Mathematics Meets Music
Three researchers attempt to bring some rigor to the math of melody.
Lee Phillips | March 6, 2016
Noam Elkies of Harvard University presented the first talk, titled “The Entropy of Music: How Many Possible Pieces of Music Are There?” He illustrated his points with virtuosic turns on a keyboard. His basic idea was to apply concepts similar to those used in statistical mechanics and information theory to approach the question posed in his title. Elkies addressed how much a piece of music needs to change before it is a different piece, rather than a variation on the original. He also talked about how much information remains when the redundancy of repeated themes in a piece is accounted for.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/27/music-mathematics-fibonacci |
<more at http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/mathematics-meets-music/; related links and articles: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100056655/music-and-maths-joined-at-the-hip-or-walking-down-different-paths/ (Music and maths: joined at the hip or walking down different paths? October 7, 2011) and http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/27/music-mathematics-fibonacci (Listen by numbers: music and maths. Who says maths is all cold logic and music all emotion? That's nonsense, writes Marcus du Sautoy – the two are intimately connected. June 27, 2011)>
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