2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

Mathematics and Music

Mathematics may be the most abstract of the sciences, and music the most abstract of the arts. Mathematics deals with conceptual and logical truth and appreciates intrinsic beauty. Music can involve a similar appreciation of abstract relationships, though it also evokes mood and emotion through tones and rhythm. Thinkers from Pythagoras to Vincenzo Galilei and Euler have noted the intersections between the disciplines. This symposium considers how mathematics and music overlap: the tuning of chords and how this relates to overtones; the geometry arising from a new framework for the varied array of chord progressions in Western music; and the structural coherence needed to make a piece of music rhetorically viable.