Can a song be represented through a mathematical formula?

Question

I have been studying music for a few years now and I was wondering if you could represent music through a mathematical formula and understand what sounds good or not good. Like could you put Mary had a little lamb into an equation or graph

Answer 1

Sorry, no magic bullet - if there were, computer programs would be cranking out pop hits, lounge songs no one could resist, prog-rock to knock the skinny jeans off of all the prog-rockers, and contemporary classical that would take the classical community by storm.



Even those composers such as Xenakis, already mentioned, are creative musicians who make aesthetic choices as they work. The math, as used by those composers, is just a mere premise.



Mathematicians love to think there is a very direct correlation of music and numbers. I've found it impossible to convince those with whom I've discussed the issue otherwise, so I am convinced we musicians and creative artists should leave the mathematicians to their ideal dream world while we get about the inherently intutitve, empirical, innately sloppy and painstaking business of 'making stuff up.'



A tidy formula for success in how to make successful piece of art is just never going to happen.





Best regards.

Answer 2

There is a lot of math that can used to quantitatively understand how music works, however there has been very little connection shown between math and qualitative aesthetic judgements.



We can graph the pitches by their pressure waves and also with Fourier analysis: http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Physics_of_music/

However this kind of analysis only describes discrete sounds but not the entire piece of music.



There are some algorithmic composers such as Xenakis who use sophisticated formulas to generate entire pieces.



The best book on the topic is Formalized Music by Iannis Xenakis. Be warned that many chapters of the book require an understanding of calculus, statistics, and physics. So you may need some suplemental reading to help you understand the book.

Answer 3

Since the Bible started as an oral history in a pre-literate society, it may have been too difficult to explain God using non-existent mathematical formula. However, if it makes you feel better, I'll get right on that!

Answer 4

The band "After The Burial" created a song called "Pi (The Mercury.....)" which is based on pi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io8mnNVsaqE



They did some really interesting stuff by converting pi into a song. You can read the description in the video to see how they did it.



My suggestion, do what they did, only in opposite order. That may give you an appropriate way to create a math formula from a song..

Answer 5

Yeah -- with X as the time axis and Y as the pitch axis you can create a graph



... and that graph is called sheet music.