Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 12
Abstracts
Panel 1: Feline Symbolism
Cleo
11:20 – 11:35
The Cat in the Box
Schrödinger's Cat and Musical Metaphors of Uncertainty
DJ W. Hatfield 施永德 and Stanley S. Chang / GIM National Taiwan
University, Wellesley College
The physics thought experiment Schrödinger’s cat
—a
paradox
that
dramatizes
quantum
superposition through the image of a cat
simultaneously alive and dead—has escaped the
box of theoretical physics to become a powerful
metaphor
in
popular
culture.
In
this
interdisciplinary talk, a mathematician and a
musicologist explore the curious journey of
Schrödinger’s cat from the blackboard to recording
studio, examining its musical reincarnations
across diverse genres. From the art-rock
introspection of Tears for Fears (1996) to the
literary rap of MC Lars (2017), Schrödinger’s cat
has been sonically remediated in ways that employ
scientific metaphor for personal and cultural
reflection. Although popular musicians have
employed Schrödinger’s cat as a metaphor in
lyrics, it also appears in ambiguous musical forms
that shift as listeners attend or sing along. The
2014 self-titled album by the band Schrödinger’s
Cat further demonstrates how this feline emblem
of uncertainty inspires not only single tracks but
entire
conceptual
frameworks.
Through
a
discussion of these examples, we ask how musical
remediation
might
transform
Schrödinger’s
experiment, bringing it into domains of social and
cultural commentary. Finally, we argue that the
cat in the box has become a musical metaphor of
the
modern
imagination—caught
between
determinism and possibility, and always on the
edge of collapse into meaning.
10
