6 ms·

Music has little to do with math. The math is useful in measuring things and developing the tools but basically, music is about emotional expressivity.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
True. Math nerds get excited by the ratios, roots, and groups, but all of that is a rabbit hole - useful for DSP code, but it will do nothing to help you write memorable music.
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  The book does not assert that to write memorable music you only need mathematics.
- johnr2 7y ago
  Knowing how to count beats and bars can be helpful when writing music, as can knowing how string lengths are related to notes when playing a stringed instrument.
johnr2 7y ago
> Music has little to do with math. As a musician (and audio engineer) I disagree. You don't need to think about math while writing or playing music, just like you don't need to think about physics when riding a bike, but that doesn't mean it has little to do with it.
- coldtea 7y ago
  The kind of math musicians talk about are elementary ratios that concern the relationships between tones and between frequencies, nothing to write home about. And even the latter have little application to composition. You can be a great musician and even original songwriter and not know any math (or even the names of chords for that matter) at all. And that's even in folk -- it's even less so in electronic music and other genres.
  - Kye 7y ago
    It's more important if you plan to involve computers in your workflow. Knowing what a Fourier transform is and how music software applies it can help you avoid problems. Like "why is this song muddy when I add anything to it?" You don't need to know about it to know that two sounds can cancel out, but it helps. You'll never be worse off for knowing a little about music theory or audio engineering.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >Knowing what a Fourier transform is and how music software applies it can help you avoid problems. Sure, but that's DSP not music. Whereas the "old wives tale" that music=math has been before the advent of computers.
      - Kye 7y ago
        >> "Sure, but that's DSP not music." That's why I said "It's more important if you plan to involve computers in your workflow." I didn't make a general statement about all music. The more electronic your music, the blurrier the line between making music and audio engineering. Most famous electronic musicians, especially EDM artists, are known as much for their audio engineering as for their music.
  - dwringer 7y ago
    > The kind of math musicians talk about are elementary ratios that concern the relationships between tones and between frequencies, nothing to write home about. Perhaps in general this is often true, but Guerino Mazzola might have a thing or two to say about that, having published work applying topos theory to music.[1][2] Admittedly it appears to meet with some controversy and I haven't studied his work myself. My apologies for not having any more accessible links on hand to the subject material. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerino_Mazzola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerino_Mazzola [2] https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts-Performance/dp/3764357312/ https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts-Perfor...
  - wwweston 7y ago
- boomlinde 7y ago
  When I am riding a bike, I am very much thinking about physics, in order not to fall over and hurt myself. I can say that I have to think about physics regardless of whether I am thinking of it in the terms Newton did, because the physical world exists without the theoretical framework to describe it. Mathematics on the other hand is purely theoretical. Unless I am engaging in mathematical reasoning, I'm not doing maths. That said, when I am musicking, I am doing mathematics all the time, at least for things like basic counting, arithmetic and logic. But that's true for so much of the basic activities we do every day that saying that music has a lot to do with maths becomes a pointless truism. Similarly, I may be doing maths when I'm cooking, but no one is going to try to tell me that "cooking is maths". Cooking has little to do with maths, but maths has a lot to do with everything.
  - slothtrop 7y ago
    There's a difference between physics in abstract, more akin to math, and physics as intuitive assessment of your surroundings.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      What is the difference? It seems to me that in order to successfully predict how I should handle my bike when riding it not to fall over, I must be using an abstract model of physical reality that I draw conclusions from.
      - slothtrop 7y ago
        Approximating isn't the same as an abstract model, which uses glyphs and, well, math.
        boomlinde 7y ago
        Glyphs have absolutely nothing to do with it, or do you propose that writing predates abstract thinking? I'd say that abstract thinking is a prerequisite for language. You can't communicate with others unless you can distill the physical world into abstract higher-order concepts. In doing so, you create an abstract model of the world. For example you may point and call that thing a bicycle. In reality, the concept of a bicycle is just a figment of your representational model that happens to roughly coincide with mine. Maybe an abstract model uses mathematics, but only necessarily in the sense that one could say that I'm using set theory to pick my nose. It's a bit like saying that watching TV is color theory.
dcassett 7y ago
The author says as much in the introduction: "I should close with a disclaimer. Music is not mathematics."
ebj73 7y ago
It's not math, per se. But music is certainly about patterns. And some of the ratios in musical patterns certainly have a foundation in math. I think you cannot arrive at beautiful music starting from math. But you probably can arrive at some interesting mathematical patterns starting from music.
jedimastert 7y ago
As a jazz musician, you have no idea what you're talking about. Music theory is a subset of set and group theory, and there's no way to analyse music without math.
- foobar_ 7y ago
  Music is not meant to be analysed. It is felt. The opera singer is the model for all music. TBH I have often felt jazz and classical music to be cold and mechanical, except for a few songs.
manifestsilence 7y ago
You don't need math to enjoy or even perform music, or to understand it in a certain way. But there is another way to understand it that is purely mathematical, and it is quite enriching. The start of the rabbit hole is the pythagorean comma and it has a very real effect on the real-world messy compromises that are involved in tuning instruments to play with each other in multiple keys. The terrible beauty and ugliness that are one and the same stems from the simple fact that if you go up a fifth, say, C to G, it sounds the purest if the pitch is exactly 1.5 times as high, or 3/2. If you keep going up five notes at a time, eventually you get back to a C, having gone through all the other notes in the process. But the pure, good sounding way to get from a C to a higher C is to double its frequency. And you never can get to exactly a power of two by repeatedly multiplying by 1.5. So the C you get by going up by octaves and the C you get by going up by fifths come out different. A consequence of that is it is impossible to play all the different chords in a key as pure, perfectly-in-tune chords without at least one "floater" note (my term) that changes pitch depending on which chord it's part of at the time. See Just Intonation for more information. It's geeky stuff, but has an effect on the way real musicians play certain instruments, such as harpsichord and pedal steel guitar, and it has bothered and fascinated certain musicians ever since the ancient Greeks if not before.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Agreed on what music is intended to do. But being expressive can mean understanding different scales, different rhythms, different harmonic progressions, the capabilities of different instruments, etc. One thing I did not learn in my childhood music lessons is basic stuff like musical intervals, chord structure, circle of fifths. These are very practical math relationships ... essential to knowing about your options, for both expressive performance and for on-paper composition and arranging. In later years, I regretted that none of my teachers knew enough about them to help me understand them. They're an indispensable tool in the pro musician's arsenal.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

True. Math nerds get excited by the ratios, roots, and groups, but all of that is a rabbit hole - useful for DSP code, but it will do nothing to help you write memorable music.

jimhefferon 7y ago
The book does not assert that to write memorable music you only need mathematics.
johnr2 7y ago
Knowing how to count beats and bars can be helpful when writing music, as can knowing how string lengths are related to notes when playing a stringed instrument.

johnr2 7y ago

> Music has little to do with math. As a musician (and audio engineer) I disagree. You don't need to think about math while writing or playing music, just like you don't need to think about physics when riding a bike, but that doesn't mean it has little to do with it.

coldtea 7y ago
The kind of math musicians talk about are elementary ratios that concern the relationships between tones and between frequencies, nothing to write home about. And even the latter have little application to composition. You can be a great musician and even original songwriter and not know any math (or even the names of chords for that matter) at all. And that's even in folk -- it's even less so in electronic music and other genres.
- Kye 7y ago
  It's more important if you plan to involve computers in your workflow. Knowing what a Fourier transform is and how music software applies it can help you avoid problems. Like "why is this song muddy when I add anything to it?" You don't need to know about it to know that two sounds can cancel out, but it helps. You'll never be worse off for knowing a little about music theory or audio engineering.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Knowing what a Fourier transform is and how music software applies it can help you avoid problems. Sure, but that's DSP not music. Whereas the "old wives tale" that music=math has been before the advent of computers.
    - Kye 7y ago
      >> "Sure, but that's DSP not music." That's why I said "It's more important if you plan to involve computers in your workflow." I didn't make a general statement about all music. The more electronic your music, the blurrier the line between making music and audio engineering. Most famous electronic musicians, especially EDM artists, are known as much for their audio engineering as for their music.
- dwringer 7y ago
  > The kind of math musicians talk about are elementary ratios that concern the relationships between tones and between frequencies, nothing to write home about. Perhaps in general this is often true, but Guerino Mazzola might have a thing or two to say about that, having published work applying topos theory to music.[1][2] Admittedly it appears to meet with some controversy and I haven't studied his work myself. My apologies for not having any more accessible links on hand to the subject material. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerino_Mazzola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerino_Mazzola [2] https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts-Performance/dp/3764357312/ https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts-Perfor...
- wwweston 7y ago
boomlinde 7y ago
When I am riding a bike, I am very much thinking about physics, in order not to fall over and hurt myself. I can say that I have to think about physics regardless of whether I am thinking of it in the terms Newton did, because the physical world exists without the theoretical framework to describe it. Mathematics on the other hand is purely theoretical. Unless I am engaging in mathematical reasoning, I'm not doing maths. That said, when I am musicking, I am doing mathematics all the time, at least for things like basic counting, arithmetic and logic. But that's true for so much of the basic activities we do every day that saying that music has a lot to do with maths becomes a pointless truism. Similarly, I may be doing maths when I'm cooking, but no one is going to try to tell me that "cooking is maths". Cooking has little to do with maths, but maths has a lot to do with everything.
- slothtrop 7y ago
  There's a difference between physics in abstract, more akin to math, and physics as intuitive assessment of your surroundings.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    What is the difference? It seems to me that in order to successfully predict how I should handle my bike when riding it not to fall over, I must be using an abstract model of physical reality that I draw conclusions from.
    - slothtrop 7y ago
      Approximating isn't the same as an abstract model, which uses glyphs and, well, math.
      - boomlinde 7y ago
        Glyphs have absolutely nothing to do with it, or do you propose that writing predates abstract thinking? I'd say that abstract thinking is a prerequisite for language. You can't communicate with others unless you can distill the physical world into abstract higher-order concepts. In doing so, you create an abstract model of the world. For example you may point and call that thing a bicycle. In reality, the concept of a bicycle is just a figment of your representational model that happens to roughly coincide with mine. Maybe an abstract model uses mathematics, but only necessarily in the sense that one could say that I'm using set theory to pick my nose. It's a bit like saying that watching TV is color theory.

dcassett 7y ago

The author says as much in the introduction: "I should close with a disclaimer. Music is not mathematics."

ebj73 7y ago

It's not math, per se. But music is certainly about patterns. And some of the ratios in musical patterns certainly have a foundation in math. I think you cannot arrive at beautiful music starting from math. But you probably can arrive at some interesting mathematical patterns starting from music.

jedimastert 7y ago

As a jazz musician, you have no idea what you're talking about. Music theory is a subset of set and group theory, and there's no way to analyse music without math.

foobar_ 7y ago
Music is not meant to be analysed. It is felt. The opera singer is the model for all music. TBH I have often felt jazz and classical music to be cold and mechanical, except for a few songs.

manifestsilence 7y ago

You don't need math to enjoy or even perform music, or to understand it in a certain way. But there is another way to understand it that is purely mathematical, and it is quite enriching. The start of the rabbit hole is the pythagorean comma and it has a very real effect on the real-world messy compromises that are involved in tuning instruments to play with each other in multiple keys. The terrible beauty and ugliness that are one and the same stems from the simple fact that if you go up a fifth, say, C to G, it sounds the purest if the pitch is exactly 1.5 times as high, or 3/2. If you keep going up five notes at a time, eventually you get back to a C, having gone through all the other notes in the process. But the pure, good sounding way to get from a C to a higher C is to double its frequency. And you never can get to exactly a power of two by repeatedly multiplying by 1.5. So the C you get by going up by octaves and the C you get by going up by fifths come out different. A consequence of that is it is impossible to play all the different chords in a key as pure, perfectly-in-tune chords without at least one "floater" note (my term) that changes pitch depending on which chord it's part of at the time. See Just Intonation for more information. It's geeky stuff, but has an effect on the way real musicians play certain instruments, such as harpsichord and pedal steel guitar, and it has bothered and fascinated certain musicians ever since the ancient Greeks if not before.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Agreed on what music is intended to do. But being expressive can mean understanding different scales, different rhythms, different harmonic progressions, the capabilities of different instruments, etc. One thing I did not learn in my childhood music lessons is basic stuff like musical intervals, chord structure, circle of fifths. These are very practical math relationships ... essential to knowing about your options, for both expressive performance and for on-paper composition and arranging. In later years, I regretted that none of my teachers knew enough about them to help me understand them. They're an indispensable tool in the pro musician's arsenal.