Apparently January is Math Madness Month, at least at Taylor & Francis publishing company. They are offering free online access to the current and back content for all of their math and statistics journals through January 31st. Why am I mentioning this here, on a music blog? Because one of these free journals is the Journal of Mathematics and Music. (They also have the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.) This is a new journal, only 3 years old, on the uses of mathematical analysis to explore various aspects of music. This isn't a new thing, heck Pythagoras (or someone else) talked about the mathematical relationships in musical sounds back in the 5th century BC. But new things are constantly being found, and it was decided to give a common home to a variety of approaches to this general subject from the perspectives of music theory, neuroscience, mathematics, statistics, and physics. As an example, here are the articles in the most recent issue:
"Minimum description length modelling of musical structure" by Panayotis Mavromatis (a friend from grad school).
"Ionian theorem" by Thomas Noll.
"Counterpoint in 2k-tone equal temperament" by Octavio A. Agustin-Aquino.
"What pre-whitened music can tell us about multi-instrument compositions" by R.E. Dumas and A.P. Georgopoulos. (Apparently pre-whitened music is music with the melody and harmony removed, so only timbre and rhythm is considered. This looks interesting to me.)
So if you find your month not nearly math-mad enough, go on over to the website and browse through some math-tastic music or musical math.
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