Geometrical Music Theory

I was skimming through the abstracts in this month’s Science magazine when I came across a really interesting article on music theory. Music theory in Science? Yep, and I do believe it’s the first time that this has happened. The paper, by a group of music theorists from Princeton, outlines the geometry of music, or, geometrical music theory.

Their method provides a mathemaitcal model and representation of music theory by translating the basic concepts into geometrical forms. It really is a good, and not too intensive, read. I won’t go into too much detail here but you can read the paper here, or what appears to be the full pre-published version here.

Accompanying the paper is a program called ChordGeometries which allows you to play with the ideas presented in the paper. It really is fun to play with, and it helps if you’ve got some MIDI gear hooked up to your computer.  Here’s an example of C perfect 5th in Dyadic space:

and also a  D sus 7th in circular space

To get the full effect you really need to download and play with it and see the animations between chord changes.  It’s written in MAX/MSP/JITTER and so should work on Windows and Mac no problem.

It’ll be interesting to see what follow up work takes place.  Watch this space, or rather, watch this space.