Mathematics and Music

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mathematical structures that lie within the heart of music. The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote: ‘Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting’. Mathematical structures have always provided the bare bones around which musicians compose music and have been vital to the very practical considerations of performance such as fingering and tempo. But there is a more complex area in the relationship between maths and music which is to do with the physics of sound: how pitch is determined by force or weight; how the complex arrangement of notes in relation to each other produces a scale; and how frequency determines the harmonics of sound. How were mathematical formulations used to create early music? Why do we in the West hear twelve notes in the octave when the Chinese hear fifty-three? What is the mathematical sequence that produces the so-called ‘golden section’? And why was there a resurgence of the use of mathematics in composition in the twentieth century?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Marcus du Sautoy 15 episodes
  Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford
• Robin Wilson 2 episodes
  Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University
• Ruth Tatlow No other episodes
  Lecturer in Music Theory at the University of Stockholm

Related episodes

• Mathematics and Platonism
  
  11 Jan, 2001 510 Mathematics
• Mathematics
  
  6 May, 1999 510 Mathematics
• Symmetry
  
  19 Apr, 2007 510 Mathematics
• Maths and Storytelling
  
  30 Sep, 1999 510 Mathematics
• The Music of the Spheres
  
  19 Jun, 2008 780 Music
• Mathematics’ Unintended Consequences
  
  11 Feb, 2010 510 Mathematics
• Renaissance Maths
  
  2 Jun, 2005 510 Mathematics
• Calculus
  
  24 Sep, 2009 510 Mathematics
• Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems
  
  9 Oct, 2008 510 Mathematics
• Indian Mathematics
  
  14 Dec, 2006 510 Mathematics
• The Fibonacci Sequence
  
  29 Nov, 2007 510 Mathematics
• Maths in the Early Islamic World
  
  16 Feb, 2017 510 Mathematics
• Imaginary Numbers
  
  23 Sep, 2010 510 Mathematics
• The Physics of Time
  
  18 Dec, 2008 530 Physics
• Chaos Theory
  
  16 May, 2002 500 Science
• Infinity
  
  23 Oct, 2003 510 Mathematics
• The Poincaré Conjecture
  
  2 Nov, 2006 510 Mathematics
• Laws of Nature
  
  19 Oct, 2000 500 Science
• Zero
  
  13 May, 2004 510 Mathematics
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
  
  30 Apr, 2020 510 Mathematics

---

Programme ID: p003c1b9

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1b9

Auto-category: 780.1 (Music and mathematics)