The Sound and the Theory

Beneath the clashing plates, the clinking silverware and the yells in John Jay dining hall there is a whirr, a buzz, a drone emanating from the machinery that sustains the food factory—from heaters and coolers, lights and vents. No matter how loud the white noise is in 207 Mathematics, you manage to put it into the back of your mind, focusing instead on the unintelligible mumbling of your Linear Algebra professor. But the notes and harmonies produced by these drones unconsciously set the tone of conversations—and test scores.

White noise harmonies are everywhere, and while few will ever stop to ponder their significance, their effects have been the subject of debate since the beginning of Western thought, when Plato condemned all but the Phrygian and Dorian modes as dangerous to public health. More recently, the 1950s witnessed musicologist Deryck Cooke's classic attempt to provide a systematic account of the relationship between music and the emotions. As anyone who has spent finals season wading through the sea of campers in Butler knows, Columbia is not famous for fostering a high level of mental health. But, could sound be the reason behind this? Were the dissonances lurking in the white noise the reason for Primal Screams and Butler breakdowns? Armed with a pitch pipe and a copy Cooke's Language of Music, I set about campus, desperate for the ideal study space.

My search began in the behemoth of glass and steel that is our student center. Trekking up to Tasti D-Lite Lounge seemed like a logical choice for pouring over Contemporary Civilizations's deep philosophical treatises. But alas! A dissonant war between the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola vending machines had broken out, producing a most excruciating augmented fourth, or, as a medieval composer would call it, Diabolus in Musica, an interval so reviled that no one would use it for fear of divine retribution.

So, fearing the eternal, harmful effects of this dissonance on my well-tuned corpus, I retreated down the ramps to Café 212 in hopes of finding peace. It was late, so all of the kiosks had closed up and all that I could hear was a dominant seventh produced by the dormant refrigerators and the ceiling vents, which evoked the feeling that Cooke correctly identified as mourning and loss. These dirge-like tones reminded me of 602 Hamilton Hall, where two buzzes from the vent and one whine from the fluorescent lighting created an inversion of the dominant seventh chord, like the heartbreaking twang of Robert Johnson's Crossroad Blues—the perfect atmosphere for Civilization and its Discontents.

Solace was not to be found in the titanic, industrial building that is Pupin Physics Laboratories, which exuded Cooke's "stoic" variety of depression. The Physics Library, sitting far above the Manhattan Project's forgotten beginnings, seemed to resonate only a monotonous A. Upon close inspection, however, the bowels of the building emanated a deep pulsing C, creating a minor third, which any student of Music Hum knows means sad, sad, sad.

Fed up with gloom, I turned to the names engraved on Butler's frieze. Certainly, Plato's name would only appear on a building of dazzling resonance. Once inside, I decided to take on the computer lab, despite fears that the plethora of tones would result in the same sort of discord; I proceeded cautiously. But, the three tones I heard—between the humming of the vents, the whirring of the computers, the beeping of the smoker detectors—formed that perfect interval, the deep consonance of stacked fifths, that the theologian would have identified with the Holy Trinity. Some students tapped out their essays, others labored diligently over problem sets and computer programs, and I knew that in the most unlikely of places, I found eternal harmony and the ideal study space.