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Music | 2/19/2009 |
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Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
Dmitri Tymoczko lectures on "Geometry of Music" at Vassar this Tuesday |
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by Bob Margolis
What do Pythagoras and Princeton University composer and music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko have in common? Both found a new way to see music - in the latter's case, watching chord progressions unfold as motion across space. (Hey, didn't that happen at many Grateful Dead shows? Never mind.) Eventually, Tymoczko tried representing chords as points within abstract geometrical spaces called orbifolds, and found that he could reveal hidden patterns that make music sound musical and give Bach, Duke, Garcia and Gershwin their distinct qualities. The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries. More than 200 years ago, Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.
The professor, who speaks at Vassar College on Tuesday, February 24, is now part of his own trio, featuring the minds of music professors Clifton Callender of Florida State University and Ian Quinn of Yale University. The three have come up with a new way of analyzing and categorizing music based on what might be called deep mathematics, which they maintain lies at music's inner core.
In 2006, after the professor's first paper dealing with this connection was published, he explained that his underlying theory takes off from earlier visual representations of music that went back centuries. He cited the "circle of fifths," discovered in 1728, which, yes, uses a circle to represent the major scales.
He delivers the Matthew Vassar Lecture on Tuesday, February 24 at 5 p.m. in Rockefeller Hall, Room 300. Tymoczko will discuss "The Geometry of Music" in the lecture, which is free and open to the public, hosted by the Departments of Mathematics and Music.
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