Exits

The musical instruments of the Indian subcontinent have remarkably sophisticated acoustic properties. The Indian drums are typically loaded at the center, which gives them their unique harmonic overtones. Apart from the tympani, which operates on a different principle, the Indian drums are the only ones which have harmonic overtones. The curved bridge of the Indian chordophones - the sitar, the tanpura, and the veena - is another uniquely Indian innovation. The curved bridge produces overtones which, for an ordinary bridge, are forbidden by the Young-Helmholtz law. This generates the uniquely characteristic full sound, the jawari. Please have a look at my musical acoustics page to find out more.

I find a deep similarity in the creative lives of the musician Acharya Baba Alauddin Khan and the physicist Academician Lev Davidovich Landau. Khan was a master of at least a dozen Indian instruments; Landau was a master of almost every department of physics. In todays era of specialisation, both were the last great universalists. Khan almost singlehandedly created the modern baj of Hindustani classical music and innovated in numerous other ways; Landau almost singlehandedly created the discipline of condensed matter physics and his name is linked with its most important concepts. Both were seminal creative giants. Khan was a harsh but generous Guru in the Indian tradition, giving shape to the Maihar gharana and producing stellar shishyas Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Pannalal Ghosh; Landau was a formidably exacting supervisor, building around him that uniquely Soviet school of physics (which I cannot stop from calling the Moscow gharana) whose equally stellar students were A. Abrikosov, E. M. Lifshitz, I. Khalatnikov, B. Ioffe. Both had their unique rigorous style of teaching and were supreme as pedagogues. It is well known that Landau disliked music. We seem to have no information on Khan's preference for physics.