Improv in the key of Nitrogen

Improvisation with a High Spirits, First Nation flute. This traditional flute is made in the key of F#. Percussion by Larry Stephens.

Nitrogen is the 7^th element in the periodic table. It is one of the 6 elements that make up 98.7% of the human body. Approximately 3.2% of the total body weight is Nitrogen. Essential for life in almost all of its forms, Nitrogen plays a role as a member of DNA, RNA and ATP. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, all contain Nitrogen. It is also present in hemoglobin and chlorophyl.

Nitrogen is a colorless and odorless gas that comprises 78% of atmosphere by volume. Plants are our relatives that are able to “fix” Nitrogen into a form that can be used by other life on the planet. It follows a path known as the Nitrogen cycle moving from micro-organisms, to plants, to various critters, back into the soil and back into the air. At least this was the case before people discovered they could remove nitrogen from the air, form it into fertilizer and spread it ubiquitously across the planet. The disruption of the Nitrogen Cycle has added to the algal blooms and degradation of the homes of our water based plants and animals. It is estimated that the human body has 80% of its nitrogen from artificial fertilizers. It is a good reason to know your organic farmer.

In Alchemy, Nitrogen was named Sal Amoniac as a compound that when combined with sulfuric acid was called Aegis Regis and was the only substance known to dissolve gold.

Alchemical Symbols

Nitrogen has a color spectrum in the full range of what we can see. Rainbow. It has a scale that is very close to our F# major scale.

An Aside:

This is a point to try again to explain where the music of the elements comes from. In the field of spectrometry, every element has a specific set of colors that are emitted when observed. This is how astrophysicists can tell what elements are in a distant star.  Each element always emits the same set of wavelengths. Some of the wavelengths are in the visible spectrum. The visible light is like a fingerprint of an element. Each set of colors makes a scale.

I am converting the light into sound. A well-heeled scientist will say that the electro-magnetic (light) cannot be compared to the vibration we hear (sound) because they are two different systems of energy. I feel okay about doing this because the folks at NASA have been doing this for a while. Follow this link for the sounds of a black hole:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-black-hole-sonifications-with-a-remix.html

{As an aside from this aside. Follow the winding path at this NASA site to listen to the sounds of Saturn. They are haunting. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html }

The light that we see between infrared and ultraviolet is one octave of the electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine a pole that is three feet high. At the bottom of the pole are the lowest wavelengths and at the top are the highest and most energetic wavelengths. Our eyes are able to see one-quarter inch of this pole. The rest have names like x-ray, radio waves, micro-waves (used in the kitchen to heat your food- among other things), and the list goes on and on. In the visible spectrum the lowest, meaning it has the longest wavelength, color is red and the highest that we can see is indigo-violet. Follow the colors of the rainbow. Just out of our visual field is the infrared and the ultraviolet. Some of our Kin on the planet see these colors.

The part that gets a little bit complicated is how wavelength is related to frequency. Wavelength is measured in vibrations per meter and frequency is measured in vibrations per second. Frequency is measured in Hertz. The healthy young person can hear between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Another way to say this is that we can hear between 20 vibrations per second to 20,000 vibrations per second.

Frequency can be converted from wavelength by using the following equation:

f = c /L where f is frequency in Hertz (Hz), c is the speed of light in meters/second and L is wavelength in meters.

Light has a very high measure in Hz. (trillions of Hz per second). Using the laws of harmonics one can continually divide by 2 to reduce the very high values to those that can be heard by us. With sound, every time a frequency is divided by 2 you get to the same tone one octave lower and if you double the frequency, you get one octave higher. Think about hitting middle C on the piano and going to the right to the next C, the pitch gets higher and going to the left the pitch gets lower. We hear about 40 octaves below the sound of light.

More poetically, the dance of the colors makes a sound 40 octaves above what we can hear. Imagine that sound, singing so high that only angels can hear. Through the law of octaves, we can take the angel song, call it down to the place where we can play it on our instruments, and dance it on the earth.

This parenthetic departure is yet another attempt to explain how this project finds its tones and the individual scales of the light for each element of the human body.

 

This perhaps, with a little luck, will help explain that Nitrogen is in the Key of F#. Coincidentally, the visible spectrum is also an octave from F# to F#, only in the trillion Hertz range. Perhaps the Native American flute tuning is an intuitive reflection of the indigenous knowledge.

 

The colors and tones of Nitrogen:

Angstrom	Nanometer (rounded)	Color	Element Scale Hz	Our Scale	Hertz
7468.31	747	Dark red	365.09	F#4	369.99
7442.29	744	Dark red	366.37
6610.56	661	Red	412.46	G#4	415.31
6482.05	648	Red	420.64	A4	440.00
5941.65	594	Orange	458.9	A#4	466.16
5679.56	568	Yellow green	480.07
5005.15	501	Dark green	544.76	C#5	554.4
4630.54	463	Blue	588.83	D5	587.33
4447.03	445	Dark blue	613.13
3995.00	400	Indigo	682.50	F5	698.5