14 Comments
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Raf Linens's avatar

This is one of the most autistic things I’ve ever read, cheers to you

Jackson Sardello's avatar

Gonna be a couple weeks before I can get out to theaters to see it, so I'm gonna skip the article. Gotta feed the engagement algo for you tho. Ty for your hustle Nic.

Nic Carter's avatar

good choice Please go into the film without having anything spoiled for you it's amazing.

Carl's avatar

Great article Nic! We saw the movie last week and loved it! I love how Weir used sound waves in the film. I haven't read the book but you're right he could have explored more the univerality of music. Although, music is essentially math and math is the universal language (at least as far as we know).

Tubby's avatar

The second band to produce a good sounding album using quarter tones is Angine de Poitrine. Give a listen. Released last week.

Nic Carter's avatar

will do, thank you!

Brady Dale's avatar

This movie is so great. It's nice to see some optimism in a major film. As I understand it, folks feel like the movie is more enjoyable than the book, but it's interesting to see how deep the book goes.

Also I'm glad that my longtime thesis that advanced aliens are nice has been proven. It's been proven with science. Hollywood science!

Adam Singer's avatar

I waited to read this one until I just watched the movie today (thx for spoiler warnings). Great post thanks for writing it

Ryan Gunn's avatar

Interesting read! So it's not common to be able to identify notes played or sang? My whole extended family can do it, my kids and I do it as a game.

Nic Carter's avatar

being able to identify intervals = any trained musician can do. many regular people can too

perfect pitch, what you're describing = 0.01% of people

you have a talented family...

Zorfinator's avatar

Great take Nic, how often do you play? Jazz offers a lot of experimentation with harmony, you ever get into it or just classical?

Nic Carter's avatar

every single day! I "peaked" in terms of skill around age 16 when I was practicing 2h/day but I understand music at a much deeper level and have been teaching myself production over the last year with the help of AI. hopefully even produce an album soon!

Polaris's avatar

Whoa. How do you know all this stuff??

Regardless, nice analysis. I hope Andy Weir gets to read it.

Nic Carter's avatar

I hope he does! I think he does know some of the theory because I don’t think he would causally throw in the music theory references without checking that they could be grounded in a shared physics

and how I know it.. I am a classically trained pianist and my teacher as a kid was absolutely adamant that I learn music theory to an insane degree. In the last few years I have been teaching myself the relationships between physics and music theory and I got more interested in electronic music production and the book was a great opportunity to share these concepts… I have been wondering for a long time whether harmony is a universal language and looking into to cases of animals (like the hermit thrush I mentioned) or other cultures having inherent harmonic knowledge, and it just so happened that it came up in the book. so it was pretty exciting for me.