Compositional Rheology: Drafting Musical Flux through Fluid Mechanics and Drawing

Abstract

This article explores the fluctuating relationship between the concepts of the “smooth” and “striated” musical space and time introduced by French composer Pierre Boulez and further developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as its connection to rheology. The study focuses on how the understanding of the Reynolds number (Re), a parameter that characterizes the way a fluid flows in a duct, might provide a new approach to investigating the aforementioned musical concepts and visualizing them through drawing. This article also introduces a way of studying and visualizing musical compositions by establishing analogies between compositional parameters and the molecular and inertial forces that exist within the stream of a fluid.