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The Geometry of Music
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.
It's not the first time music has been represemted as mathematical equations, or even as a random events. Hell, even Bach experimented by throwing a pair of dices while composing some of his most popular baroque parts.
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Am I the only one who immediately thought of the computer scientist in Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency?
This reminds me of the Aphex Twin track Windowlicker, which, when viewed via a spectrogram, shows hidden images - Richard D. James' face, and a spiral. This explains why the track sounds so weird in places - the music is being warped to generate the images.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
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.
The study of Music Theory is highly recommended (though I wouldn't recommend it for a career choice) for anyone of a technical nature who really wants to be challenged.
Beyond the simple technicalities of measure-by-measure analysis (what notes combine to find what chord? what notes form a pattern to yield what scale?) the body of known music as a whole forms a massive network of associations and references in the form of quotes, parody, mimesis, etc...it's almost as if music comments about other music.
This network, combined with various social and cultural studies, really provides a rich field of exploration (for example, the reason we concentrate on music by dead white europeans from 1700-1900 may include a cultural bias, not just technical).
The professional, academic fields of Music Theory, History, and Ethnomusicology are only now beginning to broaden the discussion, having been stuck in the early 1900s (I've known professors of music who will say, without irony, that there's nothing worth discussing since ca. 1915).
So, on your I-IV-V comment, it's true that there are about a zillion compositions that use this chord progression, so an interesting question would be "what makes each composition different in its use of this repetitive structure?"
The answers are always interesting, and can include discussions of different genres, barely-perceptible rhythmic features borrowed from other cultures, sound textures, audio effects, and on and on.
Fun times.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth