
Music: A Mathematical Offering (2006) - ghosthamlet
http://freecomputerbooks.com/Music-A-Mathematical-Offering.html
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ghosthamlet
Pdf is here:
[https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MATH379/1.%2...](https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MATH379/1.%20%CE%92%CE%B9%CE%B2%CE%BB%CE%AF%CE%B1/DaveBenson.pdf)

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mikorym
Has it not been updated since 2008? The intro suggests it has been; web
searches suggest it has not.

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codegladiator
Correct, its not been updated though the book says it would probably have been
updated.

I found the link to the new home page of the author:

[https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/](https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/)

which links to the same version of the book.

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enriquto
God, how much I love these hand-written html pages. They send a powerful
message that the writing there is very serious, interesting, and down to
business. Just like a beautiful LaTeX formatting for a paper.

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mkesper
You are using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/60.0. You are wearing red.

What?

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sn9
Inspect the element. It's cute.

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jwiesenborn
Music has everything to do with mathematics. It’s all waves just like y =
sin(x). Digital music in particular has much in common with calculus in the
piecewise manner that discrete samples approximate analog waves. I wrote a
program in vanilla JS to demonstrate this idea. It converts XML-formatted
music into mathematical terms, and then encodes it into pulse code modulation
for playback. Feel free to peek at dietpumpkinmachine.com if you don't mind
the sloppy code.

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schemathings
"David J. Benson is a 6th Century Professor in the Department of Mathematical
Sciences at the University of Aberdeen." ? Piqued my curiosity!

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tokai
What a great website.

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foobar_
Music has little to do with math. The math is useful in measuring things and
developing the tools but basically, music is about emotional expressivity.

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johnr2
> 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.

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coldtea
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.

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wwweston
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.

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coldtea
> _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.

