Beautiful Lecture

This afternoon, I attended a joint colloquium held by the music and mathematics department on "The Geometry of Music." As far as anyone was aware, it was the first time those two departments held any formal collaboration. The lecture was hosted by Princeton composition professor, Dmitri Tymeczko. His initial intent, in first attending Harvard, was to become a student of mathematics. Eventually, he discovered music to be his true love. For a brief time, he also studied philosophy at U.C. Berkeley. Additionally, he is attractive. Surprisingly, he spoke with elegance and personality. The circular, repetitive nature of the piano keyboard he described as the Maria principle: "ti, a drink with jam and bread, and that brings us back to doe!" "What takes six weeks of education for a new musician to compose, takes similarly forty-five minutes of programming for the computer science student." This was in reference to the brutally statistical nature of creating consonance.

1. Melodies move by short distances or "conjunct melodic motion"
2. Harmonies are structurally similar
3. Chords should be intrinsically consonant
4. Limited macro harmonies, in that a composition should use between 5-8 notes within a few bars
5. a Tonal center is present

By creating a computer program to generate a random series of notes, he would then apply limitations to the series. Melodies would need to move within 2-3 notes of the original. Harmonies would stay within the same keys, major, minor, harmonics. This was the introduction for the students of music. From there, he elaborated on geometry. While notes are usually perceived as a discrete concept, a repetitive octet, they are, in fact, continuous, with infinite tones between the traditionally defined notes. Because of the repetitive nature described earlier, the tones can be displayed as a circular form. For his presentation, colorful circles would represent locations on the keyboard, then illustrating the geometric patterns between chords of a certain key. He illustrated Chopin's prelude in E minor with a hypercube of related chords. With my limited knowledge of both music and mathematics, I could not understand the full concept, let alone relate it, but I loved it. At once, he described the melody of an atonal chord as, "restless shimmering within stasis." It was a convergence of knowledge beyond anything I'd ever seen. He created three dimensional models of music that he intents to sculpt. I understood the ability of Iannis Xannakis to construct music based on architecture. I felt privileged beyond measure to witness a man use the beautiful, broken English language to convey this idea of music as mathematical notation. Linguistics. Music. Mathematics. Expression of importance, in my lifetime, occurs nearly exclusively through these systematic notations.