The Alchemy of Design and the Sound of Music

The Design and the Designer – Part 7

In the last post, I made some observations about the process of Architecture – very briefly I stated that Architecture is the process of bringing meaning to space, and expressing the meaning in terms of certain engineering transformations, which transform the problem into an engineering problem.

The process of design – transforming ‘meaning’ into a set of engineering problems is very analogous to music composition. The difference between music and sound is the same as the difference between a sweet home and a concrete building. Therefore, let’s try and understand how music is composed. Later, we will define what engineering really is, and then I shall describe the relationship between design and engineering.

It is very simple to explain the physics of Sound. Sound is produced when two objects make contact with each other. Sound consists of a series of waves that ‘move’ the air in a particular way. The two major characteristics of Sound are its amplitude and frequency plotted on a time scale. That’s pretty much it.

What is Music? What makes certain sounds musical and certain other types of sounds non-musical? Can we say that Music is the sound we like? What do we ‘mean’ by liking? We use many different ‘esoteric’ words associated with Music, but not with Sound – words like melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, beauty and balance.

A music composer somehow ‘transforms’ these musical attributes into a set of sound waves. The music theory build up over thousands of years provides some guide lines of how this transformation could be achieved. The music theory – whether it is western music, or Indian music theory – is a body of knowledge that codifies how music can be produced using sound. This body of knowledge can be divided into two distinct categories – the first category enables a music composer to ‘recognize’ his/her creative impulse. This is the body of knowledge that deals with recognizing music. This body of knowledge does not talk about frequencies, amplitude or rhythm, but it deals with characterizing the emotional qualities of music, and tries to categorize them.

In Indian Music – the concept of Raga for example deals with systematizing the ‘melody’ into a set of information structures. A Raga is therefore nothing but a shared understanding of melody and how to express it objectively. For those who are not familiar with Indian Classical music, here is a very brief explanation of Raga.

A Raga defines a set of melodic patterns and a melodic structure. For example, if you take a Raga like Mohanam – it is used to express the feelings of love and romance. Love and Romance are very ‘semantic’ concepts. What the Raga manages to do is to transform these concepts into a melodic structure and a set of melodic patterns. So, a composer whose creative impulse connects him with love or romance, he can then use the codified body of knowledge of Raga Mohanam, and compose music in that Raga.

Melodic Structure: This deals with the ‘rasa’ or ‘experience’ of music. There are about nine primary ‘rasas’ and another nine sub categories. There are all kinds of permutations and combinations of these primary experiences are possible, but any composition’s melodic aspects can be explained using these ‘rasas’. Apart from the Rasas, there is a ‘presentation’ aspect of the experience. The presentation is further divided into three categories: Majestic, Mellifluous, Simple (the Sanskrit Terms are Ghana Ragas, Rakti Ragas and Desi Ragas).

Melodic Patterns: The human ear is apparently very logarithmic. All music uses a concept of Octave. An octave is a predefined set of ‘notes’ or ‘frequencies’. The most frequently used octave all over the world uses 12 notes. Basically, you start from a certain base frequency, and keep increasing the frequency for every subsequent note, and by the time the octave is completed, you would have doubled the original frequency. Basically a Raga is a particular subset from an octave (7, 6 or 5 notes). It defines how to move back and forth along the octave (called Ascent and Descent). It also defines certain relationships between the notes – these are called ‘sangati’ and ‘sancharam’. In other words, a Raga defines – purely theoretically – a certain ‘musical movement’ (chalan), and also gives a set of ‘musical phrases’ that could be used to create a certain type of experience. A ‘raga’ therefore defines both the melodic structure and the melodic pattern.

The beauty of a raga is that it is just a pattern – without any ‘fixed’ compositional aspect to it. The same pattern can be used in millions of different ways – giving rise to a wide variety of compositions. A raga is thus a design pattern or a ‘semantic abstraction’. In the same way that a bird does not exist any where in the physical world, but there are millions of manifestations of the bird, a raga has no physical existence – it is just a useful abstraction.

The second category of Music Composition is closer to the characteristics of sound – and this acts a bridge between the musical characteristics and sound characteristics. For example, almost all musical traditions have a concept of an octave and beat cycles. An octave is an information structure and a very useful abstraction. (Please refer to my earlier posts for a detailed discussion on abstraction, semantic types and concepts). This body of knowledge of basically deals with the structural aspects of music composition.

Music composition therefore is very similar to design and engineering. There is an understanding of meaning and transforming that understanding into a set of structural transformations. Perhaps this is the reason why architecture is followed by structural engineering, and there is a very strong connection between architecture and structural engineering.

In the next post, we will define structural engineering, and its relationship to design and architecture.