Related papers: A group-theoretical classification of three-tone a…
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.…
We will discuss how certain group theory structures are found in music theory. Western music splits the octave into 12 equal tones called half-steps. We can take this division further and split the octave into 24 equal tones by splitting…
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…
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…
In the Pythagorean tuning system, the fifth is used to generate a scale of 12 notes per octave. In this paper, we use the octave to generate a scale of 19 notes per tritave; one can play this scale on a traditional piano. In this system,…
The sequence of pitches which form a musical melody can be transposed or inverted. Since the 1970s, music theorists have modeled musical transposition and inversion in terms of an action of the dihedral group of order 24. More recently…
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…
Transformational music theory mainly deals with group and group actions on sets, which are usually constituted by chords. For example, neo-Riemannian theory uses the dihedral group D24 to study transformations between major and minor…
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,…
Relations among various musical concepts are investigated through a new concept, musical icosahedron that is the regular icosahedron each of whose vertices has one of 12 tones. First, we found that there exist four musical icosahedra that…
Musical chords, harmonies or melodies in Just Intonation have note frequencies which are described by a base frequency multiplied by rational numbers. For any local section, these notes can be converted to some base frequency multiplied by…
Following the ideas of von Helmholtz and Plomp-Levelt, an algorithm for calculating the total dissonance of complex sounds, free from logical inconsistencies and useful for comparing different chords, is proposed. The method is tested by…
The perception of consonance/dissonance of musical harmonies is strongly correlated with their periodicity. This is shown in this article by consistently applying recent results from psychophysics and neuroacoustics, namely that the just…
We broaden the scope of quantum field theory by introducing a general class of discrete gauge theories that realize either topological order or fracton behavior across dimensions. We start from translation-invariant systems endowed with…
For example, in the chromatic circle, the twelve tones are represented by twelve points on a circle, and in Tonnetz, the relationships among harmonies are represented by a triangular lattice. Recently, we have shown that several…
The presence of skew quadrupole fields will linearly couple the x and y motions. The x and y motions can then be written as the sum of two normal modes >. This paper presents analytical perturbation theory results for the tunes of the…
A triple chord is a sub-diagram of a chord diagram that consists of a circle and finitely many chords connecting the preimages for every double point on a spherical curve, and it has exactly three chords giving the triple intersection. This…
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…
These notes are concerned with harmonic and holomorphic functions on Euclidean spaces, using quaternions and Clifford algebras in higher dimensions. The main themes are weak solutions, the mean-value property, and subharmonicity.