The Sound of Music

This Month’s talk – 9th May at 19:30.

While the Ancient Greeks gave the mathematical basis of perfect intervals in music over two and a half thousand years ago, there are still many considerations (not all understood) that influence and affect how we experience music today. These include culture, memory, familiarity, setting, acoustics, physics, mathematics and psychology – to name but a few. In this introductory talk (with many audio examples), I’ll look at just one aspect – the physics and mathematics of sound. From this, can we scientifically explain concepts like dissonance/consonance in music? How is this related to the Western 12-tone scale? What has this to do with MP3 compression? Or maybe music just transcends any crude scientific reductionism?