Related papers: Harmony and Duality: An introduction to Music Theo…
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 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…
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…
We classify three-tone and four-tone chords based on subgroups of the symmetric group acting on chords contained within a twelve-tone scale. The actions are inversion, major-minor duality, and augmented-diminished duality. These actions…
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.…
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…
After briefly revising the concepts of consonance/dissonance, a respective mathematic-computational model is described, based on Helmholtz's consonance theory and also considering the partials intensity. It is then applied to characterize…
The origins of consonance in human music has long been contested, and today there are three primary hypotheses: aversion to roughness, preference for harmonicity, and learned preferences from cultural exposure. While the evidence is…
Consonance is related to the perception of pleasantness arising from a combination of sounds and has been approached quantitatively using mathematical relations, physics, information theory, and psychoacoustics. Tonal consonance is present…
The dichotic method of hearing sound adapts in the region of musical harmony. The algorithm of the separation of the being dissonant voices into several separate groups is proposed. For an increase in the pleasantness of chords the…
In this paper I want to suggest a new solution to the problem of musical tuning. On one hand, I see it as a generalization of Just Intonation (JI) to inharmonic timbers, on another, as a unification of spectral interference and harmonicity…
We make some general observations about partial orders on quotient spaces, and explore their use in music theory, in two different contexts. In the first, we show that many of the most familiar chord and scale types in Western music appear…
Transformer architectures offer significant advantages regarding the generation of symbolic music; their capabilities for incorporating user preferences toward what they generate is being studied under many aspects. This paper studies the…
We introduce a notion of compatibility between constraint encoding and compositional structure. Phrased in the language of category theory, it is given by a "composable constraint encoding". We show that every composable constraint encoding…
The standard theory of musical scales since antiquity has been based on harmony, rather than melody. While recent analyses provide mixed support for a role of melody as well as harmony, we lack a comparative analysis based on cross-cultural…
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…
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…
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…
Music and dance have always co-existed as pillars of human activities, contributing immensely to the cultural, social, and entertainment functions in virtually all societies. Notwithstanding the gradual systematization of music and dance…
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…