Summer of Math Exposition

Feels like a good teaser to push someone down a very VERY deep rabbit hole of how music works…

The video is nice and concise with good visuals, but the pacing could be a little better. It feels slightly rushed and a few more pauses would help people digest the information laid out better. Some more detailed explanations about Fourier series and harmonics/overtones would also make it better, as they feel too heavy to simply state without much elaboration. Additionally, a lot of the wording used is accurate but can feel a little intimidating since it’s lacking proper depth and approachability.

Your mathematisation of musical concepts was done very well, though parts felt a bit rushed, and I like how natural it felt, however, you should spend more time going in depth about harmonic frequencies and talk about how different combinations of harmonic frequencies create different characters.

I really loved the idea you had for the video. I think the pacing was a little too fast. If it was a little slower, I think it would be easy to digest things you say and the complementary animations you had. A few of the ideas, such as Fourier series were introduced but not clearly, and it wasn’t really clear what you did with those ideas that you introduced. Finally, it remained unclear why even with different frequencies playing in different instruments, why we still classify the sound as being the same “pitch”?

You’re covering exactly the subjects that interest me most, so I’m going to be very critical. Let me start by saying that you’re way, way ahead of where I was at your age and I think your video shows a lot of promise, so everything I’m about to say is meant as encouragement.

First, I think you’re cramming too many subjects into one short video. Judging by your style, you’re probably a fan of minutephysics and/or welch labs, and both of them also pack a lot of content into short videos. But notice how they always have a strong overarching narrative that ties everything together, a single main question+answer per video - I think that’s a very important part of what makes their videos good.

In your video, I see 3 separate questions/narratives:

1. Consonance vs dissonance
2. Pitch vs timbre
3. Temperament

You’re spending the first minute on preliminaries (what is sound/what is pitch), rightly so and well done. But then you only have 2 minutes left for covering 3 very large (and related but quite separate) subjects. Each of these really deserves its own video, and that way you could tell more cohesive and interesting stories.

Especially the temperament part needs introduction/motivation: why would you want to divide the octave into equal-sized steps? Why does 12 steps work better than 11 or 13? (Spoiler alert: relatively good approximation of harmonics at a relatively low number of notes per octave.) I actually did a SoME entry on that particular subject myself a few years back, it has its flaws but you might find it interesting: https://chielzwinkels.net/projects/arithmophone/more/audible-numbers/

This video has some really good stuff about timbre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8 (starts at around 4 minutes, most of the video is about other things, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).

Best of luck!

The video itself is good and the topic is interesting, but I felt that it was a bit too short and doesn’t go into much detail

The chosen topic was very interesting and well contextualized: starting the video with a question and then playing the same note on different instruments was a great way to start.

The animations were well put together. The physical medium of using different instruments was great.

The pace of the video was quite quick: mathematical steps were walked through too quickly. Also, the main question of the video: “why do these sound different” was only partially answered. It would have been nice to end the video with a brief summary recapping the reason(s) the same note sounds different.

The video looks great! The hook is presented well, and overall the problem presented was solved when you showed the waveforms of various instruments. That said, even though you had largely resolved what you set out to resolve I was surprised when the video ended. Perhaps it could have used two more minutes of showing off how the waves actually sound as you add them together piece by piece.

Thanks for this interesting introduction to pitch, timbre, and harmonics. I liked the illustration of tones with your two instruments, it made for an exciting start to the video. I also appreciated the overall color scheme and that you adapted the standard manim background color. The colors for the graphs were well chosen and “harmonic” ;) The historical facts about ancient Greek knowledge were also a nice touch and I think your thumbnail is well designed.

I think some polishing on the storyline, audio, and editing could’ve elevated the video:

• Storyline and logical flow: Since you played the tone in the beginning on two different instruments, I thought the pitch would be what you later described as timbre. If you had played the two tones on a single instrument, it might’ve been clearer. You also mentioned the abbreviation FFT before introducing the Fourier transform, which was a bit confusing at that point. It may be helpful to check your script for logical flow and the introduction of all abbreviations.

• Summary at the end: The ending was a bit abrupt. A short summary of the main findings from the video would be cool.

• Audio: There was some noise in the audio (maybe your chair creaking?). You should be able to remove such noise with a basic audio filter in a free editing program.

• Editing: Your VoiceOver seems to have been sped up starting from „Back to Pythagoras“, which felt a bit unnatural. I thought I had accidentally sped up the video. Maybe this was a mistake that sneaked in

Overall, I think this musical field is super interesting and I’d enjoy viewing more videos about it! But I have to give a slightly lower rating, since I didn’t see these tiny editing and audio flaws in other videos.

The animations do work well to help support the points here that you’ve made in terms of how we understand pitch and some of the harmonic series. I found some of the explanations a bit fast and I think somewhat who isn’t familiar with either music theory / maths might have a bit of difficulty understand some of the concepts of the video. I think it would help to approach this with a focus on either coming from more of a music or mathematical background to try to explain to one audience instead, and then focusing on explaining in more depth to that audience. (eg. I might not necessarily know what equal temperament meant)