How Canadian rock duo Angine de Poitrine play with neurobiology and physics to make viral music

How Canadian rock duo Angine de Poitrine play with neurobiology and physics to make viral music

Angine de Poitrine don't abide by the usual rules of Western music, using their own custom-built guitar to strike notes that shouldn't exist

One of the strangest viral music phenoms of the year is the Quebecois duo Angine de Poitrine. In February a 27-minute-long YouTube video of the pair exploded. In it, they wore outfits covered in black-and-white polka dots and strange masks that reflected the conceit they are aliens. Playing music that sounds like nothing else in Western pop music, the duo has, at press time, racked up more than 15 million views on that video alone. Even Google took notice, giving the group their very own tribute in search . Physics and neurobiology can help explain why a band whose music uses notes that no one else does—literally—went so viral.

Let’s start with the physics. At its core, a musical note is a repeating vibration, says Mark van Raamsdonk, a physics professor at the University of British Columbia and an amateur jazz musician.

“A piano string or whatever is oscillating at that frequency, and then that makes the air oscillate at that frequency, and then that makes your eardrum oscillate at that frequency, and then your ear converts that into a signal to your brain,” he says.

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In Western music, the vast majority of sounds are made up of 12 notes. Imagine a piano keyboard: the white keys ascend from A to G and back to A, with the black keys representing a few sharps and flats along the way. The distance from a lower A to a higher A is one octave—the higher A vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower A.

The concept of musical intervals based on frequency dates back more than 2,500 years, and music historians often attribute it to either the Greek philosopher Pythagoras or the ancient Mesopotamians. Either way, what ancient musicians realized is that changing the length of a string also changed its vibration when plucked, which in turn changed the musical pitch. The relationship between notes depends on the ratio of their vibrations to each other.