IMA Maths in Music Conference

The study of the relationship between music and mathematics has a thousand-year-long history which predates Pythagoras. Mathematics and music share a common basis of language and creativity. From the theory of tuning systems and temperament to physical acoustics, from harmonic analysis to spectrograms, from the structures of rhythms and pulses to the continuous stretching of the laws of harmony and the exploration of the musical forms carried out by contemporary composers, all elements of music lead to an immediate connection to mathematics. Established and recent research has witnessed the use of set theory to describe how musical objects are related and organised, the use of group theory in the context of transformational analysis of tonal and atonal compositions, the application of Grassmannians to the study of temperaments, and the investigation of category theory, topology and differential geometry to provide a basis of music theory.

Topics: Mathematics or computation with music theory, musicology, music performance, sound engineering and composition, musicologists, computational musicologists, performers, composers using quantitative tools and formal methods from mathematics,