I'm not the scientist in this blog, and I'm a mediocre mathematician at best (a chain of bad teachers...long story), so I'm probably not the best person to be writing about this. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that apparently a composer at Princeton has used String Theory mathematics to graphically represent the "universe of possible chords."
From the article:
Tymoczko's answer, which led last summer to the first paper on music theory
ever published in the journal Science, is that the cosmos of chords consists of
weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves
with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot out to prove to
students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side. Indeed, the
simplest chords, which consist of just two notes, live on an actual Möbius
strip. Three-note chords reside in spaces that look like prisms--except that
opposing faces connect to each other. And more complex chords inhabit spaces
that are as hard to visualize as the multidimensional universes of string
theory.
Maybe it would help me to brush up on my geometry before I try and take up an instrument?
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