Related papers: Pairwise Well-Formed Modes and Transformations
We develop aspects of music theory related to harmony, such as scales, chord formation and improvisation from a combinatorial perspective. The goal is to provide a foundation for this subject by deriving the basic structure from a few…
A combination of three or more tones played together is called a chord. In the chromatic scale, chords which are consonant are of particular interest and can be divided into several groups, two main ones being the major and minor chords.…
The aim of this paper is twofold: on one side we review the classical concept of musical mode from the viewpoint of modern music, reading it as a superimposition of a base-chord (seventh chord) and a tension-chord (triad). We associate to…
In classical music and in any genre of contemporary music, the tonal elements or notes used for playing are the same. The numerous possibilities of chords for a given instance in a piece make the playing, in general, very intricate, and…
This paper develops a formal theory of musical scales and their harmonic coverings and introduces orbit covers: coverings obtained by translating a fixed subset across a scale via a group action. Orbit covers generalize familiar…
We address certain structural innovations in the music of Claudio Monteverdi, which defined the pivotal transition from the Renaissance prima pratica to the Baroque seconda pratica. To formalize this analysis, we employ Mazzola's…
We investigate cosmological perturbations of scalar-tensor theories in Palatini formalism. First we introduce an action where the Ricci scalar is conformally coupled to a function of a scalar field and its kinetic term and there is also a…
Symbolic Music Generation relies on the contextual representation capabilities of the generative model, where the most prevalent approach is the Transformer-based model. The learning of musical context is also related to the structural…
Western tonality provides a hierarchy of stability among melodic scale-degrees, from the maximally stable tonic to unstable chromatic notes. Tonal stability has been linked to emotion, yet systematic investigations of the associations…
In this paper we study prime, maximal and two--class congruences from the point of view of the relationships between them in various kinds of universal algebras, as well as their direct and inverse images through morphisms. This research…
Why are white and black piano keys in an octave arranged as they are today? This article examines the relations between abstract algebra and key signature, scales, degrees, and keyboard configurations in general equal-temperament systems.…
Most music theory books are like medieval medical textbooks: they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases. How does music, in particular harmony, actually work, presented as a real,…
The collaboration of mathematics in the two musical systems of Pythagorean sounds and of equal sounds is evident and opportune for generating the elements and managing their relationships. The only essential notion for a rational…
Musical scales are used throughout the world, but the question of how they evolved remains open. Some suggest that scales based on the harmonic series are inherently pleasant, while others propose that scales are chosen that are easy to…
The mathematics of musical intervals and scales has been extensively studied. Vastly simplified, our ears seem to prefer intervals whose frequency ratios have small numerator and denominator, such as 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth), 4:3…
We characterize those strings whose suffix arrays are based on arithmetic progressions, in particular, arithmetically progressed permutations where all pairs of successive entries of the permutation have the same difference modulo the…
Understanding the structural characteristics of harmony is essential for an effective use of music as a communication medium. Of the three expressive axes of music (melody, rhythm, harmony), harmony is the foundation on which the emotional…
Along with some known and less known results, we discuss new insights relating combinatorics of words and the ordering of the rationals from a dynamical systems point of view, somehow continuing along the path started in [BI]. We obtain in…
We extend a property of Mazzola's theory of cadential sets in relation to the modulation between minor and major tonalities from triadic to tetradic harmony, using the PLRQ group of Cannas et al. (2017) as the analogue of the classical PLR…
Cosmology in extended theories of gravity is considered assuming the Palatini variational principle, for which the metric and connection are independent variables. The field equations are derived to linear order in perturbations about the…