Related papers: Pourquoi la gamme a sept notes? Une math{\'e}matiq…
We investigate correlations among pitches in several songs and pieces of piano music by mapping them to one-dimensional walks. Two kinds of correlations are studied, one is related to the real values of frequencies while they are treated…
We explain the link between the so-called "three gap theorem" and the construction of musical scales. Nous expliquons le lien entre un th\'eor\`eme classique d'approximation diophantienne (le th\'eor\`eme des trois distances), et la…
Music is a string of some of the notes out of 12 notes (Sa, Komal_re, Re, Komal_ga, Ga, Ma, Kari_ma, Pa, Komal_dha, Dha, Komal_ni, Ni) and their harmonics. Each note corresponds to a particular frequency. When such strings are encoded to…
The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this…
Scales, sets of discrete pitches that form the basis of melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal hallmarks of music. But we know relatively little about cross-cultural diversity of scales or how they evolved. To remedy this, we…
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 impossibility of a transposable 12 semitone tuning of the octave arises from the mathematical fact that $2 \times 2^{7/12} \neq 3$ i.e., the second harmonic of the fifth can not exactly match the third harmonic of the fundamental. This…
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…
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…
Music is an art, perceived in unique ways by every listener, coming from acoustic signals. In the meantime, standards as musical scores exist to describe it. Even if humans can make this transcription, it is costly in terms of time and…
There has been an everlasting discussion around the concept of form in music. This work is motivated by such debate by using a complex systems framework in which we study the form as an emergent property of rhythm. Such a framework…
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…
An arithmetical structure on a graph is given by a labeling of the vertices which satisfies certain divisibility properties. In this note, we look at several families of graphs and attempt to give counts on the number of arithmetical…
We introduce the notion of multi-patterns, a combinatorial abstraction of polyphonic musical phrases. The interest of this approach in encoding musical phrases lies in the fact that it becomes possible to compose multi-patterns in order to…
This article discusses the extension of the notion of context from linguistics to the domain of music. In language, the statistical regularity known as Zipf's law -which concerns the frequency of usage of different words- has been…
We propose a complex network approach to the harmonic structure underpinning western tonal music. From a database of Beethoven's string quartets, we construct a directed network whose nodes are musical chords and edges connect chords…
Is the specific structure of Western tonal harmony a physical inevitability derived from acoustics, or is it merely one solution among many in a purely algebraic landscape? In this paper, we strip away the physics of vibrating strings and…
In this paper, we explore the tokenized representation of musical scores using the Transformer model to automatically generate musical scores. Thus far, sequence models have yielded fruitful results with note-level (MIDI-equivalent)…
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…
Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional…