Related papers: Mathematics and group theory in music
Symmetry principles underlie and guide scientific theory and research, from Curie's invariance formulation to modern applications across physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Building on a recent matrix Lie group measurement model, this…
Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics can be understood as a reflection of a deep and unexpected unity between the fundamental structures of mathematics and of physics. Some of the history of evidence for this is…
The problem of how mathematics and physics are related at a foundational level is of much interest. One approach is to work towards a coherent theory of physics and mathematics together. Here steps are taken in this direction by first…
In this article on mathematics and music, we explain how one can "listen to motives" as rhythmic interpreters. In the simplest instance which is the one we shall consider, the motive is simply the $H^1$ of the reduction modulo a prime $p$…
These few pages briefly present the way in which Activity Theory has been adopted for several years now by French researchers in didactics of mathematics and has been adapted to study the learning of school mathematics in relation with the…
The fundamental role of mathematics as an inspiration for artists, but also as a tool for art creation, is presented in this paper following different art fields, like architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, literature and poetry,…
Many formal languages of contemporary mathematical music theory -- particularly those employing category theory -- are powerful but cumbersome: ideas that are conceptually simple frequently require expression through elaborate categorical…
The Pythagorean school attributed consonance in music to simplicity of frequency ratios between musical tones. In the last two centuries, the consonance curves developed by Helmholtz, Plompt and Levelt shifted focus to psycho-acoustic…
The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of language in the process of teaching and learning mathematics. We will begin with the definition of mathematics given by Cassiodorus (in its essential features repeated in Kolmogorov's…
Transformational music theory is a recent field in music theory which studies the possible transformations between musical objects, such as chords. In the framework of the theory initiated by David Lewin, the set of all transformations…
Wigner found unreasonable the "effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". But if the mathematics we use to describe nature is simply a coded expression of our experience then its effectiveness is quite reasonable. Its…
These notes form an introduction to Lie algebras and group theory. Most of the material can be found in many works by various authors given in the list of references. The reader is referred to such works for more detail.
Many have wondered how mathematics, which appears to be the result of both human creativity and human discovery, can possibly exhibit the degree of success and seemingly-universal applicability to quantifying the physical world as…
We present a survey of results on word equations in simple groups, as well as their analogues and generalizations, which were obtained over the past decade using various methods, group-theoretic and coming from algebraic and arithmetic…
We analyzed a large selection of classical musical pieces composed by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, and found a surprising connection with mathematics. For each composer, we extracted the time intervals each note was…
We present and discuss a curated selection of recent literature related to the application of quantitative techniques, tools, and topics from mathematics and data science that have been used to analyze the mathematical sciences community.…
We apply geometric group theory to study and interpret known concepts from Western music. We show that chords, the circle of fifths, scales and certain aspects of the first species of counterpoint are encoded in the Cayley graph of the…
Symmetry is at the heart of much of mathematics, physics, and art. Traditional geometric symmetry groups are defined in terms of isometries of the ambient space of a shape or pattern. If we slightly generalize this notion to allow the…
This essay recounts my personal journey towards a deeper understanding of the mathematical foundations of algorithmic music composition. I do not spend much time on specific mathematical algorithms used by composers; rather, I focus on…
Mathematics has become inescapable in modern, digitized societies: there is hardly any area of life left that isn't affected by it, and we as mathematicians play a central role in this. Our actions affect what others, in particular our…