- Hardcover: 200 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford (2 Oct 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0198511876
- ISBN-13: 978-0198511878
- Product Dimensions: 24.6 x 19.4 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,976,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
The writing throughout is wonderfully elegant and clear, so when the mathematical symbolism defeated me I could still follow the gist of the argument. (BBC Music Magazine )
This is a lucid and stimulating introduction to a many-sided topic, leavened with amusing anecdotes and occasional donnish humour. (BBC Music Magazine )
This is a lucid and stimulating introduction to a many-sided topic, leavened with amusing anecdotes and occasional donnish humour. (BBC Music Magazine )
Product Description
From Ancient Greek times, music has been seen as a mathematical art, and the relationship between mathematics and music has fascinated generations. This collection of wide ranging, comprehensive and fully-illustrated papers, authored by leading scholars, presents the link between these two subjects in a lucid manner that is suitable for students of both subjects, as well as the general reader with an interest in music. Physical, theoretical, physiological, acoustic, compositional, and analytical relationships between mathematics and music are unfolded and explored with focus on tuning and temperament, the mathematics of sound, bell-ringing and modern compositional techniques.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have long been a fan of Raymond Flood's work and had been anticipating this new volume for some time. What a relief to see his writing is still as astute, insightful and witty as ever. I would heartily recommend this volume to anyone fascinated by the complex relationship between mathematics and music.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
50 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Expendable collection of essays
15 July 2006
Format:Hardcover
Only two chapters address fundamental mathematical-musical issues, namely decent chapters on the Pythagorean principles of consonance and scales and Helmholtz's theory of consonance. The rest of the book treats various quirky side topics, many of them trying in more or less contrived ways to force mathematical ideas (magic squares, finite projective planes, fractals, the Erlanger Programm, etc.) into a musical setting. Personally, I was amused by chapter 7 on bell-ringing: a bell-tower has a few different bells and of course "an evening spent playing unchanging rounds might be considered uneventful", so we wish to change the ringing order of our bells, but "because bells are heavy and slow" we are limited to changing the order one adjacent pair at a time, and so eighteenth century bell-ringers developed a sophisticated understanding of symmetric groups generated by transpositions, which we can now illustrate with modern concepts and Cayley diagrams and so on, only to conclude that the ringers "had been doing 'group theory' and 'ringing the cosets' all along". That's about as good as it gets. The book as a whole suffers from many shortcomings including lack of depth (e.g., chapter 2 on Kepler's musical cosmology doesn't contain a single line of mathematics), lack of breadth (e.g., Fourier analysis is not even in the index), and lack of originality (e.g., chapter 4 consists of recycled Ian Stewart material which in turn was mostly recycled Barbour material, down to consistent misspelling of the main character's name).
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