Most students on campus don’t seem to know that there is an indie rock legend in the math department. Dr. Robert Schneider, mathematical sciences professor, number theorist, founder of the Mathematics and Music Lab, formerly of Elephant 6, The Apples In Stereo, and producer of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Schneider first started making music with his friends in high school. They all lived in Ruston, Louisiana, and shared their recordings on cassettes with each other. This loose group of bands became known as the Elephant 6 collective, a huge influence on modern indie rock. Eventually, Schneider moved to Denver, CO for college, but dropped out after a year to start The Apples In Stereo. He kept in touch with his Ruston friends and worked on their albums in a recording studio he set up.
Though Schneider was primarily a musician with The Apples in Stereo throughout the 2000s, he still had an interest in electronics and music. He likes to describe an epiphany he had when fixing his tape machine back in Colorado, where he opened a book to a page on Ohm’s Law, and realized that the music he was creating all boiled down to math. After that, Schneider created a musical scale based on logarithm, which landed him invites to speak at math conferences and meet mathematicians. As his interest in mathematics grew, he took classes in his free time, and eventually stopped doing music altogether to go to graduate school.
After graduating, Schneider taught number theory, specializing in partitions, at the University of Georgia in Athens. He came to Michigan Tech when he learned of all the experts in partition theory that worked here. At Tech, Schneider, along with Visual and Performing Arts professor Michael Maxwell, started the Mathematics in Music Lab, which Schneider describes as “a research think tank in music theory and electronics and computer programming.”
“We have this vision for this kind of futuristic new music of the future where mathematics and like technology are infused with music theory and influence music theory backwards” he said. Schneider is currently working on projects at the MML involving non-Pythagorean synthesizers, AI reverb plugins (in collaboration with ICC) and installations involving placing microphones under the ice of the canal (in collaboration with the GLRC).
