My music professor told me that if you have a great understanding of mathematics, you can also be great at composing music; how true is this?
I want to dismiss it as complete bullshit but I don't know math (outside of what I need for chemistry) or music theory
Complete bullshit. Maybe I'm wrong but the most math you use in music is literally counting to 12. Thats what D7 and i.iv.v and all that shit is. It's all just counting up the scale of 12. The 7 is the 7th note etc.
No use for math in equal tempered (i.e. basically all modern) music.
In just intonation harmony was based around integer relations and I think Pythagoreans messed around with it a lot but every time I tried to apply any math to music it just ended up not being music and feeling really forced.
Total bs. Math and musical talent are entirely separate things. The thing is, someone who is good at math is naturally intelligent, so he would probably learn music theory faster than an average student. But that in no way means he would make a good musician.
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And thats misleading. You're not counting through 12. But just the notes within that 12 note octave. So the 7 would be the 7th note of the Dmajor scale taken from the 12 notes of that octave just like everything is. I think.
And all 12 notes is actually the chromatic scale so you'd count all through that only one.
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It's more pattern recognition than calculations, but basics of problem solving apply to both composing and math.
"math" is very broad. algebra, geometry, statistics etc. Different people will be good at different subsets of maths. I was good at algebra, but shit at geometry because I'm more of an abstract thinker for example. You can't just say that someone who's generally good at math is automatically better at music. They might have an easier time finding patterns etc. but that's honestly only 10% of what makes good music
Scifags, mathematicians in particular, seem to just love inventing bullshit to make their fields seem more relevant and useful than they actually are.
Well, I say 10% but thinking about it it's actually quite a bit more than that probably. Cause a 'feel' for music is basically a feel for patterns. Ofc you need pitch recognition as well.
Music is mathematical, regardless of all the anons in this board denying it. Notes are values and they each fit into each other in different ways. Chord progressions, melodies, harmony etc are number sequences. Rhythms are number sequences. Song structures are sequences. How they all fit together is mathematical (obviously). This is not accounting for the math/science in synthesis, production, mixing in mastering. Ancients understood the relation between things like music and math, for some reason people are trying to divorce these concepts.
if you want to be more analytic and do things like just intonation and microtonal music, there's a heavier math component. but still it's largely basic arithmetic shit that you can teach yourself, being a math major doesn't translate directly to that
it involves numbers, but that doesn't mean a math background helps you do it any better, unless you're trying to do some crazy DSP shit in Max/MSP
So? Sure, you can characterise music using maths, but you can do so with most things in our universe. It does not by any means mean that you have to be good at maths to be good at music or that being good at maths necessarily brings you any closer to being good at music. It's like saying that cooking is actually very close to mathematics because you have to understand proportions and shit and being a good mathematician gives you better chances at being a good cook. Many great and beloved musicians completely shat on this analytic aspect of music altogether. Most of it require only very basic maths that any teenager can do or can just as well be understood by pure logic and reason, without any proper mathematical knowledge anyway. This is the exact kind of bullshit that insecure scifags come up with to make maths sound cooler than it is. I've never met any musician who would give a single fuck about maths and most of the good ones I know are actually terrible at it.
it's more relevant if you're using things like set theory, but even then it's basic arithmetic
Well, unless you wanna write fugues using scala and max, high school math background should be sufficient I'd say.
>Most things in our universe
and that somehow makes it illegitimate? Everything is math.
>It does not by any means mean that you have to be good
No, and no one is saying that? But music is math. Read GEB already pleb.
Music is pretty mathematical. I would like to make good techno/electronic music but I'm so bad at math!!!
>But music is math.
This is still a meaningless, nonsensical assertion. Music isn't math more than driving is math.
It's not nonsensical, you just want to deny reality.
>and that somehow makes it illegitimate? Everything is math.
Yes it does, because it shows that this statement can be used for literally anything and it means jackshit in practice
none of these people claim that mathematicians can make good musicians because of the maths they know
It's the combination of creativity and problem-solving skills that both music and maths foster, like a "how your brain works" kind of thing.
Certainly in my experience the proportion of maths/physics people in the "band geek" crowd at Unis was much higher.
trigonometry is very useful if you want to go full electronic autism
>writing ten lines to justifiy not learning something
sad
My experience was actually completely the opposite, but maybe I'm the odd one here.
>It's the combination of creativity and problem-solving skills that both music and maths foster, like a "how your brain works" kind of thing.
However although that's certainly a more reasonable approach to the matter, it's really not how it works either. I've heard this meme argument used for pretty much everything. "You need maths to be good at debates, because it boosts logical thinking!", "You need maths to be good at life because it boosts problem solving!". Nah, it's just not how developing different aspects of your mind/brain works. Maths makes you directly good at maths and very similar fields and that's pretty much it. It's by no means a universal way to boost your intelligence and skill in all mental fields and actual practical in-life problem solving requires many parts of brain that maths don't develop at all. If anything it works rather in the opposite way: people who are intelligent in general tend to be better in maths as well.
No, you can analyze music (just like everything else in the universe) using math, but it's not involved to any significant degree during its creation.
I'm an electrical engineering major and a lot of the things I learn can be applied to music.
There's the obvious "how synthesizers/distortion effects work" stuff, but the math involves resonance, harmonies, etc. Some of it (e.g. Fourier transforms) involve fairly complex calculus, but a lot of it is dealing with series calculations (for example, resistors in parallel are summed harmonically).
>trigonometry is very useful if you want to go full electronic autism
ambisonics is basically the height of trigonometric autism
Likewise physics, differential equations, etc. are extremely important to any kind of simulation of acoustic phenomena.
But that's just physics and simulation, it's not related to music theory or composition. The people that designed the instruments to begin with didn't have a sophisticated understanding of physics.
If youre a bedroom producer doing beats using only samples, sure you won't need a lot of math. But if you're looking for your own sounds then youre at least gonna have to have basic programming and electronics skills. ie math and logic
I study pure mathematics and seeing people in this thread misunderstanding what it is is oddly amusing. Protip, we don't just add and substract large numbers or find roots of high degree polynomials. Maths does not end with your high school knowledge.
>If anything it works rather in the opposite way: people who are intelligent in general tend to be better in maths as well.
This is the answer, but maths does help you order and structure your thoughts because you need it for writing proofs. The effect of learning to think in such a way extends to any field that requires reasoning, and not only that, a lot of modern fields are built on maths.
If anyone is interested there is an article that applies mathematics to Bach, it's called "An aspect of harmony in music of Johann Sebastian Bach".
literally retarded, the 7th note is a perfect 5th worthless nigger
honestly it's music terminology that's retarded; using set theory for everything would make far more sense