an image of and explained Plimpton 322 a few months ago. Moreover, abaci -- where beads are arranged into place-value representation -- were in widespread use in various places long before the Hindu "invention of zero."

More importantly, the idea that a high-tech civilization might have mathematical physics completely different from ours seems very wrong to me. We have various models, but solution always takes the form of differential equations. It would be a big challenge to develop the simplest math notions without a common language, but once this is done our mathematicians and the aliens could zoom ahead and start discussing the Riemann Hypothesis.

I think Eugene Wigner absolutely agrees with this in his famous essay, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". I am happy to agree that Isaac Newton was a mathematical physicist of incomparable talent but it is an exaggeration to imagine the world waited many centuries just for him. Newton had contemporaries making similar discoveries (Leibniz, Gregory, Fermat, Huygens, etc.) and "stood on the shoulders of giants."

 

[pood]

I am not generally a fan of sci-fi, so dislike Close Encounters. (I DO like Deja Vu and Ghost where sci-fi or supernatural is introduced to make a good story rather than for its own sake.) I agree that the brief melody meme in Close Encounters is silly, BUT the aliens already knew enough about humans (acoustic sense, musical scales) to adopt such a meme. Thinkers like Carl Sagan seem to imagine a sense of acoustic beauty to be universal, sending a recording of Bach on the Voyager probes. ("Messages" to aliens in the 1970's were famous. Are there better (smarter) messages developed today?)

I'm afraid I find much to disagree with in the chapter linked by OP. To start with the trivial: The ancient Babylonians DID have a place-value number system. I posted an image of and explained Plimpton 322 a few months ago. Moreover, abaci -- where beads are arranged into place-value representation -- were in widespread use in various places long before the Hindu "invention of zero."

More importantly, the idea that a high-tech civilization might have mathematical physics completely different from ours seems very wrong to me. We have various models, but solution always takes the form of differential equations. It would be a big challenge to develop the simplest math notions without a common language, but once this is done our mathematicians and the aliens could zoom ahead and start discussing the Riemann Hypothesis.

I think Eugene Wigner absolutely agrees with this in his famous essay, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". I am happy to agree that Isaac Newton was a mathematical physicist of incomparable talent but it is an exaggeration to imagine the world waited many centuries just for him. Newton had contemporaries making similar discoveries (Leibniz, Gregory, Fermat, Huygens, etc.) and "stood on the shoulders of giants."

Note though that the author is heavily qualifying everything he writes on this subject and not insisting that his claims are correct. This is a widely used philosophical approach to many subjects.

Here is a much fuller treatment:

How aliens do math

 

[pood]

Hah, this is pretty cool

 

[unapologetic]

The auditory systems of aliens (even assuming they hear stuff) and brain organization would almost certainly be so different from ours that they would fail to understand our music at all.

As I remember Close Encounters, There was no 'music' in the film. Just harmonic tones. The 4 tones were first introduced by the aliens. We did not inturpet them. ("Ice cream"?) No understanding, No dialog took place. We just mimiked the tones.
I haven't seen the film in decades, maybe I am misremembering it.

Further, Our music contains no info at all, that is even ment for anyone to understand. Our music is just to elisit emotions/feelings. Not conversation. The disconnect would be with our use of music. Not the aliens.

Q: Is there a consistant connection between a note's frequency and it's position on the musical scale?
I think there would need to be for music to be used for math or comnunication.

 

[unapologetic]

I once fantasized about making a sci-fi musical featuring aliens who use music as their language. Title: "Space Opera". The gimic being it would be bi-lingual. The human audiance would hear english songs, and the alien audience would hear their tune dialog, at the same time. Better than subtitles.
Of course I am not capable of making it. (Oh, yeah, ...and we havent met those aliens.)

 

[WAB]

The auditory systems of aliens (even assuming they hear stuff) and brain organization would almost certainly be so different from ours that they would fail to understand our music at all.

As I remember Close Encounters, There was no 'music' in the film. Just harmonic tones. The 4 tones were first introduced by the aliens. We did not inturpet them. ("Ice cream"?) No understanding, No dialog took place. We just mimiked the tones.
I haven't seen the film in decades, maybe I am misremembering it.

Further, Our music contains no info at all, that is even ment for anyone to understand. Our music is just to elisit emotions/feelings. Not conversation. The disconnect would be with our use of music. Not the aliens.

Q: Is there a consistant connection between a note's frequency and it's position on the musical scale?
I think there would need to be for music to be used for math or comnunication.

The end of the film, when the mother ship arrives, there is a whole sequence of call and answer with the humans' Moog synthesizer and the vessel, culminating when the computer takes over and the "conversation" proceeds into incomprehensibility (unless you're a musical genius, I suppose).

 

[Swammerdami]

Any life that evolved from non-life will be very similar to our own -- based on protein and probably some relative of nucleic acid. There might be life that operates with electronic circuitry, electric motors and so on, but it would have been created by carbon-based life: it couldn't have evolved by itself. (Of course it might be self-sustaining with its carbon-based creators already extinct for millions of years.)

Whatever the physical differences might be, any aliens with high-tech will be familiar with arithmetic, trigonometry, calculus, equations of motion, etc. Uncertain is what math inessential to high-tech they've explored. Would they have bothered with esoteric topics in cardinal numbers? Maybe not, if they followed this advice:

I know that the great Hilbert said, "We will not be driven out of the paradise Cantor has created for us,"and I reply,"I see no reason for walking in!" ...
Many years ago, as I was picking up a paper to read on the non-computable numbers,I suddenly realized that no one could ever come into my office and ask for a non-computable number. If they never can occur,why bother? So I threw the article in the waste basket unread!

The best part of Pood's "pretty cool" cite above is the bibliography at its end. It references
* Hamming's essay (which agrees with me) and includes the quote above.
* A book by Roger Penrose. (I downloaded the book but am afraid I won't have time to read it.)
* "ET Math: How different could it be?", a 1-hour lecture by John Stillwell. One of his examples is how even Newton spoke of "rectangle" rather than "product". (This demonstrates that aliens might be better at math than humans I guess.) At about 46:50 he compares Ruelle's views with Hamming's, taking Ruelle's side. I lost interest when he described Hamming's "Mathematics on a Distant Planet" as "written by a cranky old man."
* A Chapter by David Ruelle for which I found a LaTeX file.

I had the greatest difficulty with her first statement, that

``\dots to appreciate human mathematics you have to understand
how peculiar the human intellect is, compared with that of the ancient
civilizations of the Galaxy.''

``How on earth can you say such a thing'' I answered, ``and
what right have you to say that the mind of a human is more peculiar than
that of a slimy galactic superoctopus?''

``Why in the galaxy don't you use your brains! Think how
primitive a machine your Personal Computer is, yet it completely outwits
you on simple mathematical problems like deciding if a ten digit number is an
exact square. You can imagine that an ancient civilization would have
fixed such intellectual inadequacies by assisted coevolution, biological
engineering, and so on. I shan't go into details, as they might greatly
upset you.''

``You mean that human civilization too will \dots?''

``Yes, if human civilization survives to become ancient.''

After that we argued, point by point, what made the human
brain so {\it peculiar}. Pallas made some comparisons between humans and
slimy galactic superoctopi, but these comparisons made little sense to
me. So she replaced galactic beasts by human computers, with which I am
more familiar. ``These computers are really very stupid things'', she said,
``but they already give a good idea of features desirable for doing
mathematics, and which are not possessed by the human brain''....