Isaac Newton's Lost Musical Insights

The father of gravity had some thoughts about music.

Music history is littered with great thinkers, bringing a broad range of unique perspectives to the exploration of the art form. But a name you might not expect to see on that list is Sir Isaac Newton, president of the Royal Society and leader of the Scientific Revolution. And for good reason: he pretty much never wrote about music. It wasn't an area particularly that interested him, and he rarely if ever listened to music for fun. But as a part of his well-rounded education, he did learn music *theory*, and a nearly-forgotten notebook from his college years tells us a lot about how he understood the subtle art of sound.

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[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:


2) If you're curious, the scale Newton thinks is just as usable as Lydian is what we would today call Aeolian Dominant, or Mixolydian b6. Melodic minor is also on his list, and it's his second-favorite of the non-Greek Mode options, but not enough that he's willing to argue for it over Lydian.

3) Typically, the breakdown of just intonation ratios goes the other way, starting with the 1:2 octave and dividing it into smaller chunks, but like I said Newton was very interested in patterns of different kinds of half-steps, so showing a bottom-up approach seemed appropriate.

4) I should note that, in practice, most music of the era was made with a compromise system called meantone tuning, not directly on just intonation. However, meantone was specifically viewed and developed _as_ a compromise, not as its own alternate philosophy of consonance: It existed specifically to solve practical issues in the implementation of the idealized principles of just intonation. Equal temperament also started that way, but I would argue that in modern practice it has genuinely developed into a self-contained philosophy in a way that, to the best of my knowledge, meantone never did.

[aaronspeedy]

Euler also did some really interesting things with music. Interestingly enough, he wanted to eventually make music a sub-field of math.

[beatrixwickson]

So much great creativity can come from lockdowns. But Newton's Annus Mirabilis and Bo Burnham's Inside are the top two IMO.

[gwalla]

As an aside, Turkish music theory actually uses an equal division of the octave into 53 units ("koma") as a measurement of interval size.

[Dyslexiexia]

really lovely how you say "an instrument" and drew a theremin at 0:57. that puppy is definitely An Instrument

[ActiveAdvocate]

OPTICS: the only subject in school my best friend ever truly sucked at. Why? She's blind. She's literal genius and awesome at everything else, but please, anyone, try explaining colour to a friend, even a fully sighted friend. Bet you can't do it without using comparative language (i.e. dark, bright, vivid, etc.). You and I (if you're not blind) have visual context for those words, but you kind of NEED comparative language to describe colour, so if you don't know what the words mean, you CAN'T grasp colour.

[jacoballessio]

Im a programmer and love math. It is interesting how much applies to music. Math and music are deeply connected

[j_murdoch]

This was really insightful. It's a bit different from the usual videos, but I really enjoyed it. I'd love to see more like this.

[michaelcherry]

Well, we've established that 12tone has watched both The Prisoner (4:10) and Rocky & Bullwinkle (5:47)

[teucer]

A lot of the folk music in Newton's day probably used the mixolydian scale (ionian and dorian being very common also, aeolian probably less so), so whatever abstract reasons he had for preferring it, he was also justifying a preference for something familiar.

[forrcaho]

The grid pattern Newton put the notes into is an example of a "tonnetz", which is a word that can be searched on to bring up all sorts of interesting resources.

[CSGraves]

Non-mathematician here, just wanted to express my appreciation for the monotile at 3:55 😀

[eleanorsparks]

For my final quarterly project in science we get to make a project about any one of our interests, with the idea being for us to do something we're passionate about at the end of the year. The only other criterions are that we 1. connect it back to science in some way, and 2. do a presentation with literally anything other than a slide show.

For my topic, I chose to talk about tuning and temperament, more specifically the evolution of it. I found this video a while back but just stumbled upon it again while looking at one of your other videos about temperament, and I wanted to say thank you for giving me another source to talk about music with. I really enjoy your videos in general, and have been watching them for a while at this point, and the fact that I now get to use your video as an additional source for my project is really cool. It also means I get to tie in both Pythagorean AND Einstein, which will at least be familiar names to the non-musicians in my class that have to hear this, lmao.

[adb]

Fabulous stuff. I knew of Newton's musical dabblings, but I didn't know the details! So, thank you for giving them the 12tone rundown.

A pity there wasn't a second plague to squeeze out his ideas on how to change scales mid song!

And as for 11:33...It could be that by "the half step being more central", he means more central to the scale/ to the octave (not the root and fifth). And by "greater distance from it", the 'it' could mean the root (not the fifth). But I'm just trying to make it work, and it absolutely sounds like a confusing contradiction, exactly how you interpreted it!
(and contrary to his other thought patterns/ justifications/ values, ie regarding the importance of how things relate to the fifth)

[colonelsanders]

For the inconsistencies and stuff, all I know is that when I was in college, if I had to write an essay about something outside of my area of interest/expertise, it would definitely be kinda poorly scrapped together with a healthy dose of bs-ing. Heck even on things I cared about there still would be things that aren’t actually correct

[joellenwest]

Thank you for putting so much thought and effort into this— so worth it for us!

[DrMedioPato]

Best Newton’s contribution to music was the design of the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon

[MrTerrorFace]

I love how the drawing of the doubt face resembles Cilian Murphy's role as Oppenheimer.

[kimjunkmoon]

12:00 I think he means that the half step between the 6 and b7 is equally spaced between the fifth and the octave, instead of having it be next to the fifth (b6) or next to the octave (major 7th).

[rehnahvah]

9:53 The middle of the two scales reminds me of the Ballad of the Wind Fish from Link's Awakening