Related papers: The Two-Step Property and the Mathematics of Music…
A new musical scale devised by the author, based on natural logarithms, is described. Most of the logarithmic pitches bear no correspondence to the twelve tones of the ancient tuning system attributed to Pythagoras, based on ratios of whole…
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…
The equable, Pythagorean and natural scales are built on the basis of a mathematical logic.
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…
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…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
A set of basic notes, or `scale', forms the basis of music. Scales are specific to specific genre of music. In this second article of the series we explore the development of various scales associated with western classical music, arguably…
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…
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…
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 aim is to explore new opportunities of the pitch organization of the musical scale. Specifically, a numerical comparison of the different musical temperaments among themselves in the degree of approximation of the Pythagorean scale is…
Polyphonic music files were analyzed using the set of symbols that produced the Minimal Entropy Description which we call the Fundamental Scale. This allowed us to create a novel space to represent music pieces by developing: a) a method to…
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 study considers rational approximations of musical constant $\beta=\log_2(3/2)$, which defines perfect fifth. This constant has been the subject of the numerous studies, and this paper determines quality of rational approximations in…
We present an algebraic construction of music notes and show how to associate them inseveral ways to construct music ranges. Then a family of ranges emerge with a fixed number of notes: two, three, five, seven, twelve, seventeen, etc. A…
Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic…
In order to explore tonality outside of the `Pythagorean' paradigm of integer ratios, Robert Schneider introduced a musical scale based on the logarithm function. We seek to refine Schneider's scale so that the difference tones generated by…
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,…
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…
Quantification of stylistic differences between musical artists is of academic interest to the music community, and is also useful for other applications such as music information retrieval and recommendation systems. Information about…