On the mathematical structure of Tonal Harmony

Chords in musical harmony can be viewed as objects having shapes (major/minor/etc.) attached to base sets (pitch class sets). The base set and the shape set are usually given the structure of a group, more particularly a cyclic group. In a more general setting, any object could be defined by its position on a base set and by its internal shape or state. The goal of this paper is to determine the structure of simply transitive groups of transformations acting on such sets of o...

These informal notes concern some basic themes of harmonic analysis related to representations of groups.

We explain the link between the so-called "three gap theorem" and the construction of musical scales. Nous expliquons le lien entre un th\'eor\`eme classique d'approximation diophantienne (le th\'eor\`eme des trois distances), et la construction des gammes en musique.

After presenting the general framework of 'mathemusical' dynamics, we focus on one music-theoretical problem concerning a special case of homometry theory applied to music composition, namely Milton Babbitt's hexachordal theorem. We briefly discuss some historical aspects of homometric structures and their ramifications in crystallography, spectral analysis and music composition via the construction of rhythmic canons tiling the integer line. We then present the probabilistic...

A set of basic notes, or `scale', forms the basis of music. Scales are specific to specific genre of music. In this second article of the series we explore the development of various scales associated with western classical music, arguably the most influential genre of music of the present time.

Consonance is related to the perception of pleasantness arising from a combination of sounds and has been approached quantitatively using mathematical relations, physics, information theory, and psychoacoustics. Tonal consonance is present in timbre, musical tuning, harmony, and melody, and it is used for conveying sensations, perceptions, and emotions in music. It involves the physical properties of sound waves and is used to study melody and harmony through musical interval...

This paper, in french, gives a new approach to the concept of Maximally Even Sets based on discrete Fourier transform, with several elementary but interesting and previously unpublished results. Maximally Even Sets have been invented by musicologists but have been found to bear deep relationships to other areas of science, such as the Ising model in Physics. They describe economically and characterise many famous 'scales' or subsets of the cyclic group as modelised here.

The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, I generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and derive functional principles of compositional design by the direct analysis of the network topology. This approach provides a novel framework for the analysis and quantificat...

We classify three-tone and four-tone chords based on subgroups of the symmetric group acting on chords contained within a twelve-tone scale. The actions are inversion, major-minor duality, and augmented-diminished duality. These actions correspond to elements of symmetric groups, and also correspond directly to intuitive concepts in the harmony theory of music. We produce a graph of how these actions relate different seventh chords that suggests a concept of distance in the t...

This paper develops a unified voice-leading model for the genus of mystic and Wozzeck chords. These voice-leading regions are constructed by perturbing symmetric partitions of the octave, and new Neo-Riemannian transformations between nearly symmetric hexachords are defined. The behaviors of these transformations are shown within visual representations of the voice-leading regions for the mystic-Wozzeck genus.