[math-fun] Rock music, math & extraterrestrials
From NPR's "Fresh Air":
Terry Gross spoke with Queen lead guitarist *Brian May* in 2010 about recording the many vocals in 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' writing the anthem 'We Will Rock You' and getting a ***PhD in astrophysics***. https://16683.mc.tritondigital.com/NPR_381444908/media-session/dd64f39b-11e9... ----- According to Queen guitarist & astrophysicist Brian May, the stomping sound in the original recording of 'We Will Rock You' involved summing a multiplicity of recordings of stomping but with differing delays of *prime numbers*. Presumably, this fact could be confirmed by some sort of matched filtering using FFT's on this recording. ----- This human sound artifact falls into the bizarre category of "better than real", because it would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to organize a real crowd to stand only at prime number distances from the stage. Another example is that of ancient Greek temple columns, which are NOT absolutely straight, but are elegantly curved to *appear* straight in their actual setting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entasis "An early view, often articulated and still widespread, espoused by Hero of Alexandria, is that *entasis* corrects the optical illusion of concavity in the columns that the fallible human eye would create if the correction were not made." ----- I think that incorporating something "better than real" into a signal would alert an intelligent receiver that the sender not only understood the reality, but was also capable of "hacking it" until it became real-er than real. This sort of signal is probably more likely to catch the attention of some extraterrestrial than some of the silliness that has been previously proposed. For example, what if someone on Earth computed the hologram which would *correct* for the gravitational lensing in some far-off galaxy. Then the Earth's signal would stand out like a sore thumb in any statistical analysis of the incoming photon data.
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Henry Baker