Science News

Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks has been a lifelong lover of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and thanks to a team at Columbia University (including WSF alum Joy Hirsch) he was able to put his favorite composer to the test. In a clip from NOVA, Bach is pitted against Ludwig van Beethoven, while a brain scanner analyzed the results.

Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.