Music and mathematics

Yeah, but I'm curious what you think, too. I mean you can quantify a lot about any composition, say that mathematics explains a lot of the things you can observe or understand about a set or time period of music, looking at intervals and chords and motifs and whatnot. But you might still also say "these notes follow each other in a more or less arbitrary manner." And you can also say something like "[jazz is] our native art form." So I wonder how we'd argue for more qualitative languages, like intuition or experience, or a mixture.

You give me more credit than I deserve lol. I can't even follow what you are saying lol. But I'll try...intuition and experience....would be on the music sheet after all is said and done, if you are going to transcribe a piece of music, right? So it's all quantifiable, like everything. So that question is kind of answered I guess.

I'd really like to know what came first music or math. I'm going with music, but that's just a guess.
 
I'd really like to know what came first music or math. I'm going with music, but that's just a guess.

Gotta be music, but I wonder if we didn't start calling it "music" until after we figured out the math. Maybe it was more naturalistic before that. Surely there's an anthropologist on the forum?
 
Mathematics and music are both about relationships of quantifiable factors. In math, it's about values (integers and portions thereof) and how they relate to each other via operations. In music, notes and their intervals are in relation to each other, according to the ratios of their frequencies/vibrations.

See? They're EXACTLY the same thing!

Larry, you may lower your tentacle now...
 
The egg, laid by the immediate forebearer of ancient chickens.

(One of these years I'll get the hang of expressing myself in Twitteresque text bites)

Yea, that question always struck me as obvious, too. You cannot have a chicken without it being in an egg at one point... Ergo, some time in the distant past, the closest common relative to today's chickens laid an egg before any other "chickens" existed.
 
Yea, that question always struck me as obvious, too. You cannot have a chicken without it being in an egg at one point... Ergo, some time in the distant past, the closest common relative to today's chickens laid an egg before any other "chickens" existed.

Yup, like a tree falling in a forest and no one is there to hear. Firstly, it's impossible because a forest is a sea of life - bacteria, bugs and other plants at least occupying every square millimetre. The bacteria and bugs might sense the vibration, but don't have ears to experience those vibrations as sound.

A while ago I started a thread that seems to have been removed due to low attendance. It was based on a video called "Will we ever run out of music?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw

For those who can't YouTube at the moment, there are 2 to the 211,000,000th power possible ways of combining sounds (any sound) to make a 5 minute audio file. If I remember correctly it's more than all the atoms in the universe. Broken down to include more conventional music (as opposed to any random sound) there are still waaay more combinations than the age of the universe in seconds.

In other words "no", we will never run out. Which begs the question as to why, with a universe of options, so many songs are based on Taco Bell's Canon! I suspect the answer to that one is because people are silly.

So much for short, sharp Twittery replies :)
 
The egg, laid by the immediate forebearer of ancient chickens.

(One of these years I'll get the hang of expressing myself in Twitteresque text bites)

Dinosaurs laid eggs, way before any chickens were here. As Watso stated, I have always found this a bit obvious as well.

We can write music on graph paper, and put each note in its exact spacial location. That visually shows that music and math are directly related. I think math was here first. Music is a function of math. We can analyze music with math, but not the other way around I don't think. And besides, 2+2=4 no matter where you are in the universe. That was here long before any ears were around to hear music. I would guess most planets don't even have music.
 
It was removed becaus I already made a thread on the video months before yours.

The video is relevant to this topic.

Ah, got it. Sorry for double dipping. Cheers TG.

We can write music on graph paper, and put each note in its exact spacial location. That visually shows that music and math are directly related. I think math was here first. Music is a function of math. We can analyze music with math, but not the other way around I don't think. And besides, 2+2=4 no matter where you are in the universe. That was here long before any ears were around to hear music. I would guess most planets don't even have music.

Though there's a couple of sides to this. One is music as a physical phenomenon, where you'd imagine math came first. The first sound would have vibrated at a frequency etc.

Then there's the question of which came first in human culture. My guess would be math unconsciously because there is a type of math that most animals understand - one piece of food or lots. Big / small is another means of quantifying.

But, since no anthropologists have put their hand up, Wiki says:

Math: The oldest known possibly mathematical object is the Lebombo bone, discovered in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland and dated to approximately 35,000 BC. It consists of 29 distinct notches cut into a baboon's fibula.

Music: Between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago humans started creating art in the form of paintings on cave walls, jewelry and so on (the "cultural explosion"). They also started to bury their dead ceremonially. If we assume that these new forms of behaviour reflect the emergence of intentionality, then music as we know it must also have emerged during that period.

No doubt both math and music predated the artefacts - early music would have features voice, clapping, stomping, sticks, hollow logs and stones found in nature. Early maths would have happened in early people's heads and maybe on fingers or scratches in the dirt.
 
The egg, laid by the immediate forebearer of ancient chickens.
Yea, that question always struck me as obvious, too. You cannot have a chicken without it being in an egg at one point... Ergo, some time in the distant past, the closest common relative to today's chickens laid an egg before any other "chickens" existed.

You both been watching "Chicken Run" haven't you...



Nick: Here's a thought. Why don't we get an egg and start our own chicken farm? That way we'd have all the eggs we could eat.

Fetcher: Right. We'll need a chicken, then.

Nick: No... no, we'll need an egg. You have the egg first, that's where you get the chicken from.

Fetcher: No, that's cobblers. If you don't have a chicken, where are you going to get the egg?

Nick: From the chicken that comes from the egg.

Fetcher: Yeah, but you have to have an egg to have a chicken.

Nick: Yeah, but you've got to get the chicken first to get the egg, and then you get the egg... to get the chicken out of...

Fetcher: Hang on. Let's go over this again?
 
Can I just say, the electrician coming to wire my shop next Friday is called Nick Mason. What are the odds of that? Music & mathematics right there ;)

Indeed,what are the odds? He must be moonlighting now that Pink Floyd is over.
(Actually, Nick Mason's autobio is one of the more hilarious ones out there).
 
The odds depend on whether the coincidence is that an electrician would be called Nick Mason - as opposed to, say, Larry ... or that an electrician is called Nick Mason as opposed to, say, a plumber is named Nick Mason - or even another drummer is called NM... and one who posts on the forum. Or is it a coincidence that NM turned up, as opposed to dissing you for a higher paying customer?
 
Indeed,what are the odds? He must be moonlighting now that Pink Floyd is over.
Somehow, the fee Nick is charging leads me to believe he didn't play drums for Floyd :)

Or is it a coincidence that NM turned up, as opposed to dissing you for a higher paying customer?
Ha, yes, a distinct possibility. I'll let you know next Friday. Would have been nice to fly Larry over for this job, but those damn maths don't add up :(
 
Somehow, the fee Nick is charging leads me to believe he didn't play drums for Floyd :)

Ha, yes, a distinct possibility. I'll let you know next Friday. Would have been nice to fly Larry over for this job, but those damn maths don't add up :(

Ironically, one of my uncles was consulted on building a kitchen for Nick Mason (the Nick Mason - my uncle is a high-end carpenter) and he was apparently a very nice bloke!

How odd the World is.
 
This is a good read:

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/kavli-origins-of-math

I agree with Butterworth...Math is an abstraction and a developed language to order and repeatably describe and then calculate the physical world. The physical world...and thus tones, groupings of tones and emitting of tones in order with velocity, pitch, spacing, level are all *units* of the physical world

The physical world is the genesis...it exists first,..and is then quantified and manipulated by humans through various abstractions. Music, or, the *potential* for music is part of the physical world...the elements are there first...music organizes the elements and math just describes the relationship.

Too much philosophy can cause one to swallow oneself up....thus rendering it difficult to identify, ascertain and manage the physical world. It doesn't have to be that difficult. The physical and then abstracted worlds are logical and ordered.

Sound is part of the physical world...organizing and manipulating/abstracting it is part of the human world and math exists in the human world to help manage and repeat the organizing and manipulating and also to predict (due to repeating physical patterns)
 
you cannot really learn about music without math being involved

then again math is involved in just about everything we do from cooking, to building, to going to the bank, to finding clothes and shoes that fit, .....pretty much anything we do we can find mathematics involved

this doesn't mean anyone should ever think about math while making music though

I'll leave you with this quote ....and take it as you may but consider the source

"all musicians are subconsciously mathematicians"
- Thelonious Monk
 
They are the same, different sides of the same coin. What I mean is that if you are playing a song and it has a certain amount of measures, for that song to have a beginning, everything in between and an ending. It has to be mathematically correct to be musically correct. Just take one measure alone. Every beat, needs to be accounted for. 1234, etc...if you didn't the song would not make sense or fall apart, all the other band members would be playing all over the place. The math creates structure and organization of the song and outlines speed (tempo), distance (how long/short the song is), each musician playing the song has their own math to do. When the math is right, the song is completed.
Music/Math both start with M. What do you think, is that just a coincidence.

you are talking about theory though

there was music before there was theory

tribes in Africa didn't know how many beats per measure they were playing nor did they care when they were creating rhythms for harvest , war, celebration or weather

the way I see it music theory involves math.... music doesn't

math is used as a break down , as a transcription tool and a teaching tool

there is math everywhere in music.... but only because someone said so

now if we want to get into Hz and Decibels thats a whole different story
 
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