Reply To: Music, maths and language
Sorry for bumping the thread, I only recently got around to reading it all — not because I wasn’t interested, but because it was too interesting, and I wanted to wait until I had time to read and respond to it properly. Then it kept getting longer.
What struck me about the sequence of digits at the beginning is that one can put them in neat little groups of four most of the time. Near the start one has to insert a single “couplet”, but there are many”quatrains” that seem to have a rhyming structure:3. [[1415] 92 [6535]] [8979 3238 4626 4338] 3279 5028 [8419 7169] 39937510 5820 9749…
I memorised about 35 digits of pi once, and I noticed this, though surely it’s just because humans are good at finding patterns, whether there are any or not. I’ve since heard several songs with the digits of pi, and it’s surprisingly difficult to remember the next digits when they’re sung to a rhythm different from the one I memorised them in. Also, e rhymes even more, at least in the beginning… 2.7 1828 1828 4590 4523… I wrote a poem rhyming with the digits of e, and it actually sounds somewhat like a normal poem for the first couple of stanzas.
People even interpret speaking distance as part of communication. In Spain (or Mexico, I can’t remember) people speak while standing very closely, Americans speak while standing far apart. In a conversation, we step farther away, and they take it as an insult, because we do not maintain that physical closeness that they feel is necessary for polite discourse. Are nonverbal cues grouped together with language, though?
Not language, but paralanguage. The distance between speakers is covered by proxemics. There’s also kinesics and another one I’ve forgotten the name of. I’ve heard of people chasing people around the room without realising it, because one speaker is used to being closer, the other feels uncomfortable and backs away, and then the first comes in closer again; repeat forever.
Colleenky, I think I’m in your boat as well regarding nothaving a good enough maths background. Problem is, the real “mathy” folk might be feeling alienated by us huddling in our little music world. Poor us. Poor them 😉 If anybody with some maths insight reads this,please chime in with whatever thoughts you have.
I have a degree in maths, and don’t understand a word of all this musical jargon. Most of what I know about music comes from Euler, so I know about the proportion, ratio and patterns that Colleenky mentioned, but surely there must be more to the connection than that.
Tonal and rhythm patterns, not single notes, are the basic units of meaning in music. They are roughly analogous to words in language.
I would say rather that they’re analogous to morphemes.
maths is the only pure language, its the same everywhere
Mathematics is the universal language… anywhere you go, people will equally misunderstand it.
To my mind music is all about 2s and 3s
Ahh… there’s the connection. The only time I saw a literal number larger than three in a university mathematics course was when somebody mistook a Greek letter for a six and doubled it. I <3 mathematics.
More in the next post… my comments [sic] is 914 characters too long.