Trivia Thursday - Geometry of Music

I am D-503. I am the Builder of the Integral. I am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, more accustomed to mathematical figures, is not up to the task of creating the music of unison and rhyme. But I might as well attempt to record what I see, what I think - or, more exactly, what we think. (Yes, that’s right: we. And let that also be the title of these records: We.) So these records will be manufactured from the stuff of our life, from the mathematically perfect life of the One State, and, as such, might they become, inadvertently, regardless of my intentions, a poem? Yes - I believe so and I know so.

This is D-503, the protagonist of Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. D-503 lives in the One State. Its society is based on the believe that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Taylor. E.g. music is based on algorithms and sung by the Music Factory.

Maybe we just came a bit closer to the One State. Dmitri Tymoczko, a Princeton University composer, has published a paper in Science called The Geometry of Musical Chords (7 July 2006, 313: 72-74). Tymoczko researched topology and non-Euclidean geometry to come up with a new and comparatively simple way to see how the best-sounding music is constructed. [read more]

I was fighting my entire time in school with the hideous comma rules of the German language. They (and orthography) ruined numerous marks. Not before university, I was told an engineering approach to it: "Put a comma when the logical level of expression changes". This did the trick for me. Maybe, I have to read Tymoczko's paper to get a grip of music.

[More about Zamyatin in another blog by The Measures Taken: Art is a branch of Mathematics: Zamyatin and Soviet Socio-Fantasy]