The Periodic Table of Notes

A New Way to Visualize Elements

From a chemical viewpoint, the periodic table of elements is a long, repeating pattern of properties for any set of given elements. For example, elements in row 2 (Lithium to Neon) will generally have higher ionization energies than later rows due to their orbitals being closer to the nucleus. All elements in group I are easy to remove an electron from, and elements in group VIII tend to be unreactive. These patterns can also be applied to music, just like repeating octaves and groups of frequencies/pitches.

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Using these concepts, Professor Mahadev Kumbar from Nassau Community College wanted to determine how they could be applied to a musical visualization. By recording the atomic spectra for each element and transforming the recorded energy into notes in frequencies proportional to the energy differences, he created a set of notes for each element. Similar to the properties of the elements, each row, column, and even groups such as metals were found to have distinctive sounds and types of music.

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Note: Unfortunately we were unable to locate the original audio clips of these groups of sounds, but check out the "IR Spectroscopy" and "Creative Project" pages to hear real samples of data being transformed into sound!