- from Lightfoot's Manual of the Lodge (Texas), 1934
Friday, January 25, 2008
Music
"Teaches us the art of forming concords, so as to compose delightful harmony, by a mathematical and proportional arrangement of acute, grave and mixed sounds. This art by a series of experiments, is reduced to a demonstrative science, with respect to tones and intervals of sound. It inquires into the nature of concords, discords, and enables us to find out the proportion between them by numbers."
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3 comments:
Being a musician I am sure you will not agree with this, but I will state my idea anyway. From this quote it makes music out to be close to a form of mathematics and engineering, therefore it would look to me that I could create a formula or computer program that could create a wonderful work of art. If you could input a set of great classical music then have the program determine frequency of note changes, tempo and other variables of the music (I am not a musician therefore I do not know all the exact terminology), then the program should be able to use that information and possibly even create music that would be very similar style in real time.
Actually, you're absolutley right. And there is software out there that does exactly that. In fact, when I used to take piano lessons, we used to do exercises where we'd pick random dots on a graph and then we'd do some sort of graph polarization and we'd have a song. It's amazing how mathematical music is. When you think about it, there are only 7 notes (tones). So the art comes in when you take those notes do something with them.
It's also amazing to look at a spectral analysis of audio waves. You can see overtones and different components of a sound that makes identifiable as a 'flute' or a 'voice.' If any of those parts are removed or supressed, the results are insanely interesting.
it's no coincidence that you can consitently create a different 'moods' in music with simple formulas. The formula stays the same, it's how you choose to shape the waves that makes it different. For example, Jazz chords consist of a lot of major 7ths. It's also interesting how our brains associate different sounds with different atmospheres, emotions, and even regions of the world. It's still the same 7 notes!
It's all math!
There's even software out there (non-consumer, unfortunately) that will take mathematical data from songs that have been popular in the past and will determine common patterns, and will spit out new 'random' melodies and chord progressions based on the data. The idea being that the output will have all the ingredients for a hit song. Crazy.
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