The Geometry of Musical Chords

music.princeton.edu

15 points·Rod··6 comments

Mathematics of music is a frequent guest topic of John Baez's This Weeks Finds in Mathematical Physics. Week #234 was one of the most interesting, referencing lots of work, including Tymoczko's : http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week234.html Many books are mentioned there already, but I would like to add one more, Benson's "Music : A Mathematical Offering", which is a little lighter read (at least not going into category theory stuff), downloadable here : http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html

These books are also interesting (and require no more than elementary math):

Mathematics and Music (by David Wright) http://www.math.wustl.edu/~wright/Math109/00Book

Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques.htm

I like the Musimathics books:

http://musimathics.com/

Does anybody have the link to the TED talk about this prelude?

Benjamin Zander's talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_...

(Although as you probably know it's not exacly _about_ the prelude; Zander illustrates his point by playing the prelude.)

WHOA, as a CS/Music Theory major and as an FP hacker, I must say, this is mindblowing stuff that I've definitely thought about but never implemented. Props to this guy. Good next steps after these would be notations for tonal, contrapuntal and schenkerian analytical structures, not to mention some sort of interface to, say, something like pd (puredata.info). Good find.

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