Chemical Education Today
Letters Music of Second-Order Reactions Previously in this Journal (1), I made an attempt to uncover the hidden musical talents of a variety of chemical processes, including first-order reactions using model reactions, as well as some real chemical reactions based on the equations that describe the rate of disappearance of reactants and the rate of formation of products. Since then, I have explored the musical artifacts of second-order reactions based on model functions as well as three real chemical reactions: namely, isobutyl bromide and sodium ethoxide reaction; dimerization of butadiene; and hydrolysis of ethyl nitrobenzoate. Study of these model reactions reveals that the concentration at time zero (c0) and the secondorder rate constant (k2) influence both amplitude and timbre, unlike those of the first-order reactions where c0 has been found to manipulate only the amplitude. Similar to first-order reactions, these reactions also seem to produce music characteristic of their nature, type of reaction, and kind of species involved in the reaction. The music created by these reactions is certainly quite distinct compared to that of first-order reactions. The online supplement to this letter outlines a brief methodology for extracting amplitudes and frequencies from second-order reactions using discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) presented in the form of spectral analysis figures for model functions and real chemical reactions. The frequencies thus generated fall in the infrasound region not audible to the human ear (
