Waveforms

Lecture is dismissed. I have about an hour before my next class, and I know exactly where to go. 

I peruse the halls, glance into each classroom window. One has a class in session, the next has a jazz rehearsal, another band, another class. My hope fades until I take one last stroll, and then, jackpot. My heart flutters as I place my hand on the door handle.

There she is, standing proud and mighty: a Yamaha Disklavier 6’7” grand piano. This divine apparatus is technically reserved for music majors, but whenever I find an empty practice room in Schoenberg Hall I can’t resist. 

My thumb glazes the middle A and sparks begin to fly. My remaining fingers glide across the lustrous ivory like butter on a pan. My wrists melt into the keys until eventually there is no distinction, they’ve become one. I’ve transcended into a state of otherworldly synergy, I’m riding the waves of this sonic sea and each note is a stepping stone that propels me further and deeper. Nothing could pull me out of this trance. 

“Excuse me, we have a midterm going on in the next room. Could you please keep it down?”

Except maybe that.

– 

Baroque: 

At age three, I couldn’t form a sentence. My parents were concerned– children my age were already engaging in coherent conversation, and the most I could conjure up was a word or two followed by gibberish. But funnily enough, I could sing fifty Bollywood songs fluently from start to finish. Music has been fundamental to my existence since before I could possibly conceptualize what music is. I’m eternally grateful to come from a family of musicians; my parents have been Bollywood singers since before I was born, so music was about as frequent as conversation in our household. Developmental psychology tells us that who we become is an intertwinement of nature and nurture, and thankfully I had music in both.

Classical: 

Early in my piano journey, I discovered I have perfect pitch with a particular affinity for chords; with any song I heard on the radio I could discern the key and chord progression instantly. This manifested into my favorite hobby to date: creating original piano covers of my favorite mainstream songs, be it R&B, hip hop, or Bollywood. What started as recreating the prominent melodies and chord progressions evolved into dissecting the chord inversions, rhythmic syncopations, and everything in between, emulating a full band with ten fingers. As much as I loved learning Chopin’s Nocturnes and Mozart’s Sonatas, nothing could parallel the satisfaction of mapping out my own arrangements by ear. In fact, it came infinitely easier to me than memorizing sheet music; why replicate someone else’s interpretation when I could craft my own?

During the pandemic, my love for music found an entirely different medium: mixing. I became immersed in the Desi-American DJ community and learned the intricacies of digital audio workstations to create seamless blends of my favorite English and Bollywood songs. It was exhilarating to translate my knowledge of music theory from a physical environment to a digital one. The crests and troughs of the soundwaves that danced across my screen bore a striking conceptual resemblance to the repeating octaves on my keyboard, both fundamentally cyclical in nature. 

Romantic:

As I studied my first electroencephalogram scan in UCLA's Cognitive Psychology Laboratory, I couldn’t help but recognize an uncanny replica of my digital audio workspace. I couldn’t fathom that the innumerable inner workings of my brain, the complex web of neural interactions that allow me to form this very sentence, could be compartmentalized into mere waveforms– nearly identical to the soundwaves I manipulated every day. This came with a profound realization, that life is rooted in rhythm. Be it the cadence of the heart beating, the diaphragm breathing, or synapses firing, rhythm is eternally woven into our anatomical fabric.  Throughout my cognitive science curriculum I developed an acute curiosity for the intersection of music and cognition– how unique pitch and chord arrangements have the power to elicit specific emotional experiences in a listener. As I researched the amygdala’s pivotal role in triggering musical memories, I gained the scientific foundations to articulate something I’ve always known: that music scratches the brain like nothing else can. 

When I attempted my first machine learning projects within the data science minor, I found that my mental approach was profoundly similar to that of tackling a new piano piece. Both were a quest to find meaning within madness, using my technical foundations to discern the patterns hidden amidst vast, fluctuating information. I realized that both music and data science are rooted in the power of storytelling– bringing nuanced narratives and latent emotions to life, searching deeper than what’s visible to the unsuspecting eye.

This sentiment was the catalyst for my original segment on UCLA Radio, “Soundtrack 2 My Life”: an intimate deep-dive into the formative music in my guests’ lives. Through radio and the music industry minor, music remained the driving current of my undergraduate endeavors. Uncovering the nuances of streaming economics and artist management revealed to me that both cognitive science and data science stand at the pinnacle of an artist’s success– a masterful interplay of behavioral psychology to understand your audience, and data analytics to position yourself strategically in an ever-changing music scene. 

Contemporary:

Today as a cognitive science, data science, and music industry graduate, I look forward to discovering the harmonious intersection of my three disciplines through Georgia Tech’s Masters of Music Technology in 2026. I’m eager to leverage my foundations in each industry to extract the irreplicable power of music in all its forms. I dream of combining my worlds to make disruptive innovations in music therapy, channeling music theory and cognitive psychology towards mental health treatment and leveraging computational data science to execute this scalably. 

My endeavors thus far have been in pursuit of understanding life’s innumerable waveforms: the sonic waves that give music its magic, the electromagnetic waves that fuel the brain, or how these waveforms can be extrapolated to build artificially intelligent machines. I hope to continuously ride the convergent waves of music, cognition, and data science, to create ripples of innovation that resonate in the realm of sound and beyond.