Patterns etched in sound

“I’m into beautiful melodies and catchy harmonies,” says Robert Schneider, the co-founder of The Elephant 6 Recording Company and lead singer and songwriter in the band The Apples in Stereo. “As a producer, I’m also interested in surrounding my pop songs with experimental sounds. These sorts of things are very appealing to me.”

In a recent TEDxEmory talk, Schneider explains how music led him to become a Woodruff Graduate Fellow in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. His research focuses mainly on analytic number theory, but he also has created music compositions based on mathematics.

“I found as I started to study mathematics that there were all these beautiful patterns that were lying there,” he says. “It was like music that was silent, just waiting to be written out and used for compositions.”

Watch the video to learn more, and listen to some of Schneider’s mathematical compositions.

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