Scientists make music into mathematical shapes

The two-note chords form a Mobius strip,
whose boundary is a 'trefoil knot'

(telegraph) -- We know it has pitch and beat. But it turns out that music has a distinct shape too.

In the wake of centuries of effort to seek deep connections between music and mathematics, a team today concludes that music does have geometry.

More than 2000 years ago, Pythagoras discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios. And the idea of the so-called musica universalis or "music of the spheres" emerged in the Middle Ages which said that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies - the sun, moon and planets - could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors - Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University, and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University - have devised a new way of analysing and categorising music to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence, suggesting that mathematics is a more fundamental language of nature than music. full story