Music: A Mathematical Offering
eBook - PDF

Music: A Mathematical Offering

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Music: A Mathematical Offering

About this book

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, much has been written about the relation between mathematics and music: from harmony and number theory, to musical patterns and group theory. Benson provides a wealth of information here to enable the teacher, the student, or the interested amateur to understand, at varying levels of technicality, the real interplay between these two ancient disciplines. The story is long as well as broad and involves physics, biology, psycho acoustics, the history of science, and digital technology as well as, of course, mathematics and music. Starting with the structure of the human ear and its relationship with Fourier analysis, the story proceeds via the mathematics of musical instruments to the ideas of consonance and dissonance, and then to scales and temperaments. This is a must-have book if you want to know about the music of the spheres or digital music and many things in between.

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Yes, you can access Music: A Mathematical Offering by Dave Benson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Mathematics & Mathematics General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Preface
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Introduction
  8. 1 Waves and harmonics
  9. 2 Fourier theory
  10. 3 A mathematician’s guide to the orchestra
  11. 4 Consonance and dissonance
  12. 5 Scales and temperaments: the fivefold way
  13. 6 More scales and temperaments
  14. 7 Digital music
  15. 8 Synthesis
  16. 9 Symmetry in music
  17. Appendix A Bessel functions
  18. Appendix B Equal tempered scales
  19. Appendix C Frequency and MIDI chart
  20. Appendix D Intervals
  21. Appendix E Just, equal and meantone scales compared
  22. Appendix F Music theory
  23. Appendix G Recordings
  24. References
  25. Bibliography
  26. Index