Music, Physics, and the Boy I Love

Around October last year, I moved from my home in India to the United States, where I met my old friend Lok. A boy I have been shamelessly asking out ever since. I have always been this way, incredibly honest about my feelings. If I liked someone, I would let them know. I've been begging this man to officially be my boyfriend for more than an acceptable few months now.

I felt the same way about physics when I was 12. I don’t want to be the kind of person who calls physics her first crush, just like I don’t want to be the person who begs a man to date her. Yet, here we are. Physics has the answer to everything. How did the Universe form? How does everything work? How will it all end? The beginning, the middle, and the end, physics has it all. So, it was no surprise that I chose to major in physics at BITS Pilani, India.

I first met Lok on an October evening at BITS, about five years ago. The football team had taken me and a few other freshmen to play basketball with some seniors as a bonding exercise since the football field was closed. I was terrible at the game, but I didn’t want to leave—college had only started two months ago, and I was set on joining this team. So, I ran around the court awkwardly, dodging the ball as much as possible. Suddenly, the ball ended up in my hands, and in a panic, I chucked it at this skinny guy nearby. He caught it, dribbled smoothly, and within seconds, the ball was falling through the hoop. He turned around and gave me a wide cocky grin that looked extremely out of place on his face. He didn’t look like the kind of guy that should have that level of confidence. His thin frizzy hair was all over the place, and his gigantic nose was definitely not helping.

After the match, I sat at the corner of the court with the others. As usual, I spaced out of the conversation, distracted by the rhythmic sound of balls bouncing against concrete. Such sounds always distracted me.

Sound is a longitudinal wave, which means it needs air or some other medium to travel. Sound waves are created by vibrating objects that vibrate the air molecules around them. They travel in a series of compressions, when air molecules come close together, creating a region of high pressure, and rarefactions, when air molecules move away from each other, creating a region of low pressure. The difference in pressure helps sound move through the air, allowing us to mathematically represent sound as a sine wave, a line that moves up and down above and below the x axis, like a meandering river. Sound traveling through air is similar to what would happen if you pushed one end of a slinky inwards and then let go. When these vibrating air molecules reach your ear, they vibrate your ear drum, causing you to hear sound.

Wave properties tell us why different sounds sound different. The pitch of a sound corresponds to the sound wave's frequency. When the air particles vibrate at high rates, there are more waves per second, and the frequency is high, causing a shrill high pitch. When the vibration is slower, there are fewer waves per second, and the frequency is low, resulting in a deep low pitch. Frequency is measured in Hertz (Hz). If a wave completes compression and rarefaction in 1 second, its frequency is 1 Hz. Humans can hear sounds ranging from 20 Hz to 20 KHz.

"I bought this with my own money." The boy from before was holding out a set of new AirPods. "I didn’t know you got paid," I said. I thought he was still in school. "I’m doing the fourth-year internship," he replied, looking at me. That was the first time Lok and I spoke.

As I walked back to my hostel room that night, I had a few passing thoughts of this boy: pretentious, thought too much of himself, and ugly. Checked all the boxes, definitely my type.

We’d wave when we passed each other on campus, but it wasn’t until the following January that we actually talked again. I had lost my keys on the football field and was looking around for them. "Did you lose something?" came a voice from behind me. He helped me look around for a bit, and that evening, I got a message from him on Facebook: "Hope you found your keys." I caught myself smiling. "Yeah, I did. Wanna hang out for a while?" I replied.

We walked around campus until 2 AM that night. I don't remember the conversation, but I remember it was fun, more fun than I'd had in a while. Despite being an extrovert, I did not have many friends back then. I had recently lost my high school best friend and was having trouble creating new relationships. Later that night, I told Lok about it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you spring on someone the first time you meet. “Hi, I’m Ananya, I love quantum mechanics and doing cartwheels, I kind of want to kiss you. Oh, and yeah, my best friend died last year and I’m having a hard time coping.” Even though I later regretted the unhinged oversharing, I felt like Lok was one of the first few friends I had made at college.

Over the next few months, I started getting better, and made many more friends. I never stopped the late-night strolls with Lok. I had a huge crush, and apparently, my friends knew it, as my best friend would tell me years later. Lok was graduating that semester and leaving for the US to do his master's. He was moving to Dallas, Texas. I knew that a couple of kisses and long conversations were definitely not enough to begin an extra-long-distance relationship. And I had just started making friends. It was too soon for that.

Sometimes on our walks, we’d stop by the court, and he’d try to teach me basketball. Other times, we would talk for hours. But looking back, I realized that I would talk for hours, and he would listen. When he did share, he’d tell me about his love for music—a passion I never quite understood. When I admitted that I listened almost exclusively to Taylor Swift, he gave up on trying to explain it to me.

I was never the kind of person who was into music. I enjoyed the occasional bop and danced, barely to the rhythm, when I was intoxicated at college parties. I loved screaming Taylor Swift in the car, but I've always loved her more for her incredible songwriting than her vocals or music. I did not really have a taste in music or much appreciation for the art.

Lok insisted that I see him perform at the college music night. It was an annual event when the music club at college would show off their skills on a massive stage set up for the band. Lok, as president of the club, played the piano, guitar, and drums to three different songs. It was impressive, even though I didn’t recognize a single song he played.

Musical instruments use a special sound wave known as a standing wave to produce music. Imagine a string that is fixed on one end. If you flick the string up and down, you make a wave. When the wave on the string moves to the fixed end, it reflects off the boundary and moves back down the string to your hand. This is reflection. Interference is a wave property where one or more waves can combine to produce a new wave. Interference can be constructive, when the waves are positioned so they add up, and destructive when the waves cancel each other out. Now imagine continuously flicking the string up and down, creating a series of waves that interfere with the waves that reflect off the fixed end. This is a standing wave. It can happen in both strings and air pipes and is what makes music.

The strings in string instruments such as the guitar and piano are vibrated by hand or by striking a key to create standing waves. In wind instruments such as the flute, the standing waves are produced by vibrating air particles blown into a tube or pipe with open ends. In its simplest form, a standing wave on a string with two fixed ends looks like a moving one-dimensional jump rope. The two ends are fixed, and the middle moves up and down. The fixed points are called nodes, and the point in the middle that moves the most is an antinode. This simplest possible standing wave is the fundamental or the first harmonic, which has the fewest number of nodes and antinodes. A node and antinode pair are added to the wave with each possible higher frequency. The wave with three nodes and two antinodes is the second harmonic on a string with two fixed ends. It has two times the frequency of the fundamental. The third harmonic has four nodes and three antinodes, three times the fundamental frequency, and so on.

As August approached, both Lok and I knew it was time to say goodbye. The fall semester was starting soon, and he had to leave for Dallas. He spent his last few days on campus with his closest friends. I got busy with my own friends, classes and other Freshman events. I even started dating a sophomore. We’d still meet occasionally, but not as often. After he graduated, we met for what I thought would be the last time at a café near campus. Saying goodbye wasn’t too hard—I’d known it was coming. I figured we wouldn’t stay in touch for too long after that, since neither of us was great at texting, and we’d never really had that kind of a relationship.

I wasn’t really surprised when he replied to one of my stories a few weeks later. I asked him how he was liking the US, and we started chatting. What did surprise me was that we kept texting over the years and would meet up every time he came home. Naively, I always assumed we’d be together if we didn’t live a million miles apart.

In August 2022, I graduated with a degree in physics. Four years had flown by way too fast. College had been a blast, filled with everything I loved—exciting football games, wild partying, and most importantly a lot of physics. It was when I was doing my fourth-year internship, which I did not get paid for, that I got some real research experience, and I realized that physics wasn't only something you made no money at, but also something I was not fit for. Unfortunately, I did not have a physicist's brain or creative mathematical problem-solving skills. I was great at learning and appreciating the elegant math that explained the Universe, but making my own was far more difficult than I had imagined.

I’d applied to a bunch of Ph.D. programs the semester before my internship, and over the next few months, I collected enough rejection emails to wallpaper my entire room. I wanted to do something I was good at and passionate about. I moved to the US, to Dallas, to live with my uncle while I figured out what to do with my career. I was disappointed in myself; up until then I had always had a clear vision of my future. All of a sudden, I was confused and scared.

Of all the places in the US, my uncle happened to live in the same city as Lok. It felt like the setup to a romcom. "Hey, wanna hang out?" I texted Lok, about four years after I first texted him this in college. "Sure, I'll buy you a plane ticket," he joked. "Nah, a car is good enough," I said. He didn't believe I was actually there until he drove up to my house and saw me. "I live 15 minutes away from you!" he said after he got over his initial shock. "I can't believe we are hanging out here in the US. That's crazy!"

Living in a city where I had nothing to do and only one friend was challenging. This was the second time Lok came to the rescue when I was lonely. Something about him just cheered me up and made everything better. Lok encouraged me to pursue writing when I first brought it up. After some thought, I decided I had to try it out. 

After we went out a few times, I expected him to ask me to be his girlfriend. When he didn't, I asked him instead. The first time, after a basketball game he took me to. The second, on my birthday. The third time, when we woke up next to each other after a long night out. And I swear I'm not exaggerating when I say probably the hundredth time after we went to a Taylor Swift concert together. He not only listened to her music every day for a month to learn the lyrics but also sat with me to make friendship bracelets, even though he wasn’t a Swiftie. Every single time I asked him, he would say the same thing: "I need more time."

It’s been a year now, and we talk every day for at least three hours. I love his eyes with those impossibly long lashes, his adorable face, and that smile—honestly one of the best I’ve ever seen. All my friends think I’m crazy for seeing him that way, but what can I say? I’m blinded by love—or maybe I’m just a total simp. But one thing they all agree on is that he’s charming. Somehow, he just has this way of winning people over effortlessly, even if he isn’t the classic tall, dark, and handsome type.

I used to incessantly tease my friends for saying “They are the one” or “This one is different” every time they would meet a new guy. So, it felt incredibly wrong to be saying it myself. I was never the kind of girl that stayed put on one guy for long. So far it was just a bunch of flings, a few ego-tainting rejections, and a 4-month long relationship that never meant too much to me. I inevitably got bored of every guy who had my attention. But “This one is different,” I told my friends. They were surprised, but they had to tease me about it. He is the one.

He listens to me talk for hours and hours about physics, work, friends, and absolutely everything. He doesn't talk much, something I only noticed recently. So, when he does, I grab onto every word he says. I listen to him talk about deals in the company he started, basketball, and music. Most of these things are easy to understand, except for music. I just couldn't get it. I've never listened to music without lyrics. The music didn't really matter to me. But it did to him.

Music has always meant a lot to Lok, whether learning to play an instrument or listening to it in his car. "Why would you listen to music without the lyrics?" I asked one day on the way to a friend's place. "What kind of a question is that?" he replied. "Why do you listen to the lyrics?" To me, song lyrics are poetry. They beautifully convey the writer's thoughts and emotions. The more creative the lyrics are, the more I feel for a song. To him, music worked the same way. He feels it and understands it. Music transports him to a different world and can change his mood.

Lok would talk about harmonics, instruments, beats, time signatures, and notes, and even if he explained the jargon, it was simply too much for me to keep up with. But the way his face would light up and his voice would rise excitedly made me want to understand everything there was to it. I decided I needed to learn music theory. How hard could it be? It's not rocket science, and I actually understand rocket science.

It turns out that I found music theory way more complicated than rocket science. All the online articles and videos I saw would explain music theory as though I was already a trained musician. I didn't even know how a note would be played on anything other than a piano. I didn't even know what a note really was!

After going down multiple rabbit holes, I found out what musical notes are. They’re simply standing waves with different frequencies.

Lok was in third grade when he first got his hands on an instrument. It was the harmonium, an Indian classical music instrument that resembles a piano. It is much smaller than a piano and runs on air pressure, requiring one to continuously pump air into it with one hand while playing with the other. Lok learned to play Indian classical ragas, on this instrument. As he grew older, he started listening to Western rock and pop. “The first time I heard Numb by Linkin Park, I just had to play it,” he said. He realized that a piano worked in an almost identical way to a harmonium. Instead of ragas, there were now scales, and the notes had different names; it was C D E instead of Sa Re Ga. He decided that it was time to switch to Western music. Since Lok already had the required finger dexterity and muscle memory, he was able to quickly get really good at playing the piano by watching YouTube tutorials.

When you press a key down on a piano, you make a hammer inside the piano strike a string and create standing waves on that string. Every string in a piano is tuned so that its frequency—dependent on its length, mass, and tension—corresponds to a given note. Guitars are also adjusted so that the fundamental frequencies of their strings correspond to set notes. Pressing down on a string in specific places on the guitar changes the length of the string, changing its fundamental frequency and note.

Lok has a mint green-colored guitar hung on the wall of his room. "Can you still play?" I asked him one night. “Of course I can,” he said, picking up the guitar. But it had been so long since he had touched it that it wasn't tuned right. Disappointed, he walked over to his piano and played a made-up tune. His face lit up, and his smile grew wider the second he started to play. The music he plays is great, but watching him play it is one of my favorite things to do now. There’s something mesmerizing about the way he gets lost in the rhythm, his fingers gliding effortlessly over the keys, completely absorbed in the music. I love seeing the subtle expressions on his face as he hits a tricky part or gets to a part he really loves, and how he seems to light up as he brings the song to life. It’s like seeing a whole other side of him that despite being a writer, words can’t quite capture.    

Music is made when different notes on different instruments are put together. So, how do we know what notes go well together and what notes don't? When two notes are produced simultaneously, their waves interfere, creating a sound that sounds consonant (good) when the interference is constructive or dissonant (bad) when it is somewhat destructive. The consonance or dissonance is dependent on the frequencies of the two notes. If the ratio of the frequency of two sounds is simple, the sounds go well together and are consonant. Frequencies belonging to the same standing wave harmonic are in simple frequency ratios. For example, if I have a 220 Hertz sound (let us call it the fundamental), a 440 Hertz (the second harmonic) sound would go well with it since the ratio is 2 to 1. This is because they overlap every two periods, interfering constructively. A wave of 660 Hertz (the third harmonic) would overlap every three periods, and so on. When this frequency ratio is not simple, the waves are not part of the same harmonic, and the waves go in and out of sync irregularly, causing a dissonant beating sound.

The most consonant sound that can go with the 220 Hz sound is the 440 Hz sound. This consonance is actually so high that the two sounds are considered the same note with different pitches. Any note multiplied or divided by two is the same note on a higher or lower octave. So if the 220 Hz note was an A note, then the 440 Hz note is also an A but on a different pitch range—

what musicians call an octave. But a sound of 660 hertz is not an A note but a different note, so the most consonant sound made by two different notes would be when they have a three-to-one ratio. This is how the musical scale is set.

Multiplying or dividing a note’s frequency by three creates a different note, but it often has a very high or very low pitch compared to the original note, placing it in a different octave. The frequencies of these notes can then be divided or multiplied by two as needed to fall in the same range of pitches to form a scale. A scale is a set of notes that sound good together. A song or piece of music generally has all its notes on the same scale. Most musical scales contain seven notes; the eighth note has twice the frequency of the first note, which makes it the same note with a higher pitch. Each set of notes has earned the name octave (eighth) since every eighth note is the same.

I found this fascinating: every musical scale, on every instrument, in every song ever sung or played, is simply a unique pattern of multiplying or dividing a chosen fundamental frequency by three and two, repeated in various combinations! I knew there had to be some mathematical significance to the notes, just like everything else in nature. But understanding it made music so much more beautiful to me than it was before. I wanted to share this with Lok immediately. One evening, I told him about my newfound understanding, embarrassed that he would now find out that I was spending hours trying to research the things he liked. "Cutie!" he said, smiling. "Are you trying to impress me?" I covered my face with my hands. “Ugh. Kill me.” I knew this was coming. "Don't be embarrassed, this is great!" he said. "Now we have another thing to talk about!"

The more we spoke about it, the more the physics made sense. We found that the first note in each scale is the fundamental frequency, and the fifth note of the scale is the third harmonic. It is the note that is most consonant with the first note, which is why it is called the perfect fifth.

In nature, no sound is of a single frequency. Every sound is made of a mix of multiple different frequencies. When playing notes on musical instruments, every note played produces its fundamental frequency and multiple other frequencies at lower volumes. The loudest frequency is the fundamental, and the remaining frequencies are the overtones. The overtones are both harmonic, which mean that they belong to the original frequency’s harmonics, and inharmonic. The harmonic overtones are much louder for string and wind instruments than the inharmonic ones. When a note is played on a piano or a guitar, while the fundamental frequency is the loudest, the second harmonic is the second loudest, the third is the third loudest, and so on. Because of this, when the first note of a scale is played, along with the fundamental frequency you can also hear the overtones of the second harmonic (the same note as the fundamental) and the third harmonic, which is the fifth note of the scale. Due to this reason, the first and fifth notes sound remarkably similar on most musical instruments. In the past, instruments were tuned by matching the first note to the fifth.

Because Lok was self-taught, he did not know much music theory, but he knew which sounds went well together and which ones did not. "I am street smart, not book smart," he said. He can now listen to a song and play it after a couple of tries. However, during his early stages of learning Western music, he would continuously mix up the first and fifth notes in the scale, causing the music to sound displaced. Checking the correct notes online would add to his confusion and made him think that he was tone-deaf. He was extremely relieved when he understood why the two notes sounded so similar. He wasn’t tone deaf; he just didn’t know enough music theory.

I asked Lok why he didn't pursue music if he loved it so much. "I was great at a lot of things," he said with his casual cocky smirk that I had loved since the day I met him. "I love coding, and that's where the money is," he said. "I do miss performing, though. Every time I see a performance, it kills me inside. I should be up there, performing." I didn't know what to say. I guess most people have something they really want to do more, but I did not. I was already doing everything I love: physics, writing, and, cornily enough, spending time with Lok.

Somehow, everything seems to have worked out for me. Love eventually works out, right? Maybe not the way you expect it to. But it works out. It worked out for physics and me. I now write physics content all day, learning new research and soaking up the beauty of every nugget of worldly understanding I can get my hands on. Maybe it will all work out for music and Lok as well, and dare I say for the both of us. It eventually works out, right?

Did my conversations with Lok make me suddenly understand and feel music? No. Do I understand music a little better than I used to? Yes. Will I hate him if he never likes me back? No, I don’t think so. Because now I know what I’m looking for. If it doesn’t work out with him, then at least I know what it feels like to actually be drawn to someone. That’s something I’ll always be grateful for. And do I think using him as my muse for this story could make him fall in love with me when he reads it? Let a girl hope!

(Written in November 2023)

(2025 Update - We are married now!)