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Permission to republish or repurpose articles or portions of articles can be obtained by following the guidelines here. The following resources related to this article are available online at www.sciencemag.org (this information is current as of February 11, 2014 ): Updated information and services, including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online version of this article at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5810/330.3.full.html A list of selected additional articles on the Science Web sites related to this article can be found at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5810/330.3.full.html#related This article cites 1 articles, 1 of which can be accessed free: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5810/330.3.full.html#ref-list-1 This article appears in the following subject collections: Computers, Mathematics http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/comp_math Technical Comments http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/tech_comment
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adds harmonic support by leaping to the root of each chord (1). The upper voices exploit the geometry of T3/S3; the bass plays a different musical role. Incomplete chords pose a related challenge. Most theorists would understand Fig. 1C to imply a succession of triads, as in Fig. 1B. We can represent the musical surface by plotting the incomplete chords of Fig. 1C on the orbifold T2/S2; we can represent the background by plotting Fig. 1A or 1B on the appropriate orbifold. Again, the upper three voices of the background pattern (Fig. 1A) make the most interesting use of orbifold geometry. Brown and Headlam (2) observe that tonal phrases sometimes cadence on unisons. We can typically model these cadences as incomplete manifestations of a prototypical five-voice back-
Fig. 1. (A) A common classical upper-voice pattern that exploits the geometry of T3/S3. (B) In actual music, the three-voice pattern is often accompanied by an additional bass voice, whose function is to provide harmonic support by sounding the root of each chord. (C) A two-voice passage evoking (B).
1. D. Tymoczko, Science 313, 72 (2006). 2. D. Headlam, M. Brown, Science 315, 330 (2007); www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/315/5810/330b. 3. Headlam and Browns fourth footnote suggests that this may be so. My report asked when structurally similar chords can be linked by efficient voice leading. This question admits a trivial answer, because one can always move all of a chords notes in the same direction by the same small amount. My remarks about voice independence, beyond reflecting a general Western musical value, were meant to exclude this trivial solution from the discussion. (I did not suggest that any composer used independent voice leadings exclusively.) Headlam and Brown, however, interpret me as attempting to model the avoidance of parallel perfect intervals, a style-specific convention that was not very important in either medieval or modern music. 29 August 2006; accepted 20 December 2006 10.1126/science.1134163
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Fig. 2. Many tonal cadences, including all of the examples in (2), can be understood as variants of a prototypical five-voice pattern (A). The patterns prototypicality is illustrated by the fact that it concludes several of the first pieces in Bachs Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) (C to F), as well as several of Beethovens first piano-sonata movements (G to K). By contrast, Headlam and Browns cadence (B) concludes only one of the first 20 Beethoven piano-sonata movements and none of the first 20 pieces in the WTC. (A) The prototypical five-voice pattern. (B) The cadence from figure 1 in (2). (C) Bach, W TC Prelude 3. (D) Bach, W TC Fugue 3. (E) Bach, W TC Prelude 6. (F) Bach, W TC Prelude 10. (G to H) Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 1, movements 1 and 2. (I to K) Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 2, movements 1, 3, and 4.
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