Rolf Bader - How Music Works: A Physical Culture Theory

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is about how music, and therefore, how art and culture work: as a self-organizing system. Such systems maintain a low level of entropy or a high level of order. All living systems, men, animals, or plants are self-organizing. They are maintaining their lives through self-organizing processes. So do music, art, and culture. The book tries to show this in the field of music on a physical basis, in musical acoustics, music psychology and brain research, and music ethnology, the music from all over the world.

Therefore, this book introduces a Physical Culture Theory exemplified with music, showing how musical instruments work, how their sound is processed in self-organizing brain structures, how conscious content appears in humans, and how this is dealt with in the music around the world.

Energy and entropy are closely aligned. A steam engine has a tank filled with heated water. So there is a lot of energy in this water. Still, to use the heat for driving the engine, there needs to be cold air outside the tank. Only because of the difference in pressure and heat inside and outside the tank, this pressure and heat wants to get out of the tank. If outside the tank, the same pressure and heat would be present, the steam in the tank would not move out and could not be used for doing work, for driving the engine. Therefore, no matter how much energy there is, the energy needs some kind of order, low entropy, to perform work. With the steam engine, order means that not the same temperature and pressure exist all over the place, but that there is a region of high pressure, the tank, and a region of low pressure, outside the tank.

The sun provides the earth with heat, which gives life to everything. Still, on Mars, the sun shines too without any life up there. The reason Mars is dead is that Mars has nearly no atmosphere, no plants, animals, or any other self-organizing being with a very complex molecular structure to keep entropy low. There is an endless cascade of processes, structures, and performances of living beings to lower the entropy as much as possible. Physics tells us that entropy always increases. Disorder always wins. Still, life on earth slows down this increase of entropy by beings that take the energy and use it for maintaining their own lives, self-organize in a way to maintain their very complex structures. Energy does not arise from nowhere or from nothing and does not vanish into nowhere or into nothing. It is only changing its nature, from heat to force, from speed to height, etc. Still, within this process, the energy is distributed more and more equally over a spatial field, it lowers its order, entropy increases. Of course, in the end, all energy is distributed equally. Entropy has won. Still, life on earth slows down that increase of entropy tremendously, with its endless diversity of plants, animals, humansand culture. On Mars, the suns energy heats the Mars surface during the daytime, which cools down at night nearly entirely again. Therefore, entropy has maximized within one day. On earth, trees take over the suns energy, grow wood and leaves, storing energy in complex structures, maintaining low entropy, sometimes for millions of years as oil or gas.