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| August 4, 2006
Making music add up BY JACOB SHAFER
“As a kid, I was terrible at math,” admits Loy. “I flunked freshman algebra and had to take it again. I found that mathematics was like a lion in my path. Math was always in the way of what I needed to know to make the kind of music I wanted to make. I eventually discovered the reason for this: Music is really a branch of mathematics, or vice versa. This scared me, as you might expect.” A handful of decades later, Loy has penned a book called Musimathics, which, as the title suggests, is a melding of music and math, a way for the layperson to better understand the many places where the two disciplines overlap. “Musimathics is the book I wanted that junior high school librarian to hand me,” says Loy. “It’s written so you can pick it up as you go; everything you need is introduced as you need it. All I count on is some exposure to music and a little algebra you picked up in high school. Every equation is explained in English and described with figures.” For Loy, the divide between music and math is not nearly as wide as many might think, though he does admit that left-brained artists don’t typically ace trigonometry. “There is a constant tension between the requirements of an artist and the more pragmatic side of things,” he acknowledges. “The idea that one could do research in music is not widely understood, but that’s what I do nonetheless.” Loy is the child of two amateur musicians. Through them, he was exposed to an array of influences, including opera, black gospel, folk and jazz. As a young boy, he sang in the church choir and gave solo violin recitals with his mother at the keyboard. But he also had a scientific mind. “I was one of those kids who takes apart their parents’ alarm clock to see how it works,” Loy remembers. As an adult, Loy’s career path has been as varied as it has been interesting. He did an 18-month stint in the Peace Corps in the late ’60s, where he says he spent his time as a “freelance musical ambassador,” playing a 12-string guitar for appreciative audiences in rural India. He received his musical arts doctoral degree from Stanford in 1980, and did graduate work there in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He spent a decade teaching at UC San Diego, where he served as director of research at the Center for Music Experiment. He has served as a programmer, software architect and digital engineer for various Silicon Valley firms. And he’s also president of Gareth, Inc., a company he started in 1989 to provide technology consulting and expert witness testimony for cases involving music, audio and software. Even with this impressive and lengthy résumé, he considers Musimathics to be his crowning achievement. “Musimathics has taken me 10 years to write,” he says of the critically acclaimed book. “What I think is so important about it is the fact that, for the first time, the fundamental ideas about music have been gathered into one place and organized as a linear narrative. Readers get a path that they can travel in comfort, perhaps even in style.” Volume I of Musimathics, which deals with the materials, properties and perception of music and sound and with music composition, is currently in stores. Volume II, which Loy says will focus on digital audio, is due out in about six months. In many ways, Loy’s life journey has been a unique one to this point, blending the practical with the esoteric. But as cutting edge as his ideas and techniques may be, Loy insists he’s only the latest in a long line of math/music trailblazers. To illustrate the point, he tells the story of Harry Partch, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito in the 1940s and ‘50s and built an entire orchestra of instruments to play a new musical scale he’d invented. “He called himself, ‘a composer seduced into carpentry,’ “ says Loy. “I suppose by the same reasoning, I’m a composer seduced into mathematics.” PHOTO BY ROBERT VENTE: Years ago, Loy realized that music was really a branch of mathematics. ‘This scared me,” he says. |
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When Gareth Loy was 11 years old, he walked into the library of his local junior high school and asked the librarian if she had a book that could explain the inner workings of his violin. The librarian sent the curious youngster to a nearby university, where he was confronted with a dusty shelf of volumes focused on mechanical physics and acoustics, all of which required some advanced calculus. Thwarted, he walked away in frustration. |
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