7 ms·

> 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

by 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
  You can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory, but understanding them opens up a new level of fluency. I don't need to know how to name common progressions or modes in order to write a song, but if I have my theory down well enough, it's easier to transpose to a different key, or have ideas for chord voicings or variations on the progression that'll enrich the piece (and as far as I can tell, the theory involved here is a form of mathematics). I don't need to understand the mathematics of waveforms in order to twist a knob and get a different sound and make an aesthetic judgment, but having a model of how waveforms works in my head to correlate with specific sounds helps. This is what math does. It helps take ad-hoc implicit models -- which people (and now to some extent ML algorithms) can often get by on pretty well -- and move them into explicit formalisms, often providing new power and insight in the process. The fact that people can build internal models that make them some degree of effective composers/performers implicitly isn't a particular rebuke of the idea that a significant portion of what we call music can be well understood as mathematics.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >You can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory, but understanding them opens up a new level of fluency. Sure. My point was that if "you can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory", (and that's for music theory, the very technical language of music), then imagine how more useless math are in this domain. Not only you can get by quite well without music theory or math (as you say), but you are 100% set with what you need if you also know music theory alone -- math is entirely redundant [1]. [1] Again, for music (playing, composing, etc) not DSP. If anything you need some simple ratios for coming up with tunings, and that's it.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  There is also polyrhythms. I already knew the Chinese remainder theorem when I was taught it in high school, because of music.
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.

by johnr2 7y ago

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
You can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory, but understanding them opens up a new level of fluency. I don't need to know how to name common progressions or modes in order to write a song, but if I have my theory down well enough, it's easier to transpose to a different key, or have ideas for chord voicings or variations on the progression that'll enrich the piece (and as far as I can tell, the theory involved here is a form of mathematics). I don't need to understand the mathematics of waveforms in order to twist a knob and get a different sound and make an aesthetic judgment, but having a model of how waveforms works in my head to correlate with specific sounds helps. This is what math does. It helps take ad-hoc implicit models -- which people (and now to some extent ML algorithms) can often get by on pretty well -- and move them into explicit formalisms, often providing new power and insight in the process. The fact that people can build internal models that make them some degree of effective composers/performers implicitly isn't a particular rebuke of the idea that a significant portion of what we call music can be well understood as mathematics.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >You can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory, but understanding them opens up a new level of fluency. Sure. My point was that if "you can absolutely operate (and even operate well) without understanding the formalisms involved in theory", (and that's for music theory, the very technical language of music), then imagine how more useless math are in this domain. Not only you can get by quite well without music theory or math (as you say), but you are 100% set with what you need if you also know music theory alone -- math is entirely redundant [1]. [1] Again, for music (playing, composing, etc) not DSP. If anything you need some simple ratios for coming up with tunings, and that's it.
SamReidHughes 7y ago
There is also polyrhythms. I already knew the Chinese remainder theorem when I was taught it in high school, because of music.

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.