I have written many blog posts about how science relates to music including what happens in your brain while listening to it, but I came across an article with a series of videos that explained how music relates to math and was quickly interested. A concert pianist named Eugenia Cheng, showed how a string instrument has many wavelengths that are created when it is played. She explained how half of a wavelength is an octave. Mathematicians did not know how to take the twelfth root of two for a while, but once they found out how, and the octaves were spaced evenly, people were able to write music in any key. She gave an example saying that Bach thought this was fascinating, and because of it, he wrote the “Preludes and Fugues” which encompassed every key. When I found the video, I thought it was very unique because when I have learned basics about music history in the past, it has never been about the way that octaves and scales were created, but the influential people that advanced music. As a person who likes math as well as choir, it was intriguing that without math, there would not have been the same breakthroughs in music that there have been.
Here is the article that I found (I focused my post on the third video down):
http://www.ams.org/samplings/math-and-music
Wow that's really interesting. Obviously I know that music and math are heavily intertwined but I didn't know that it was so meticulously planned out with complicated math. I always thought that the way the octave worked was fascinating but I guess I never thought about how it was brilliantly designed. I wonder how the mathematic/scientific theory/definition is explained for why each string gives of the same sound even when it's eight notes higher. It's not the exact same note of course but how does it make the same sound while being different. I always thought that the different sounds/notes were made by the different thickness of the wire but the lowest C is a much larger wire than the highest C string on a piano. So then how is the same sound made? What's makes them both C notes?
ReplyDeleteI never knew that there was a math major focused precisely on music development. That would be a really interesting class to take, especially being a musician myself.
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ReplyDeleteI think this subject is really fascinating because I don't think of math when I am listening to music or singing. However, I now realize the two have a large amount in common. It definitely never occurred to me that math could explain octaves and notes. Nor did I realize that music could affect math aptitude. The article (below) talks about how classical music can enhance math skills. It explains how music affects one's brain and can help develop mathematical as well as other skills. One thing I'm not so sure about is whether music evolved from mathematics, or if its connection to mathematics was discovered later, after music had already become an integral part of society.
ReplyDeletehttp://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/serendipupdate/correlation-between-music-and-math-neurobiology-perspective
This is quite an interesting subject. Most people don't correlate math and science with music but they are in fact very much connected. While singing or playing an instrument, I don't think mathematically how to improve my musical ability mathematically but not I might consider it.
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