Noise to Music

Friends -
This is the second in a series I am making about the visual dimensions of music. I am regretting that I did not continue with the music lessons of my childhood and I think it is too late to become skilled at piano, violin or guitar. But I can pick up where I left off in my physics lessons and try to understand more about mapping music out in three dimensional coordinate space. For example, if you follow the math, music made of chords containing only two notes map out into the shape of a Mobius strip. Kind of trippy. Kind of fun. It will take some study and I have a long way to go, but I can pretend with some of these rather exotic gourds of which I have a few.

This one is a club gourd that my daughter, Rosa, gave me about 9 years ago. Kind of cave-man like. But even cave men began to develop music for one purpose or another. It probably began with making noise by pounding to signal for welcomes or warnings. At some point it changed from just plain noise and began to have patterns of rhythm, and plucking of strings and blowing in reeds began to join the thumping of drums. To account for that I hollowed the long end of this club-like drum for blowing, and added some colored fishing line for plucking -- although please don't try either of those on this one!

Some may of you may remember that I talked about losing a finger over a gourd that was so hard to clean. Well it was this one. Notice the end of the narrow part of this gourd forms fingers? It used to have a really GREAT finger that had an exquisite curl and was a beautiful part of the music-gourd design. Until it broke. But if I had to lose any finger at all, I guess that was the best one to lose. At least I can still type!!!

I hope all is well with all of you. Life is good to me these days.

margie lopez read

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