Musical Chemistry: Integrating Chemistry and Music

This paper synopsizes a series of nine tutorials investigating how various chemical processes can be shown to have musical aspects. Both chemistry and music share a common language: mathematics. Interesting music can be created as chemical reactions—mediated by instrumentation and mathematics (e.g., spectrometry and discrete Fourier transformation)—yield data that can be combined with principles of music theory to produce sounds. Sound files resulting from converting data to musical notation are then playable and manipulable on the computer; the sound data can also be represented on musical staves and played on musical instruments. A musical form of the periodic table of elements is provided, as well as supplemental sound files and text documents for each of the nine tutorials.