Musical Math

There was an interesting section in the reading we had to do for this entry. It was on pages 49 - 51 and the section was titled "Good-bye Math... Hello Music!" Okay, maybe in the context that Hofstadter was trying to convey with saying that he didn't want to get bogged down in the "real musical understanding" but to rather be influenced by melodic patterns seems fair for the Seek-Whence Project (Hofstadter, 1995, 50). But, I would like to take a little twist on this take of music (since I have been a "musician" for over a decade now), and how it deals with math.

I'll start with his melodic sequence that he used in the book (EAEAEBEBECECEDEDEEEEEFEF). How he broke it down was using uppercase for all of the alternating E's and lowercase for the scale moving up in pitch. Here is where I would say that math comes into play with regards to music. I can take this notation of EAEAEBEB... and use numbers to represent where they fall in a scale. Now, some (non-musicians) might say that "numbers are never used with respects to notes, only rhythms." Well, I beg to differ. For instance, in Jazz many musicians use numbers to call out notes, instead of fumbling with writing out every single note on the page. So, if we had a C chord, and someone yelled out "play the 1st, 3rd and 5th" a person would play C then E then G. This works universally with any chord structure (if someone yelled out play the 1st, 3rd and 5th of a D chord, the person would the respected notes of that chord.)

This brings me to adding math into Hofstadter's sequencing from the book. If we were to take each note and associate a number to it starting with A equaling 1, B equaling 2 and so on, it would look like this:
515152525353545455555656 = EAEAEBEBECECEDEDEEEEEFEF
Then, you could break it down to:
(5 1-5 1) (5 2-5 2) (5 3-5 3) (5 4-5 4) (5 5-5 5) (5 6-5 6) like he does in the book. In essence, one could take an entire musical phrase and break it down in numbers, thus taking something like Hofstadter's idea of [2 n 2] and making a melodic line out of it. So, to some degree, there can be music made from numbers. This also gives rise to even more pattern recognition to take place.

-Bryan