Monday, June 17, 2024
By:
A couple weeks ago, Muji said something funny while the interns were fooling around in the office: “APS must stand for ‘A Playful Summer’”.
Given I spent most of Friday learning how to play Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” using Boomwhackers, I’m inclined to agree.
Boomwhackers are the cool new instrument on the block, plastic tubes that will play a specific pitch once you smack the ground or hit your best friend with it. We’ll be using these marvelous music-makers as a demonstration for our volunteer event Astronomy on the Mall next weekend, showing how we can use the physics of sound waves to make pipes that resonate with a certain frequency, or pitch, that we can then use to play songs.
Making music together with others has been one of the cornerstones of my life. There’s something special about it. It’s all physics. I vibrate my vocal chords in a certain way, and the person to the left of me vibrates theirs in a slightly different way, and then the sound waves bounce around and interfere and amplify until suddenly, there’s music. The waves somehow transcend the physics and become meaningful.
This weekend I went back to NJ for a choir reunion, and I got to see some of my friends whom I haven’t seen in years. In some cases we didn’t know what to say; too much had happened in too little time and we simply didn’t know where to start. So we let the music do the talking. And we sang together and we made music together and it was like we never left. There were lots of memories. Lots of tears.
Lots of music.
Back in DC, I eventually came to the realization that I simply don’t have enough hands to play Crazy Train by myself, so I recruited some of the other interns to try it out with me. I’m not sure if “music” is what you can call the end result, but whatever it is, we’re making it together.
Reidyn Wingate