Music, Spacetime, and Quantum Mechanics

Hello everyone,

I’ve decided to meld the notions of gravity and spacetime with the little we know of quantum mechanics in the Aurbis, along with /u/myrrlyn’s musical construct into one overarching theory. The result is (perhaps un)surprisingly connected to string theory, a highly conjectural and currently unverifiable theory of quantum gravity.

If you’re intimidated by the length of this piece; do not fear. I decided to include brief yet (hopefully) intuitive explanations of the more technical concepts instead of relying on Wikipedia to feed you everything. The one skippable section would be Additional Structure; it basically describes how to view music as a collection of abstract, geometric spaces. If you’re still not feeling up for it, then at least skim through The Big Picture section below.

Let’s get started!

The Essential Ingredients

Spacetime: Aka + Lorkhan = AkaLorkh, and together they act as the background of 4D spacetime. AkaLorkh is responsible for gravitational motion and curvature. Squashing the two Aedra together results in a Dragon Break1.

Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime: Jills can fix the region of a Dragon Break by treating all the worldlines (paths in spacetime) as waves, and applying the sum-over-histories technique to find the most consistent timeline. This effectively treats spacetime quantum mechanically, then squashes it into a projected, collapsed state.

Musical Aurbis and Spacetime: The (D)Aedra are split on a 24 tone scale as described in /u/myrrlyn’s posts. As this must be merged with the spacetime theory, consider the following modifications to the original post:

1. Lorkhan acts as both space (percussion as Doom Drum) and time (by setting the beat).

2. Correspondingly, Aka acts as both space (by setting its fundamental frequency and hence length) and time (by setting the tempo).

These two changes allow them to act simultaneously as AkaLorkh, the Gray Maybe, both for music and a background.

Additional Structure (skippable)

Music as a space: The geometry inherent in music has not been discussed much in academia; this is likely due to its highly esoteric and interdisciplinary nature.

Progressions, chords, voice leading, scales: all structures present within music can be reduced to a compact, yet somewhat complex mathematical object called an orbifold = orbit + manifold. The general idea is to take a manifold (one of the most generic notions of a smooth space), and “divide” 2 by some symmetries (a.k.a. orbits); the resulting space is an orbifold. Only recently have mathematicians published articles on musical orbifolds, with Tymoczko being one of the more prominent proponents of the notion (here’s the mathematical paper if you’re interested, pdf warning).

The most generic idea of a musical orbifold is that of an n-dimensional torus 3 Tⁿ, divided by the symmetric group S^m (the symmetry of interchangeability)4. The variable n encodes the number of pitches in a sequence, and m refers to the number of tones in each chord. The space Tⁿ/S^m thus accounts for octave symmetry and chordal permutations. Thus, all music lives on the union of these spaces for all m and n.

N.B.: If you’re following along with the pdf, then please note that in our Aurbical scale, there are 24 tones, with Mara and Dibella identified on the vertical boundaries denoted in Figure 2. This is an example of the 3D projection of T²/S².

The Recipe

How do we reconcile spacetime with our musical spaces? By using the notion of compactification from theoretical physics. Essentially, we will glue copies of the above musical structure onto each point in spacetime; it would look something like this.

The musical structure is pasted onto physical spacetime through AkaLorkh’s fundamental frequency or beat which sets the “size” of the music space. This scale-setting frequency acts as an anchoring Tower for all the other frequencies present in the scale. This, coupled with their tempo and drum gives a relative spacetime orientation to this musical space. Spoken differently, AkaLorkh as music is the subgradient echo of AkaLorkh as spacetime, which binds these dual spaces. A region with spacetime curvature will influence its inner musical dynamics, and faster-paced piece will bend the resulting spacetime.

Dynamics

For a particle5 over at a point in Mundus, we can associate a wave its musical subspace; it is a wavefunction, analogous to a chord or a complex progression such as a leitmotif. However, a wavefunction is quantum mechanical, and represents a wave of pure potential and probability6, which travels from spacetime point to spacetime point according to its harmonic content. Thus, it is not quite yet Music as we know it; it is a melody of potentials. Any possible particle can be described by a different “musical” piece. In addition, if a particle is spread over a region due to quantum fuzziness, then it’s described by the entanglement of all its musical subspaces from each point. Entanglement can be thought of as the joining of melodies from different instruments, or as intertwined staves on sheet music. Wavefunction collapse can be understood as a harmonic resolution, or as the convergence of intertwined staves into one staff.

When two particles interact, their harmonies collide and interfere, collapsing their wavefunctions inducing the phenomena of entanglement and linking them together until further collapse. This process gives back classical dynamics by taking the limit of large amounts of particles; constant contact with close neighbors forces the fuzzy wavefunctions to constantly collapse into well-defined regions.

It is at this point that the first harmonic echoing subgradient occurs: in keeping to constrained wavefunctions, the particles are essentially vibrating in spacetime. If this vibrational wave echoes the particle’s musical harmonies, then this should lead to a resonant coupling between spacetime and the quantum musical subspace. The resonance excites nearby particles which induces the emission of Color and Sound on a macroscopic scale.

As mentioned above, a Dragon Break results from spacetime being smashed together; this results in the particles’ worldlines, the very fibers of spacetime, to become quantum mechanical. This occurs since every spacetime point’s musical substructure becomes entangled and acts as a gravitational wavefunction. The Jills pick apart and merge the pieces with carefully calculated gravitational path integrals.

Consequences

• Sword-Singing, Kiai, Thu’um, Tonal Architecture…these are all manipulations of the inherent musical substructure and its ties to spacetime and mass-energy. The highly complex musical subspaces explains why these schools require years of practice; these notions must resonate with your own set of musical orbifolds.

• The Elder Scrolls are coherent wavefunctions made from the fabric of Spacetime itself; once history has been made they can solidify their projection of potential future worldlines, but still remain in a state of flux. They can be thought of as neutralized Dragon Breaks (with potentially inconsistent or bizarro timelines mixed in), and are useless during a Dragon Break since Time itself has collapsed.

• The Towers as Maestros focus resonant energy from Aetherius and the Void whilst simultaneously broadcasting Music and Color back into Oblivion. The arriving energy solidifies Nirn’s wavefunction through quantum mechanical collapse. The outgoing energy resonates with the (D)Aedric spheres. (D)Aedric artifacts on Nirn are mostly made of a pure (D)Aedric tone.

Conjectures

• The Music and Color from Mundus leak through the holes left by the Magne-Ge, who listen in carefully from Aetherius. If the frequencies are right, they will Dance to a matching pattern of light and color, leading to the movement of the stars in the sky.

• The Aurbis is a Turing-complete quantum orchestra, with AkaLorkh’s bulk as the sheet music (instruction tape). During a Dragon Break, the sheet music itself becomes an Elder Scroll, and the Mnemoli delightedly sweep in to collect their treasure.

• Divinities and Blessed mortals (e.g. Shezzarines) are coherent, macroscopic quantum objects that can only be collapsed by each other; this is what leads to the power of the Enantiomorph equation. The 3-turned-1 entanglement aspect is a resonant chord from their musical subspaces.

The Big Picture

As an abstract, finalized big picture: imagine Mundus as a fractal, highly sophisticated music box, with a musical probability wave space attached to each point in spacetime. Particles are traveling musical progressions that are subject to quantum mechanical collapse. Macroscopic effects are tied to the echoing of the musical subgradient. The music box is self-correcting, filled with infinite capacity for memory, and can broadcast its Music via its Towers. The resulting harmonies travel to Aetherius via the boundary membrane between the two, which acts like a speaker.

The Magne-Ge are in Aetherius, listening to the Music from the box, and dancing a Dance of color and light, an array of frequencies and amplitudes that corresponds to the subtractive colors; a different eigenbasis for the sounds emanating from the box. For them, Mundus is outputting a fantastically dynamic light show composed of the additive colors.

From within Mundus, the Magne-Ge dance across the Boundary canvas, resonating with the Music within and radiating energy through Color into the Void. The Aetherial fragments known as the Elder Scrolls resonate with the incoming waves of creatia.