Music in Terms of Science
James Q. Feng

TL;DR
This paper explores the scientific and mathematical foundations of music, examining its universal elements, historical discoveries, and the relationship between musical perception and scientific principles.
Contribution
It attempts to bridge the gap between scientific understanding and artistic intuition by analyzing the structural and mathematical aspects of music.
Findings
Music has universal building blocks like melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Harmonic relationships are based on simple rational frequency ratios.
Octave spans are fundamental to musical systems across cultures.
Abstract
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's need to impose his will upon the universe, to bring order out of chaos and to endow his moments of highest awareness with enduring form and substance. It is a form of art dealing with the organization of tones into patterns. Despite of cultural differences, music from different civilizations seems to consist of some building blocks that are universal: melody, harmony, rhythm, etc. Almost all musical systems are based on scales spanning an octave---the note that sounds the same as the one you started off with, but at a higher or lower pitch. It was discovered by Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 BC, that the note an octave higher…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMusic Technology and Sound Studies · Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
