Noise and Number: Mathematical Structure in Music

Sky Hester hesters@students.wwu.edu May 15, 2012

Abstract Music contains many structures with nice mathematical properties. Among the elementary structures are melody and harmony. Both are derived from a scale, which is here shown to satisfy a surprising and beautiful geometric property. While not providing great insight into large-scale musical organization, these mathematical viewpoints provide good coverage of rudimentary music theory in a simple and consistent framework.

0.1

Introduction

In music of the western tradition, the octave is divided into twelve pitch units, called semitones. This division of the octave is referred to as a temperament; specically, the system in common use is the twelve tone equal temperament, or 12-temperament. Since notes of the same pitch class (separated by some number of octaves) are considered equivalent, the chromatic scale can be represented geometrically by distributing 12 equally spaced points about the perimeter of a circle and labelling each point by the number of semitones from a chosen reference pitch, as in Figure 1.

0.2

Melody

Usually, a scale is a subest of notes of the chromatic scale, and can be represented by 3 4 2 a bit string of length 12, with the location of on-bits representing the inclusion of a note 5 1 at that position in the chromatic scale and o-bits representing exclusions. Since a tem6 0 perament is cyclic and a scale is a subset of a temperament, a scale is also cyclic and can 7 11 be represented geometrically on a circle, this time coloring black the points corresponding 8 10 to an on-bit, and coloring the others white. 9 Figure 1: 12-temperament of the octave Combinatorially, this is considered to be a necklace of order 12 with beads of only two colors, white and black. If we say that such necklaces are the same if we rotate them, we are making their corresponding bit strings equivalent under the symmetries of C12 , the cyclic group of order 12, and we can count them with Polyas theorem. Keith[1] derives the expression N(k, n) = 1 n (d)
d|n,k

n/d k/d

for the number of distinct, 2-color, n-bead neckalces with exactly k beads of one color, where (d) is Eulers totient function, which counts the number of integers less than and coprime to d, and the summation is over the common divisors of n and k. Out of the N(7, 12) = 66 seven note scales possible in the twelve tone equal temperament, why are only a handful in common use? One possible answer is that not many of these scales distribute their notes evenly about the octave. A very discriminating measure of scale evenness is the sum of all Euclidean distances between pairs of points of a single color (call this set P ) in the circle representation of the scale, D=
0i<jk1

cij

i, j P

where cij is the length of a chord from point i to point j. A neckalce which maximizes D is called maximally even. Demaine et. al.[2] show that the necklace maximizing D is unique, up to rotation. Clough and Douthett[3] provide an explicit formula for one of the rotations of this unique necklace of order n with exactly k beads of one colour: E(k, n) = in : i Zk . k

This set determines the position of on-bits in the scales bit string representation (all other bits being o). For example, E(7, 12) = {0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10} denes the bit string S0 = [110101101010], representing the necklace in Figure 2. which is equivalent to the 7-note diatonic scale, the most commonly used 7-note scale 3 2 4 in western music. 5 1 0 7 10 9 Figure 2: E(7, 12) 8 11

0.3

Harmony

Another important musical idea is that of the harmonic structure; a subset of notes from a scale all separated by the same scalic interval (number of notes). We can dene a harmonic structure on E(k, n) having interval a by H(a, k, an) = ain : i Zk ; k

because the harmonic structure takes every ath note of a scale, it will require a octaves for its cycle to repeat, and thus is represented by a necklace of order an. It is clear from their denitions that H(a, k, an) = E(k, an), and thus a harmonic structure on E(k, n) is maximally even. Most harmony is in thirds, which corresponds to the scale interval a = 2; such a harmonic structure is called tertian or tertial. Because E(7, 12) corresponds to the diatonic scale and a = 2 to is most common harmonization, we investigate: The harmonic structure H(2, 7, 24) = E(7, 24) = {0, 3, 6, 10, 13, 17, 20} denes the bit string S1 = [100100100010010001001000], representing the necklace in Figure 3. Taking substrings of S1 containing l on-bits, we can derive l-note tertial chords. For the case l = 4, this is the set of common jazz chords. Table 1 shows this relationship.

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

4 3 2 1 0 23 22 21

17

18

19

20

Figure 3: Solid: H(2,7,24), Dashed: E(14,24) = E(7,12)

Substring 100100 100100 100010 100100 100010 100100 100010

1 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 1 1 1 1 1 1

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 01 1 01 1 1

Chord Symbol vii m7 (5) ii m7 IV maj7 vi m7 I maj7 iii m7 V7

Table 1: Substrings of H(2,7,24) and their common chord symbols

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Conclusion

Of a large collection of distinct 7-note scales in a 12-temperament of the octave, only one satises a very stringent geometric measure of evenness, and that scale is the one most commonly used in western music: The diatonic. Every harmonization of this scale also satises the evenness requirement, and from such harmonizations, we can derive chords. The examples given are relevant to traditional music theory, but are stated generally; as a possible course of future research, scales and harmonic structures on non-traditional temperaments could be investigated.

Bibliography
[1] Michale Keith, From Polychords to Polya: Adventures in Musical Combinatorics, Vinculum, Princeton, NJ (1991). [2] E.D. Demaine, F. Gomez-Martin, H. Meijer, D. Rappaport, P. Talaskian, G.T. Toussaint, T. Winograd, and D.R. Wood: The Distance Geometry of Music, submitted to Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, (2006). [3] J. Clough & J. Douthett: Maximally even sets. Journal of Music Theory, 35, (1991) 93-173.