$music math patterns$

(The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like 'chord' are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form. The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, 'stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content.' The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into 'families.' They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way 'x' and 'y' coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.ĭifferent types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called 'geometrical music theory' that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. Now, three music professors – Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University - have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric. And the so-called musica universalis or 'music of the spheres' emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies - the sun, moon and planets - could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Music math patterns