Most of the students are humanities and arts concentrators, but some are from physics and engineering and music. The discussion below is condensed from the first lecture. But despite the seeming opposite appeals of physics and music, there are many connections. Music is a way of playing with physics, the physics of sound and vibrations. Like physics, music can be highly mathematical and ordered in its structure.
Music often depicts the feelings that come to humans when experiencing physical events.
Like a musical masterpiece, physics is a complex structure based on simple rules or motifs. The core phenomena in both fields are based on waves and resonances. This course tries to elaborate many of these connections between physics and music. The course presents very little math, a lot of demonstrations, a lot of physically intuitive arguments, and a lot of music to be played in class. There are some formulas, but they mainly are intended to show how measurable things vary and depend on each other, not to give practice in plugging in numbers.