Music, Enrtropy, Neurons and Information

Music, Enrtropy, Neurons, and Information

“I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts, are the keys to learning” 

― Plato 

Music is something that we listen to every day in many forms. Entropy and Neurons are yet to be understood by the people who work on them but they provide interesting insights about things around us. It is really interesting how we are moved by music and with that feeling, we can understand ourselves in a scientific way.  To understand it we need to know something about each word in the topic and interpret it in our own way. This will be a long read but will be fascinating once you understand it in your own way.  

Brain, neurons, music sheet, disorder

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Music

Music can be academically defined as an arrangement of sounds. There are some technical terms that one should be familiar with. When the sound gives a pleasant and harmonious sensation it is called consonant, if the sound gives an inharmonious feeling then it is called as dissonant. 

The sound of a trained singer singing a song, the sound of a temple or a church bell, when a student plays piano we get a consonant. When a normal person sings a song, the sound of hitting metal utensils, when a cat walks on a piano we get a dissonant. One can easily recognize this, whether he knows music or not. Sometimes in nature, we get these sounds like birds, cows, and fish make consonants (not always), whereas bugs, bees, and donkeys made dissonant. 

The first audio is the ringing of the tuned bell the second is the hitting of metal utensils. Now you can find the difference between consonant and dissonant.

REFRESH THE PAGE IF THE AUDIO SHOWES AN ERROR,

From a musician's point of view, jass is mostly dissonant but gives a feel that depends on the player (not mocking jass, just a fact), metal and rock music is not pleasant but harmonic so it depends on the listener. Other than that all are consonant. Generally, consonants are predictable sounds.

Music is evolved through the ages among that classical music is the most ordered and has strict rules about music and the free-going type is jass, yet people like both the music. It is a question of why people like music? (Think it yourself)

This is a classical music sheet. See how the notes(the black dots on and in between the line) are ordered and simple. (when the dots go higher and higher the pitch increases) 

This is a Jass music sheet. This piece of music is one of the famous compositions. Even though it is good to hear it trumpet players see it as a difficult piece to master. See how the notes are organized it looks more complex than earlier sheet music.   

Technically a piece of music has rhythm, harmony, and melody. We normally combine them to produce music. We can sense them easily. 

The sense of rhythm

The best example of rhythm is our heartbeat or a ticking analog clock. It produces a sound in equal intervals of time or it is silent in a particular interval of time. 1,2,3,4:1,2,3,4;1,2,3,4;1,2,3,4... now if you count this pattern in your mind and repeat it the make a sound in everyone or in any pattern when which you wish you are producing rhythm ( technically a 4/4 rhythm pattern). 

By nature, we have a sense of rhythm, we tap our legs, nod our heads or clap our hands while listening to a song which is nothing but our sense of rhythm. From nature, we can grasp the rhythm from The rustling of leaves, the sound of rain, the sound of water flowing, the sound of waves on the beach, the song of birds, etc. 

Some of the rhythmic sounds. The first two are computer generated. The first is used in music and the second is the dile tone in a telephone. The last two mimics the natural world. like a heartbeat and walking on a hard floor. 

The sense of harmony

In a very general meaning harmony is the existence of things together. So in music, it is the existence of different sounds together. The sets example is the "gooood mooorrrninggg" of kids in school. Is harmony sounds as a single sound but has various tones in it. Another example is the audience singing a song in a concert or a group of people in a choir. We as social beings sense and produce hormones in our daily life but we do know how. 

The sense of melody 

In general, a melody is a tone that produces a consonant. A bird singing is a melody, our random hummings are a melody. It has a certain pitch to be filled and follows a rhythm. The " Happy birthday song" is a good melody. So a melody is a set of notes which make a consonant. 

Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale at the world science festival. The audience are singing harmony and Bobby is singing melody. 

The walking humans - music producers

As physicists approximate a cow as a cylinder (not a joke it is real check it here), we can approximate a walking human as a simple pendulum. As we walk we exhibit a harmonic motion i.e., an up-down motion, back-and-forth motion, extension, and compression. 

The walking human represents a simple harmonic motion similar to a pendulum.

A pendulum produces a sine wave similar to the movement of human feet and hands. 

NOTE: Click the video and wait of few seconds to load. Then again click the play button.  

All this is associated with a sound like a taping of feet, swinging of hands, and breathing. So a walking human can produce a piece of music.

When a group of people walk we can create a good random consonant. From this, we can obtain a predictable sound. By doing this we have different predictable sounds in harmony and when we can synchronize them we get spaces of silence that have two adaptations.  we can filter our unwanted predictable sounds, and we can effectively find a tempo (time frame of a rhythm) and follow it and form a convincing melody or a beat. 

The amplified sound when a human walks. You find a rhythm in it and a jass melody too.  

So our natural activity can produce a piece of good music so people get inspiration from themself and from nature. Different cultures have different types of sounds and music but the feeling that they convey are universally understood? Which is again a question that we have to think about. I also have another question about this we humans do not need music to exist ( Like a human can exist without pizza) then why do we need music? (Think about these questions by yourself).

Basics of harmony 

To understand the pattern of harmony in a physical and a mathematical way I encourage you to do a small activity. Make something as shown in the figure. Frequency ratios, Now take a model that was proposed by Pythagoras, in the following arrangement the white border is a slider so it can dived the string into two different parts and creates different sound when it is moved differently. 

Now when the slider is kept in such a way that the ratio of their lengths or the frequency is a simple integer we will get a consonant (like 1:2, 1:2, 2:3, etc). Other frequencies like 1:13, 3:19, etc are normally dissonant. You can check it by yourself by making such an apparatus. These sets of notes are in different frequencies form chords and all the major and minor chords are composed of the simple frequency ratio. 

The first three sounds are in simple integer ratio as in the figure so they make consonants (Which are the basic chords as mentioned earlier). The last two sounds are in a higher integer ratio so they are not consonant. ##

We generally like chords with lower integer ratios. The question here is why do we like chords with lower integer ratios?

The auditory system - The place where neurons play their game.

Once Sound reaches your ear it vibrates your eardrum which in turn vibrates the three bones that pass these vibrations along to your cochlea, inside the cochlea is the basilar membrane and which is a strip of tissue that runs along the length of the cochlea the basilar membrane is designed so that the stiffness and other properties vary along its length so different parts of it resonate at different frequencies near the base of the cochlea responds best to high frequencies and at the tip it responds best to low frequencies all along the basilar membrane are these sensors called hair cells because they're each in a different position on the membrane they each respond best to a different frequency so effectively the cochlea performs a Fourier transform it separates audio signals into different frequencies each connected to a neuron which sends a signal to the brain saying that it heard this frequency neurons communicate primarily through electrical signals. 

When a neuron receives chemicals called neurotransmitters from a sensory cell or from another neuron those trigger ions which move positively charged potassium and sodium ions inside and outside of the neuron so there's a flow of current into the neuron at the same time all the charges that are accumulating on the inside and outside of the neuron are only separated by the thin cell membrane so this forms a capacitor on the edge of the neuron and the current source is charging up this capacitor (of course the cell membrane isn't perfect at holding back the ions so some of the calculus is going to leak through this means that the membrane acts as a resistor so now we've turned our neuron into an RC circuit) and we can analyze it just like we would in a physics class, the key value that we are interested in is the voltage across the membrane. The reason that we're interested in that is that once this reaches a certain threshold it will trigger voltage-gated ion channels to discharge the neuron and then it'll send neurotransmitters to the next neuron and repeat the whole process so here's the equation for our neuron the input current which again depends on the other neurons and sensory cells that our neuron is connected to equals the leakage current plus the charging and both of these depend on the voltage which is what we want to solve.

Let's say you're listening to a chord with three notes and they're both frequencies that means that two of your hair cells are being triggered and each one of those sends a signal to one sensory neuron we'll say these two sensory neurons hook up to one interneuron which takes a signal to your brain what we're going to do is we'll take our neuron equation and apply it to these three neurons the hope is that once we solve it we'll be able to plug in different frequencies for different chords and hopefully we'll see some difference in the signal that goes to your brain between good chords and bad chords so we'll start with neuron number one since it's connected to a hair cell the input is just a sine wave, at whatever frequency the node is but there's also a lot of noise in our brains there's so many random factors that could change the input current so we'll also add a term here that represents random noise neuron number two is exactly the same but with a different frequency for a different note neuron number three gets its input from the first two neurons and again the way it works is the input neurons will normally send close to zero current until they fire then they'll instantaneously send the pulse of current so we'll use a Dirac Delta function to model this it's a function that's zero everywhere except at the moment the neurons fire of course we'll have to solve for neurons one and two to figure out those times this system of equations can be and has been solved and the solution is obtained as follows. 

I don't think it's particularly enlightening (If it is enlightening do read about it) so instead of solving it let me walk you through what typically happens and I say typically because that noise that we included makes the solution slightly random the current signal coming from the hair cell is generally not high enough to trigger the sensory neurons on its own so it takes the addition of our noise to actually fire during the first cycle of the sound wave that we're listening to the neuron is charging up so the moment that it's most likely to fire first is at the peak of the sine wave when the current input is highest if it didn't happen to fire at that time then the next most likely cancer is going to be at the next Peak so if we make a probability distribution of the sensory neurons firing times it'll look something like this a high peak after one cycle of the sound wave and then they get smaller after that on round number three the input from a single sensory neuron is also generally not high enough to trigger it and because of the resistor or charges leaking across the cell membrane if there's no constant current input then it'll eventually discharge so in order for neuron number three to fire it needs to receive a signal from one neuron and then really soon after receive a signal from the other neuron this needs to happen before it has time to discharge so the more often the signals from neuron 1 and neuron 2 line up the more often neuron 3 will fire and send a signal to your brain we can use this to make a probability distribution of neuron number three's firing times but of course it depends on the relationship between the two frequencies that you're hearing.

Entropy and Information

Entropy and information are big words in the modern academic world because we don't understand it to a full extent but the basic definition and insight will provide us a good understanding of the thing that we are dealing with. 

Entropy is the measure of disorder. A well-arranged room has lower entropy because the thing that room is already stable to our senses and we don't do anything about it. whereas a messy room has more entropy because things can be arranged in more ways, so the things in a messy room can be arranged in different ways, unlike a well-arranged room.  

Information is knowledge of facts. Facts are something we know, so we can know something by seeing, hearing, feeling, reading, writing, practicing, etc. Now when we take the above room case we have information from both rooms, It is easy to get detailed information from a well-arranged room because we can easily navigate things and understand them. A messy room will have information but not in the way we like, normally in a very short time we will say a well-arranged room gives more information than a messy room. It is true and false depending upon some factors. 

Music, Entropy, and Information

So here are some probability distributions for small integer chords you can see that they're pretty regular the signal that your brain gets is organized and predictable but here are some probability distributions for large integer chords as you can see they're much fuzzier it's not predictable when that neuron is going to fire we actually have a way of measuring this fuzziness it's called information entropy or Shannon entropy (after its inventor to introduce it let me show you this picture this is the Arecibo message).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Arecibo_message.svg/150px-Arecibo_message.svg.png

Arecibo message

In 1974 we sent this picture through radio waves into the cosmos I guess as an attempt to introduce ourselves to whatever aliens might find it but pretend that you're an alien and your job is to watch the data from a radio telescope and notify someone.

If you see a signal that looks like it's from Aliens most days you'll just see something like this random noise.

Then one day you see one of these signals gives you more information clearly.  It is so organized that it must be an intelligent message, see you already have an intuition (Even if we don't know the meaning of the signal we can grasp this from the analogy of the messy room earlier.) For entropy, a signal that appears more organized is more likely to contain information a high entropy signal like this is probably just noise but a low entropy signal like this tells us something if you were just shown each of these signals then the low entropy one carries more information.

Now here's the counter-intuitive part let's say that you know that both of these signals are from Aliens they're both intentional, now which one gives you more information this one does the one with higher entropy see the low entropy organized signal follows simple rules you could recreate it by only knowing a few things but to recreate the high entropy signal you would need to know each bit so you actually gain more information by understanding the messy signal is ambiguous but decoding It ultimately gives you more information.

The entropy of neural signals reaching your brain is low for consonant low integer chords it's high for dissonant High integer chords and this makes sense in a lot of ways. I mean if you hear a C major chord on a piano then of course it was intentional it carries a simple message and it's unlikely to happen by chance somebody is probably reading music and playing it.  On the other hand, if you hear three adjacent chromatic notes then it could just be that something fell on the piano on the surface you might not gain information from it but if somebody was reading music that directed them to do that then it would carry a profound amount of information because there are hundreds of bad chords and only a few good chords.

When it's less organized you have more to work with nevertheless our brain prefers the unambiguous case and that's why we like certain chords and we will easily have to connect to the musical and what feel it is delivering. Like a C major: Innocence, happiness with a spiritual feeling; Cm: Innocence, sadness, heartbroken and evokes yearning (Search them meaning in Google); D major: Triumphant and victorious. Feels like war marches or holiday songs; Dm: serious and melancholic. Brings on feelings of concern and contemplation; Em: Restless love, grief, and mournfulness; F chord: Optimism and the will to explode, etc.

When we hear a melody, we still need to think and figure out what the musician wants to say and that's the definition of high entropy. It is not a coincidence that according to our analysis of neural firing times, this is a high entropy interval. It is easy when we have low integer frequency chords that form consonants and are predictable & ambiguous to us. 

When Claude Shannon introduced the concept of information entropy, he called it that way because the disorganization of information is clearly analogous to the disorganization of matter which we call entropy and thermodynamics and statistical mechanics but maybe there is another similarity between the two. 

In matter entropy always increases on a global scale and this is just a result of statistics. If you drop food dye into the water there is only one state where all the dye molecules form a particular shape but there are trillions of states where the molecules look random so over time they'll tend to look random, This is the second law of Thermodynamics. 

https://vinacanete.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/coolwater.gif

Maybe human culture follows a second law of information, I mean modern films, music, visual art, and literature all of it depend on ambiguities that are left up to us to understand them. A single spoken sentence can contain so many layers of information that are completely absent from something like a computer programming language even day-to-day functions like determining whether somebody is lying or if they understand you. 

All (sound made by a human) is difficult to process because human speech has such high entropy but listening to music might be our way of training our brain for that. So, jazz music and indigenous drumming really aren't that different they both train us to process difficult information that might be the best benefit that music gives us. Of course, you can't listen to Hard music all the time because it might be white noise which has a very high entropy that we can not comprehend. 

This is a connection to model theory (click here)

NOTE:

## Audio is made by John Paul J

• The rest of the audio is taken from "Sound Effect from <href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=linkattribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=29388">Pixabay</a>"
• The pictures and equations are made by  GIMP and "a paper" mobile application by John Paul J. The equations are not exact and are referred from the following. 

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21981535/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20481757/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27134038/

  

Hope this article was useful and I hope you learned something from it.

If you have any theories or questions regarding this you are free to express them in comments or you can chat with me on my Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/phy.sci/?hl=en.

See my previous posts 

Science of pencil

Empiricism and Rationalism

Water and life

Why do remotes work when we smack them?

Vibration - Eternal motion

Scientific values of water

IF ANY DOUBTS AND CLARIFICATION YOU CAN COMMENT HERE.

IF ANY INFORMATION IS INACCURATE I AM READY TO CORRECT IT

 

 

 Vibration - Eternal motion

Everything in life is vibration 

- Albert Einstain

https://gifer.com/en/gifs/devils-tuning-fork

Our human senses are not powerful as we think. We miss many events that happen in nature. Even though we have the most evolved conscious but our sensory perception is not on par with other living organisms. 

The sense of vibration can be seen from different viewpoints. It can be viewed as a physical event and modeled it using the laws of physics and mathematics, It can be viewed as a philosophical thought of the cycle of life and even it can be viewed in spirituality as a connection to the unknown creator.

The essence of vibration can be best understood using the modern scientific formulation. This article will be a bird's eye view of vibration in our life and I will explain why I call vibration the "eternal motion".

This article will give a scientific explanation. This explanation may not be scientifically accurate but will provide a good intuition of the concept.

TO AND FRO MOTION

To and fro, back and forth or here and there all these verbal expressions mean the same thing. In a very general view, this expression indicates the movement of someone or something forward or backward followed by a return to the same position. This in general indicates many ideas such as emotional state, relationship, or a physical thing. We are only interested in the physical aspect of to and fro motion. 

As a human, we all would have seen the flapping of wings by a bird while flying this is a classical example of to and fro motion. This type of motion can be best understood by observing the wings of a bird or an insect. Now if you see the following picture you may get a visual idea of this here and there motion, or back and forth motion. 

An Introduction to Flapping Wing Aerodynamics (CHAPTER-1)

Wei Shyy, Hikaru Aono, Chang-kwon Kang, Hao Liu Cambridge University Press

From the above image, The motion of the bird is from right to left. The positions of wings at the 2nd and 4th stages are the equilibrium position or the position which is aligned to the body and this is the position of cruising flight. Now if we watch the position of the wings on stage 1 it is upward and on stage 3 it is downward. Now, this up and down motion from the equilibrium position is the to and fro motion of the bird's wings. (The curve line will be explained in the following section).

There are many such examples of this type of motion in our daily life, blinking of eyes, beating of heart, breathing, moving branches in the air, the motion of a swing, movement of clock hands, moving pistol in an automobile engine, and more. So in general this type of motion expression indicates the movement of someone or something forward or backward followed by a return to the same position.

 

REPETITIVE PERIODIC MOTION

Repeat - An action that is performed more than once (like breathing).

Periodic - An event occurring at intervals of time (like the beating of the heart).

Motion - Some movement through time which is defined using Newton's second law. 

Once we have an idea about to and fro motion the next step is to understand the essence of "repetitive periodic motion". As each word is defined it will be clear for you. A repetitive periodic motion is a motion that occurs more than one time in specific intervals of time. The best example of this is our heart. The heart has some movement as a whole so it is exhibiting repetitive periodic motion. I.e. in general a human heartbeat 60 to 100 times in a minute (This is given in a range because the heartbeat depends on many factors) and this process can be modeled using Newton's laws of motion.

Now we are clear about to and fro motion, time interval, and repetitive periodic motion (If you are not able to understand this contact me through the link provided at the end or ask your doubt in the comment).

OSCILLATION AND VIBRATION - A scientific approach to understanding repetitive periodic to and fro motion

When even we describe a thing we describe it through a physical quantity or a property, for example, we describe the movement of a car using speed or velocity, and we describe the dimensions of an object using size. In a similar way, repetitive periodic to and fro motion can be described using frequency. 

FREQUENCY -  Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. For example, a high E string in a guitar goes up and down from the rest position 330 times in a second therefore the frequency of vibration of the high E guitar string is 330 Hz. Normally 1 Hz is the occurrence of one event in one second. 

So, frequency is an important property to understand vibration. There are many consequences of frequency in a physical understanding like wavelength and wave period. wave number etc. When we deal with a repetitive periodic motion we always express the motion in terms of waves. 

WAVES - Waves are the disturbance caused by repetitive periodic motion. The disturbance travel in a medium usually air, water, metal, etc. Even our human ear is working due to the disturbance caused by various events. Broadly speaking waves are the physical and mathematical consequence of vibrations and oscillations. If you see the previous image representing the flapping of wings of a bird, the bottom of the image is a curved line. This is not a random curve, mathematically it is a sine wave that is obtained from the rotating vectors. So a flapping of a bird's wing along with time represents a wave. At first, I actually felt the hoe an up-down motion (almost straight) can form a curve but it can. Try it your self take a long piece of paper and move the paper in a direction with constant velocity, on the other hand, use a pen and move your hands up and down you can see a similar pattern of flapping of a bird's wing. Physically it forms a sine curve but mathematically we can obtain many things from it like the frequency or the system which is causing it, wavelength, wavenumber, etc (this will be dealt with in detail in another blog).

The idea that we should understand here is that whenever there is a vibration, as a consequence of that vibration waves are formed and the nature of vibration can be understood by studying the waves.

OSCILLATIONS - "Oscillation is the repetitive or periodic variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value often a point of equilibrium or between two or more different states". If someone search in Wikipedia this is the answer they get. Getting answers is not important but understanding them is important. 

Now if you take the flapping of wings the wings go up as much as they can and the wings move down as much as they can so, they are moving between two different states keeping the 2nd and 4th stage as equilibrium position so the wings of a bird are oscillating around a mean point. 

There is another example of oscillation in a non-physical way a child's mind oscillates between choosing a chocolate and ice cream. So anything that changes its state between two states can be considered oscillations.

The following show a spring and mass system (an ideal system in physics to study different phenomenon). when the spring is at rest the mass and spring remain in their stable state. when it is stretched or oppressed from the stable position it starts to oscillate between a compressed state and stretched state (You may have a question that why this happens? for now it is not our interest it will be dealt with afterward). Thus the mass and spring oscillate from their stable position. Along with it a graphical representation of the position of the mass over time is plotted, which forms a sine curve it represents a simple form of mechanical wave.

SIMULATION MADE BY J JOHN PAUL USING V PYTHON˘

https://github.com/JohnpaulJ1509/Python_for_physics/blob/main/7.(BASIC)Simple_HARMONIC_motion.py

So oscillations are also to and fro motion. Oscillations describe the to and fro motion of almost everything from mechanical systems, dynamical systems, and biological systems to mind and emotions. The oscillations can be best described using frequency and a waveform. The frequency gives the energy of the oscillation, the quality of vibration, and more similarly the waveform give the details about the origin, state, and future of the oscillations. Oscillations occur from the very atomic level to a very large level like in space-time or even a galaxy can oscillate. Almost all living and non-living bodies exhibit oscillatory motion or oscillations.

Oscillations can be of a periodic nature, non-periodic nature can be linear, or cyclic it can be anything. The mathematics of oscillation deals with the quantification of the amount that a sequence or function tends to move between extremes. In modern physics, we use oscillations to find the state of the particle. So the direct consequence of oscillations is waves. 

VIBRATION - Vibration literally means shaking, which is a Latin word. So shaking in one dimension is a to and fro motion and vibration in three dimensions is here and there motion. Mostly vibrations take place as a mechanical phenomenon. A mechanical phenomenon is a physical phenomenon associated with the equilibrium or motion of objects. A physical phenomenon is a natural phenomenon involving matter and energy. 

Some of the best examples of vibration are sound from our vocal cord, from musical instruments, the membrane of loudspeakers, vibrations of water molecules while heating, the vibration of mobile phones, and more. So vibration is also a to and fro motion that exhibits a mechanical phenomenon. 

THE CONFUSION - Are Oscillation and vibration the same or different

This confusion actually occurs for all the students but I have a good explanation to face this trick question. First, let us summarize what we know. 

• Both oscillations and vibrations are to and fro motion.
• Both oscillations and vibration can be represented as waves and their direct consequence is the formation of waves.
• Both oscillation and vibrations fundamentally represent the same thing. 

Now look at the question from a deeper point of view we can have a clear question "If oscillations and vibrations are the same phenomenon which is to and fro motion the why some to and fro motion is called vibrations and few to and fro motions are called as oscillations?"

It should not be surprising for you that there is no perfect answer for this but there is a convincing justification for this which is discussed below. 

Well these two words mean the same phenomenon but we use them in a different context. 

Scientifically speaking oscillations can mean any event that has the essence of to and fro motion. Like the movement of tires on gravel, any random to and fro motion, the to and fro motion of magnetic and electric field which forms a light, the to and fro motion of a pendulum, the motion of a swing, the motion of a sew-saw and more. Oscillations are mostly desirable which means it is done wanted like if you want to swing a swing you have to do it and it can be changed accordingly. What I mean to say is that if you want to move a swig for a certain distance you can move it according to your desire. 

Oscillations mostly occur as a whole. Consider the swing, the swing is made up of many atoms or it is made of many individual particles while oscillating the individual particles act as one single particle and exhibit an oscillation.

If you take vibration, it seems more random than oscillation but it is not. the vibration is mostly undesirable which means we don.t obtain what we want. For example, take a tuning fork if you hit a tuning fork it will have a to and fro motion. Now if you take a tuning fork that produces an A note on hitting it you can only get a A frequency you can't get a C frequency from it without modifying the tuning fork. Similarly in all mechanical systems like cars, the bike we don't expect vibration to take place but it happens whit a certain frequency call as natural frequency.  So vibration can't be decided for the mechanical system, the system will vibrate on its own.

Vibrations mostly occur as individual particles. So if you take vibrations all the particles vibrate in a very random fashion and provide a net vibration as a whole. If you take the tunning fork it gives an A frequency but it is provided by superimposing many rand vibrations in the material of the tuning fork. 

Another important aspect is that vibration is mostly associated with the loss of energy but in oscillations, we provide energy to perform it. This can be best understood by taking a drummer as an example. A drummer swings his hand and hits the stretched membrane of the drum, here the action of hitting the drum i.e the motion of the hand can be considered as an oscillation whereas the to and fro motion of the drum membrane is vibration. 

The vibration of a drum membrane

https://javalab.org/en/standing_waves_on_a_drum_surface_en/

 

Oscillation of the hand while playing drums

Taylor, John. (2017). Designing a Computer Model of Drumming: The Biomechanics of Percussive Performance. Human Technology. 13. 109-141. 10.17011/ht/urn.201705272520. 

So vibration and oscillation on a very basic level are the same which represent the to and fro motion but in a scientific viewpoint, they are different and use to denote the to and fro motion in different conditions. 

VIBRATION - Eternal motion

Eternal means existing or lasting forever. Each object that is visible to our eyes is made up of atoms and molecules. Mostly these particles have their own world to exist following some interesting rules. Now when you put a pollen grain on the surface and observe the interface through a microscope it will be seen that this pollen grain will jump here and there we don,t know why this happens in a macroscopic view. When we see it at a microscopic level it is clearly seen that it is because of the collisions of the washer molecules and the pollen grains, so for a collision to happen we require energy. The energy in a mass is stored via the mechanical phenomenon of vibration. So, everything in this world vibrates on its own and the reason for that is unknown. Even when the temperature is 0K (the coldest known temperature) the molecule has a vibration. So this undesired to and fro motion is kind of making the world stable by vibrating. That is why I call vibration eternal motion which is everlasting.

When anything vibrates it produces waves (a disturbance in space), so each and every object including us is emitting certain vibrations and these play an important role.  The consequence of this is resonance, natural frequency, constructive waves, destructive waves, and more (These will be dealt with in a different blog). So vibrations connect us to the cosmos. 

VIBRATION OF A GUITAR STRING

https://gfycat.com/warpedexcellenthairstreakbutterfly

DO VISIT THE ARCHIVE TO EXPLORE MORE 

Hope this article was useful and I hope you learned something from it.

If you have any theories or questions regarding this you are free to express them in the comments or you can chat with me on my Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/phy.sci/?hl=en.