Today was a math-y kind of day. I’m working on the final project for this semester’s film composition class which is to write music synchronized with an imaginary movie scene. We were each given a sheet which describes when particular events happen on-screen, and we were asked to write music which follows those events. This involves some tricky math because the language of film timing (hours, minutes, seconds and frames) is very different from the language of music timing (tempo, meter, beats and measures). These days, the software which film composers use can take care of most of the calculations necessary to convert between film timing and music timing, but I wanted to make sure I really understood what was going on, so I made a spreadsheet.

Once I completed the spreadsheet, it allowed me to experiment with the music timing to make it fit with the film timing. I have to admit that I was reminded today that spreadsheets are wonderfully fun, magical things to me! I’m sure that if I had to stare at them day-in and day-out I wouldn’t feel the same way, but today I smiled every time I changed the tempo of my music and saw the effects ripple through the numbers. I was never a stellar math student so I was happy to discover how straight-forward the calculations were to me and I was surprised how much fun I had pulling them apart to see how they worked. As I thought about this today it made me realize that it’s not numbers alone that are interesting to me, but the way numbers make explicit the connections and relationships between them that fascinates me, and this is especially true when the numbers represent something which is real to me.

When I was a freshman in college, I tried to double-major in music and physics. At the time, they were the two subjects I was most interested in. Music had been a central part of my identity since I was at least seven years old, and physics was something that always fascinated me and I was encouraged by one of my older sisters who is a physicist. What got in my way was math and a small-minded physics advisor. “First of all,” the advisor assigned to me said, “music and physics don’t have anything in common.” This is laughable to me now, but at the time I was an overwhelmed freshman and it never occurred to me that I could question a professor! “Secondly, you will need to spend your first two summers in summer school to catch up on math.”

I had done very poorly on the math placement exam at the start of college and was put in a pre-calculus math class where the material was all review to me. Halfway through the semester, seeing that the class was no challenge to me at all, my math instructor asked me why I was in there, and the only answer I had was that the wise, all-knowing university had put me there! Looking back, I could have questioned the placement results (I was so nervous during the exam that my basic arithmetic went out the window) but again, who was I to question?

In the end, my physics advisor pressured me to choose physics or music, so I chose music, in part to spite him. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in “do overs” in life, but I do think that I would have had a lot of fun in that double major. Just like I observed in my number play today, I love connections and relationships between things, especially things which appear to have little in common.

Sometimes I look at my colleagues in my film composition class and I envy the depth of their knowledge in particular areas which I lack, but I have to remind myself that we all bring different strengths to this work. One of mine is a natural attraction to and facility with connections and relationships, whether they be musical, technical, numerological or personal.