Stanley Jordan Plays the Periodical Table (Ionization Energies) 

Thanks Eric!

​@@StanleyJordanOfficialEric sent me too. He said you are hella goated and have many Ws. This video is both bussin and informative. Heck yeah bro thank you for it

I think most of us are 😄

me too :)

How original. You win.

Oh yes, the second movement (andante). I performed of it here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-upYc0-Ohqs8.html

You've opened the door here to a topic that greatly interests me. So far this project has been about using music to understand chemistry rather than the other way around. But I do think what you're suggesting could bear fruit if developed. The stage is set because we already have certain analogous hierarchies, such as molecules/atoms/subatomic particles being analogous to chords/tones/harmonics (or, more generally, partials). Also "tendency tones," tension- resolution, and "harmonic gravity" are analogous to chemical reactivity and physical gravity. So there's a lot to work with. Also my app is, essentially, a keyboard instrument, but why stop at the standard periodic table? Eric Weinstein offers a hipper version, Terrence Howard revisits Walter Russell's wave-oriented version, and any of these sound samples could be triggered from a music keyboard or from any other MIDI controller for that matter. So I think what you're saying is spot on.

this reminds me of the work Erv Wilson has done with making sounds for shapes..i just wish he was still alive, so that he can add more shapes to his app that he offered on ios..it would be interesting to see the periodic table added and mapped out to a specific pattern that shows when an elemental note repeats..

Thanks, but not currently pursuing a PhD in music. However, I would love to do just that--some day perhaps...

Organomettalics are, of course, compounds, and I did sonifications of the infrared spectra of about 400 compounds back in the 90s. That was on an old computer that died, and now you're inspiring me to rescue the data and get it going again. One interesting thing I remember is that water was the only one where the spectrum actually sounded like the thing itself. From that my ears told me that water is significant for its ability to carry a wide range of frequencies.

Please do....there's something there❤

Body ~86% water, water of the creator, resonate energy for creation

I'd love to hear water, before and after the introduction of shungite

I love this. And I think you can also say that chemistry is substantiated sound. Consider this: chemical elements and compounds are normally detected using spectroscopy, which is an analysis of frequencies.The ear actually does that better than the eye. The eye can only see about 1 "octave" of light, but the range of the ear is much greater.

@@StanleyJordanOfficialyou’ve stumbled yourself upon the truth my friend. Everything “physical” is just energy and information packets vibrating very slowly.

Great idea!

Typically the elements in the left column have a low note separated by a relatively large interval because we're just starting to fill the next outer orbital shell and this new shell so far only has one electron. That lone electron is farther from the nucleus than all the others, thus easier to remove from the atom. By definition that's a lower ionization energy, and therefore a lower musical pitch. Pretty cool, huh?

If you take just the first ionization energy of each element you find a clear pattern. Check out 8:19. In each row of the table the tones follow an overall ascending pattern, then they go back down again for the next row.

Yes, there's a lot there. I've also done some work on sonification of compounds, but this project here is just element ionization energies. In general there's lots of real data from the natural world that can serve as inputs to our musical creativity.

Yes. Éric Weinstein was so inspired by his work, I had to find that video 🥰

After I saw Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan I was inspired to change this video from unlisted to published. RU-vid reset the date, but the video is actually 3 years old. I'm glad that you found it interesting and that more people are starting to see my sonification work.

This is so cool. I'm here because Eric as well. Nice work!

@@StanleyJordanOfficial Immediately when I saw this I tried to search it up. I found your website.

​@@StanleyJordanOfficialyour page is probably going to blow up now.. something like 10 million people watch that Joe Rogan interview. Between the first and second one together 👍👍

Thanks for asking. This app can't be distributed in its current form because it only works in a very specific software environment. However, I'm getting lots of requests, so I'm looking at porting it to a more shareable form.

@@StanleyJordanOfficial I'm stonished, I always looked for something like this, would be very nice to be able to play around with it

@@StanleyJordanOfficial thanks for the update! I look forward to hearing about updates!

It feels like it could work on the web... I believe the APIs exist for sound generation

@@StanleyJordanOfficial please do, or if could elaborate about the specific environment to operate this, that too would be appreciated :).

Yes, like the sound of a beehive or a flying drone's propellers, it's a cluster of sounds with similar pitch.

What APL system were you using, and are you still using APL now?

Hi, thanks, and lots here to respond to. First, the app is not currently available--sorry. But I'm looking into that thanks to requests such as yours. Secondly, the intervals do tend to get smaller as we move toward heavier elements, but for a given element the interval structure is not based on a harmonic series. It's based more on the structure of the various orbital shells. But, make no mistake about it-there's lots of resonance, which you can hear by the predominance of consonant intervals such as octaves, thirds and fifths. Thirdly, these ionization energies correspond to mutually exclusive states, so they would not occur simultaneously within a given atom. I like to combine in a chord in order to hear their relationships, but that's just my choice in the sonification mapping. Finally, when I say hydrogen is F# I'm talking about the ionization energy, which corresponds to a frequency that is close to F# in a very high octave. Terrence Howard, on the other hand, is talking about resonant frequency which, for hydrogen, is a very high E natural, so in that sense Terrence is also correct.

@@StanleyJordanOfficial thanks for responding. I don't understand a lot about the periodic table but am desiring to learn how it musically works and connects to the universe. My expertise is music, not chemistry. With your comments, I can now research ionization energy. I'd not heard of that prior to your video. Thanks again for adding another layer of understanding to my deep dive into the periodic table.

Each element has a tone for each of its electrons. Each electron has an ionization energy, which corresponds to a frequency, and my app transposes that frequency down into the audible range. That's the gist of it.

Programming language: APL. The particular implementation I used was APLX/Windows. APL is by far the best array programming language. In APL everything is arrays--even your program code. All the primitives extend elegantly to arrays, which practically eliminates the need to write loops, thus substantially reducing programming errors. And the combination of APL's interactive interpreter, concise symbolic notation, rich suite of primitives, unparalleled array-handling, extensible syntax, and full object orientation makes it the holy grail of text-based programming in my opinion.

@@StanleyJordanOfficialcool. I’ve never done APL, but have been programming since the 90s. I’m obsessively reliant on arrays both in memory and on disk. I’ve thought I was weird for this, but maybe I should look at APL. Would love to collaborate in some way. Off the top of my head, making some version of this available on the web.

Your question doesn't even make sense. If you had what in your body? Are you asking if you could play these frequencies in your body to give it copper or vitamin D? If that's your question then the answer would be no. No, sound doesn't create elements in your body. I think, you're misunderstanding this video. The guy in the video is a musician and what he's presenting is art and not physic. The sounds have no relevant physical meaning. He's representing ionisation energies with certain frequencies of sound. Since that doesn't make sense physically he can do that any way he wants. Of course he does it in a way that makes us hear the sounds. But again there's no connection in physics or chemistry between those sounds and those elements. If you want to learn physics are chemistry then please buy a chemistry or physics book with lots of problem sets for you to solve. Not only will it be fun, but you'll also understand a lot more about the real substance of our world. The world become very weird and exciting when you go down to the level of atoms and subatomic particles. It's worth learning the basic of physics and chemistry also because when scientists talk about things like energy and frequency you actually understand what they are talking about.

Thanks! We could also have a parliamentary system and make you prime minister. But is that too complicated? 😊

Short answer: yes because that's just another arrangement of the elements. But I do see a problem where Russell lists elements before hydrogen. What would their ionization energies be?

@@StanleyJordanOfficial not sure was just wondering how the music arrangement would sound

Not yet but I'm working on it...

Terrence Howard's recent appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience have ignited a firestorm of polemic and controversy, but he has inspired millions of people to get newly excited about math and physics, and to see these subjects not as cold, boring, and strictly elitist, but rather as a rich and sacred ground for creativity, spirituality, and artistic expression. I agree with Eric Weinstein that we must maintain scientific rigor, but we can do so while still being open to useful contributions from outside the academy, so Terrence could potentially play a valuable role, particularly in engineering. But as president? Sorry, not feeling that. And I don't get the impression he'd want that gig.

The element with the highest resolution would definitely be hydrogen. With only one electron, it's just a single tone. But for sheer sonic beauty boron is my favorite. It's a B♭Maj9 chord (49:00). Titanium has some very clear, even stark, resonances. But keep in mind that these ionization energies are mutually exclusive states of an atom, so in the natural world they would not occur simultaneously as in a musical chord. That said, I don't think we're cheating to sonify them as chords because it's simply a way of representing the data. In the visual world we do this all the time, for example in a storyboard. In such cases I suppose we could say that our outcome is more epistomological than ontological.

Exactly

You might be able to relax by listening to this, but this doesn't heal anything. Your question doesn't even make sense and shows that you do not understand what he's doing here. This is art not science. He's a musician and not a physicist. He took the first ionisation energies of elements and asigned wavelenths to those ionisation energies. Yet you can't translate ionisation energies into sound waves. There's no connection in physics between ionisation energies and sounds. If anything you could asign a frequency to the photons that cause the ionisation, but that's not what he's doing. If you did that then you wouldn't be able to hear the sounds. Photons also have nothing to do with sounds. If you used photons of the correct wavelengths then those photons would be quite harmfull to human beings, since the would be in the UV range and above. You can see how our skin reacts to UV radiation, when you sit in the sun for too long. So, it doesn't mean anything to associate sound waves with chemical elements. And if you used the frequencies of the photons used to ionize those elements, then those would do the opposite of healing you, they would burn your skin. Physics and chemistry is fun. The best way to learn it is to go to school or by schoolbooks at the appropriate leven and do all the problems set (very important) and then progress to the next level from there.

@@stauffap To translate ionization energies into sound waves I calculate frequency from energy using Planck's energy-frequency relation: v=E/h where: v = frequency (in Hz, or cycles per second) E = energy in joules h = plank's constant (6.62607015e-34). This results in ultrasonic frequencies, so I then apply the law of octaves to transpose them into the audible range without changing pitch class. In the case of multiple electrons I repeat this process to obtain musical chords and scales. Example: The ionization energy of hydrogen is 13 electron volts, which converts to 2.0828e-18 joules. So, by the Planck relation we get the frequency 3.143341306e15 Hz. To transpose that down, say, 44 octaves we divide it by 2^44, giving us 178.68 Hz, which is approximately F# below middle C.

This project uses sound and music as a modality for understanding some of the physics underlying chemistry. At the end I gave some thoughts on applying it to both science and art, but I didn't touch on the topic of healing. There are some thoughts and links about that on my stanleyjordan .com Web site in the music therapy section.

@@stauffap that’s right I don’t understand I’m not a scientist that’s why I’m asking. Hellooo

I just made this for my own use in order to explore these sounds. It only runs within a limited software environment, but, but I'm getting lots of requests so I'm considering porting it to a more distributable form...

Sonification allows us to perceive data with our ears as well as our eyes, effectively making us smarter. Our ears are better suited to certain kinds of data, in particular frequency- and time-based information. We've all seen those 3D chemical models, but when you get into spectroscopy you realize that chemistry is largely about frequency. Also, the auditory nerve splits and goes directly to every major brain center, making us wired for sound more than for sight. The result is a more whole-brain experience, which I believe can also increase our powers of wisdom by integrating reason and intuition. I believe sonification (and musification) can directly address, and even heal, the negative side-effects of "ocular-centrism," or the unfair advantaging of vision over hearing, which I would argue kicked in with the Gutenberg Revolution and has been the bane of Modernity, dogging us still to this day. Plus you can get some cool sounds out of it. So that's why, basically.

@@StanleyJordanOfficial "I believe sonification (and musification) can directly address, and even heal, the negative side-effects of "ocular-centrism," or the unfair advantaging of vision over hearing, which I would argue kicked in with the Gutenberg Revolution and has been the bane of Modernity, dogging us still to this day." What? 😂