ReviewforJMA7
ReviewforJMA7
1
Department of Engineering, University of Palermo, Italy
2
DAIS and ECLT, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
3
Mathematics and Statistics, Georgia State University, USA
Atlanta: Mathematics and Music
In this review, we summarize the key topics discussed at the Mathematics and
Computation in Music (MCM) conference held in Atlanta from June 21-24,
2022. MCM is the flagship conference of the Society for Mathematics and
Computation in Music. The subjects of the presentations included combinatorics
and graph theory in scales and rhythm, categorical and algebraic approaches to
music, algorithms and modeling for music and music-related phenomena,
among many others that will be described.
1: Introduction
The Eighth International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music
(MCM) took place from June 21-24, 2022 and was hosted by both the Department of Mathe-
matics and Statistics, and the School of Music, at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta.
MCM is the flagship conference of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music
(SMCM) and has created a tradition of biennial international conferences that alternate be-
tween different sides of the Atlantic. The previous conference took place in Madrid, Spain
(Montiel et al., 2019).
The conference brings together researchers from around the world who combine
mathematics and/or computation with music theory, music analysis, composition and perfor-
mance. MCM provides a dedicated platform for the communication and exchange of ideas
amongst researchers in mathematics, computer science, music theory, composition and per-
formance, musicology and related disciplines.
The conference was organized by Mariana Montiel from the GSU Mathematics and
Statistics Department and Brent Milam from the GSU School of Music. The proceedings
were edited by Mariana Montiel, Octavio A. Agustín-Aquino, Francisco Gómez, Jeremy
Kastine, Emilio Lluis-Puebla and Brent Milam, and were published by Springer in their
LNCS/LNAI Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. In these proceedings all the long
papers, whose authors presented 30 minute talks, and short papers, whose authors presented
posters, can be found (Montiel et al., 2022).
The scientific programme featured 27 talks and 10 posters, as well as two panel ses-
sions and two plenary sessions. The presentations were grouped around the following sub-
jects: Mathematical Scale and Rhythm Theory: Combinatorial, Graph Theoretic, Group
Theoretic and Transformational Approaches; Categorical and Algebraic Approaches to Mu-
sic; Algorithms and Modeling for Music and Music-Related Phenomena; Applications of
Mathematics to Musical Analysis; Mathematical Techniques and Microtonality.
On the afternoon of June 23rd, the conference organizers planned a public outreach
event at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). The goals were to (1) engage the general
public with the area of mathematics and computation in music, and (2) to demonstrate to the
participants how effective outreach activities can be implemented.
In our review, we present the key ideas of each research and outreach activity. The
article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the outreach event activities, in
Section 3, we present the topics of each talk, In Section 4, we briefly describe the panel
sessions and concerts and, finally, in Section 5 we present our conclusions.
In particular, Jeremy Kastine (Atlanta, USA), organizer of the outreach event, pre-
sented an activity about composing canons with monophonic composite? texture and the par-
ticipants learned how this problem can be formulated in terms of finding maximal cliques of
a graph. In the activity titled “The Collective Public Fourier Performance,” three participants
controlled Fourier coefficients by holding flags at varying heights; these are interpreted by
mobile devices and processed by a central computer, producing a histogram that indicates
how loudly each of seven other participants are to play their assigned note of a diatonic
scale. Its proponent was Thomas Noll (Germany and Spain).
The activity “Matherhythm or rhythm is a killer,” proposed by Paco Gómez (Madrid)
put forward mathematical content — exact division, division with remainder, greatest com-
mon divisor, Euclid's algorithm and evenness principle — along with musical content —
time span, pulse, rhythm formation, and timelines —, showing how those mathematical ideas
can be used as a tool to understand and compose music.
The idea of reorganization of some simple material, such as musical intervals and
chords, inspired two activities, based on scales’ structural organization and chord
permutations, respectively. The first activity was organized by Luis Nuño (Valencia, Spain).
He developed the “Harmonic Wheel,” a physical tool that combines a Tonnetz transformed
into a polar grid with a plastic disc containing the lines that define the major, harmonic and
melodic minor scales, together with the scale degrees and the symbols of the corresponding
seventh chords. The second activity exploited a novel combinatorics-based musical instru-
ment exploring the concept of the triad Tonnetz through the physical manipulations of the
Rubik’s Cube: the “CubeHarmonic,” ideated by Maria Mannone (Italy), who led the activity.
Participants experienced this instrument firsthand through two mobile apps developed by Dr.
Mannone’s colleagues: Takashi Yoshino and Pascal Chiu.
Finally, there was a gallery of geometric objects used in mathematical music theory,
presented with the aid of virtual reality. Participants wearing virtual reality headsets could
clearly visualize concepts that would otherwise be difficult to explain and comprehend. The
exhibit presented a virtual museum (Fig. 1), featuring mathematical objects along with their
musical application. The museum was conceived by Gilles Baroin (Toulouse, France), who
also led the activity.
3: Topics of research
In this section, we summarize the main ideas presented during each talk, organized
according to their mathematical tools.
Let us start with highly visual and space-related approaches to music theory. We first
mention a metric-related study, presented by Richard Cohn (New Haven, USA) which mod-
els metric relations based on set theory, focusing on “metric dissonances.” Graphs can be
used to investigate scales as in the case of the research proposed by Luis Nuño, who se-
lected eight heptatonic-scale types together with their corresponding pentatonic comple-
ments. These scales are represented by novel “parsimonious graphs,” called 7- and 5-Cy-
clops. The aforementioned virtual math-musical museum was also the topic of a
presentation, with an interactive collection of geometric objects including intertwined hy-
perspheres, the Möbius strip, and the CubeHarmonic of visualizations. These models,
presented by Gilles Baroin (scholar with 20 years of experience in 3D animated CGI
movies), allow a visualization of traditional harmony, atonality, non-equal temperaments,
Fourier phases, and microtonal music, projected on different geometric objects from circles
to hyperspheres.
Let us summarize the theoretical studies based on category theory and algebraic
models. In classical music, counterpoint is one of the most complex techniques, in which
composers have traditionally used tables and arithmetic methods. Contemporary research on
counterpoint exploits algebraic methods. Octavio Agustín-Aquino (Mexico) analyzed and
further developed the mathematical model of counterpoint (first species, note against note)
proposed by Guerino Mazzola, based on similar symmetries and strong dichotomies.
Agustín-Aquino's research extends Mazzola's ideas to the microtonal sphere. He shows how
to handle dissonances and extend the formalization to second-species counterpoint
species (two notes against one).
Categorical methods, with compositional and commutative diagrams, can help explore
chord concatenation. The “Cube Dance” (Fig. 3) is a concatenation of musical tonal transfor-
mations through “cubic” diagrams, proposed years ago by Douthett and Steinbach. The cube
dance has been extended to a monoid of binary relations, defined upon a set of major, minor,
and augmented triads. The research included a discussion of the automorphism group of the
considered transformations, and a web application. That was the core idea of the talk by
Moreno Andreatta (Italy-France), presenting collaborative research with Alexandre
Popoff and Corentin Guichaouha.
Another aspect of category theory is the generalization of equality relations to
equivalence up to an isomorphism. For this reason, categories are often used to model
approximate relationships, metaphors, and similarities (Fuyama et al., 2020). In one of the
MCM 2022 talks, categories were applied to compare variations of orchestral timbres with
(visual) color variations. The subjectivity of single associations is absorbed into classes of
equivalence of perceptive similarity and similarity of transformational processes. They ex-
tend the notion of "musical gesture" to paths in the space of colors (as a Euclidean
space R3 of RGB, or, in general, a variety) and in the space of timbres, including simplicial
complexes and infinity-groupoids. The authors of the research were Maria Mannone and
Juan Sebastián Arias Valero (Colombia).
Mathematical transformations have been used since the XVII and XVIII century to
create musical variety from simple musical material. Robert Peck (Louisiana, USA) focused
on combinatorial sets, considering the classical transpositions (P), inversion (I), retrograda-
tion (R), and inverse retrogradation (RI). In the XVIII century, the well-known
mathematician Euler devised a theoretical system to justify pleasure in music listening. The
theory, discussed in the book Tentamen novae theoriae musicae, has been investigated, con-
sidering differences and similarities with other consonance theories, by Sonia Cannas and
Maria Polo. Franck Jedrzejewski (Paris, France), in his video, proposed a new definition of
“microdiatonic” scales. He defined the degree of "majorness" of a musical scale, through
limited transposition sets.
Thomas Noll and David Clampitt presented pairwise well-formed (PWWF) modes,
represented as words over a 3-letter alphabet, studied transformationally. The authors proved
that all PWWF modes may be generated by certain transformations, which are, however, not
closed under composition. They also present a new construction for the generation of PWWF
modes, with transformations of words over a 4-letter alphabet, conjecturing that these trans-
formations form a monoid.
Applications of discrete mathematics also include pitch classes, that is, classes of
musical pitches up to an octave. David Orvek (Indiana, USA) and David Clampitt (Ohio,
USA) focused on "SUM" classes, which are sets of pitch classes whose elements sum to a
given value. The authors developed algebraic properties of SUM-class systems and defined
quotient generalized interval systems, extending the group-theoretic concept.
Simultaneous superpositions of pitches are chords (named upon their constitutive
notes and numerosity). One of the talks was about a generalization of trichordal folding oper-
ations to any cardinality of a chord, focusing on the case of tetrachordal folding, which holds
one trichordal subset fixed and inverts another around a shared dyad, so that the two tetra-
chords share five interval classes and two trichordal subsets. The research was presented by
Jason Yust, who also showed the analytical application of tetrachordal folding networks, us-
ing Morton Feldman’s piece “For Stephan Wolpe.”
From pitches to rhythm, another popular topic is rhythmic canons. Remotely con-
nected from Italy, Greta Lanzarotto and Ludovico Pernazza presented their findings on aperi-
odic tilings, i.e., tiling canons where inner and outer voices are aperiodic, proposing new al-
gebraic constructs for extending Vuza canons.
One of the talks concerned the definition of musical operators, that are responsible
for transformations in a musical score, through time-frequency groups. Two examples: ero-
sion and dilation, to remove and add information, respectively, from/to fundamental struc-
tures of a musical piece. This approach, named as on "musical morphology,” was developed
by Gonzalo Romero-García (Spain-France), Isabelle Bloch (France) ,and Carlos
Agon (Colombia-France). Along the same line, Paul Lascabettes (France) and co-authors
(Carlos Agon, Moreno Andreatta, and Isabelle Bloch), defined self-distance matrices in mu-
sical structures, and they pursued research with filters and musical operators.
A powerful tool for music investigation is Fourier analysis. It is used for timbre anal-
ysis (in sound signal processing) and, in its discrete form, for music theory to measure quan-
titative information about scales and chord distributions (Fig. 2). Fourier coefficients can be
used to quantitatively investigate characteristics of musical objects such as scales and
rhythms. Whereas in usual musical spaces the coordinates independently testify to the ab-
sence or presence of some note, Fourier coefficients appear to carry musical characteristics
(such as diatonicity, chromaticism, major or minor modality, etc.) with unerring precision
and could possibly mirror some part of human perception of music. For instance, the high
value of the fifth coefficient indicates the prevalence of fifth intervals in music composed
with the notes involved in this interval. At MCM ’22, these ideas were presented by Em-
manuel Amiot and Jason Yust (Massachusetts, USA). They analyzed the musical meaning
of different products of Fourier coefficients, characterizing major/minor modes and
diatonic/pentatonic scales. Fourier coefficients can also be helpful to classify pieces and
musical genres. Classification is an important field of research in mathematical music theory.
An approach to classification involved the tonal function. Whereas some definitions of tonal
function are based on consonance and dissonance, they do not work for other kinds of music
where dissonance is present in the basic chords, such as jazz music or music from the “ex-
tended common practice.” Research by Francisco Gómez and Isaac del Pozo (Spain) intro-
duced a model of tonal function based on optimal voice-leading, allowing one to deal with
chords of different cardinalities.
There were several posters, representing short papers in the proceedings, that ad-
dressed the variety of subjects researched in mathematical and computational music theory.
To get an idea through the titles, one could see: Persistent Homology on Musical Bars by
Victoria Callet, midiVERTO: A Web Application to Visualize Tonality in Real Time by
Daniel Harasim, Giovanni Affatato, & Fabian Moss, Quantum-Musical Explorations on
Zn by Thomas Noll & Peter beim Graben, The Mystery of Anatol Vieru’s periodic se-
quences unveiled by Luisa Fiorot, Alberto Tonolo, & Riccardo Giblas, Benford’s Law and
Music by Sybil Prince, Brian Wickman, Jack Null, & Eric Gazin, Altered Chord
Alternatives by Lauren Ruth, Information Synthesis of Time-Geometry QCurve for Mu-
sic Retrieval by Shanon Steinmetz & Ellen Gethner, Investigating Styles with Scale Em-
beddings by Matt Chiu and Identifying Metric Types with Optimized DFT and Autocor-
relation Models by Matt Chiu and Jason Yust.
Acknowledgments
The present review has been adapted from a blog post by M.M. published by Math is in the
Air (www.mathisintheair.com), an Italian blog of applied mathematics. We are grateful to the
director Dr. Davide Passaro for his permission to re-use part of the material.
Fundings
This research received no external funds.
Disclosure statement
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
References
Fuyama, M., Saigo, H., Takahashi, T. (2020). A category theoretic approach to metaphor
comprehension: Theory of indeterminate natural transformation. Biosystems, 197, 104213.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264720301052
Montiel, M., Gómez-Martin, F., and Agustín-Aquino, O. A. (Eds.). (2019). Mathematics and
Computation in Music. 7th International Conference, MCM 2019, Madrid, Spain, June 18–
21, 2019, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Cham,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21392-3
Montiel, M., Agustín-Aquino, O. A., Gómez, F., Kastine, J., Lluis-Puebla, E., and Milam, B.
(2022). Mathematics and Computation in Music. 8th International Conference, MCM 2022,
Atlanta, GA, USA, June 21–24, 2022, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07015-0. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-
031-07015-0
Figures (see separated files)
Figures’ captions
Fig. 1: Poster of the math-musical virtual museum with the virtual Pyrenees landscape
Video references
The integral recordings of the talks can be found at the following links, listed in order of ap-
pearance in each session:
1. Cohn, Jedrzejewski, Nuño, Andreatta;
2. Peck, Cannas;
3. Agustin-Aquino, Baroin, Clampitt & Orvek;
4. Mannone & Arias-Valero; Clampitt & Noll;
5. Romero, Lascabettes, Yust, Amiot, Lentchiz, Blumeyer;
6. Lanzarotto & Pernazza;
7. Klassen, Lemström, del Pozo, Mannone.