Stephon Alexander, a physics professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,  and president of the National Society of Black Physicists in the United States, will address a symposium on “the science of the steelpan” at the University of Toronto on Monday.

Alexander who is a also jazz musician and author of The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe,  will discuss “the acoustic phenomena that is the steelpan – a scientific investigation of what happens when a steelpan is constructed and what are the physical properties of the sound that is produced.”

Among the other speakers at the symposium will be Edward Peters, a Toronto-based master pan tuner, pannist and steelpan researcher and Tony Pierre, a master drummer, also Toronto-based, who in his teens was a member of the Silver Stars steelband in Trinidad.

The symposium will be held at the Earth Science Centre, 33 Willcocks Street.