Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Geometry of Music

Posted by kdawson on from the fantasia-with-strings dept.

An anonymous reader notes a Time.com profile of Princeton University music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko, who has applied some string-theory math to the study of music and found that all possible chordal music can be represented in a higher-dimensional space. His research was published last year in Science — it was the first paper on music theory they ever ran. The paper and background material, including movies, can be viewed at Tymoczko's site.

1 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmmmm. by espiesior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The wording is quite misleading. Tymoczko used "string theory" math... i.e. Geometric Topology (the article tries to play with "orbifolds" - fancy manifolds). Doesn't mean that string theory and music theory are intrinsically related in the physical world (which they are for the obvious OTHER reason), but rather, they can be expressed by the same monsters in the world of mathematics.