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Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

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Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#21
Here's a generalization that yields an infinite family of similar observations.

Step 1. Take any "torus knot with n marked points": which for our purposes will mean homeomorphism classes of embeddings from a circle with n marked points, to the torus.

Step 2. Draw it on paper.

In the case of the Coltrane drawing, n = (5 octaves * 13 notes per octive) = 65. The author exhibited 3 non-homeomrphic embeddings of this circle into the torus in the three images below the protractor picture. In particular these are embeddings generated by iterated Dehn twists on the unknot. You can classify them by winding number.

The image right below the aforementioned ones also shows an embedding of a circle with marked points into the torus if we choose to identify the 2 'c's. This time there's only 13 marked points. This suggests the following. To a circle with marked points, one can associate a canonical family, labelled by integers, of circles with marked points as follows: take any covering map of the circle, and declare the union of the fibers over the marked points to be the new marked points. In the case of the music scale analogy, we take the circle with 13 marked points, and this in particular gives a family of circles with 13 * k marked points for any positive integer k, and the musical interpretation is that k is how many octave one chooses to have. In the images mentioned above k = 3 and k = 1 are exhibited.

There's a simple further generalization of all this: we can replace the torus with any topological space. For example, doing this on a higher genus surface or a non-orientable surface would both yield probably interesting-looking diagrams.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#22

Anyone know a nice source for learning some basic music theory? To be more specific, something that would teach whatever would be required to understand the musical concepts in this article (for example). The ideal would be something directed towards readers with some mathematical background (but not a PhD), conversational, and focused on concepts and maybe historical development rather than just stating facts withou…

Perhaps Harmonic Experience by W.A. Mathieu.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't thought about it in depth, but my guess is that it is not, because a lattice is not isomorphic with a cylinder or torus. Figuring out the relationship in detail would be a good project.

The Tonnetz is a torus, unwrapped onto the plane. On the first Wikipedia image ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz ) you can see the circles of major- and minor-thirds on the 60˚ lines, whole-tone and semi-tone scales along 30˚ and vertical lines, and the circle of fifths on the horizontals. Different presentations skew it in different ways, to emphasize different features, but it's very hard to make a diagram li…

It's equivalent to a torus in equal temperament, because the pattern repeats in a predictable way when the notes alias each other.

In a just intonation 3-5 lattice, it extends infinitely without repetition.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#24
post #19
post #3

Coincidentally, i just stumbled upon this today: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU Basically a musical palindrome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_canon

You might enjoy this piece too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzkOFJMI5i8 (Steve Reich's Clapping Music...)

Skip "Clapping". It's fun but you wouldn't listen to it for anything other than intellectual interest. Other Reich though - Drumming is a wonderful midpoint between formalistic process-driven music but it still can give you goosebumps. He gets less process driven as time goes on - which I think is a good thing in many ways. For me probably the high point of his work is something like Music for 18 Musicians. Simultaneously a work of symmetry and structure - but it sounds like art. It sounds like an artist.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#25

This has actually been operationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_array_model It's conjectural on my part, but if you apply D-weighting to the resulting pitch cylinders you can conceptualize musical space as an aesthetically pleasing spherical shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting If you further consider the nature of stereo hearing, head-related transfer functions, and sympathetic resonance, th…

I have considered a spiral version. You could see the Coltrane diagrams as viewing a spiral head-on, so that the spiral nature of the structure is hidden by occlusion. This would solve the problem of the arbitrary nature of representing only five octaves.

Was 5 octaves really an arbitrary choice? It's the point where the circle of fifths gets back to the starting note. (Nevermind that detail that there are no positive integers m, n such that (3/2)^m == 2^n.)

That's not exactly arbitrary - there is a reason to use that range in preference to others.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#27

This has actually been operationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_array_model It's conjectural on my part, but if you apply D-weighting to the resulting pitch cylinders you can conceptualize musical space as an aesthetically pleasing spherical shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting If you further consider the nature of stereo hearing, head-related transfer functions, and sympathetic resonance, th…

Doesn't the spiral array model discard enharmonic equivalence?

I think there's a way around this if you imagine concentric shells with harmonic rotation, but I'd have to go and look up one of my old notebooks from a few years ago. I stopped writing/playing music regularly after a massive construction project in my neighborhood :-/

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#28
I'm excited to see others on the journey of connecting music theory and math.

I feel like taking equal-temperament for granted obscures a lot of the simplest connections. Just intonation has a treasure trove of interesting implications (and challenges), and the math is elementary school stuff [0].

[0] https://music.stackexchange.com/a/33787

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't thought about it in depth, but my guess is that it is not, because a lattice is not isomorphic with a cylinder or torus. Figuring out the relationship in detail would be a good project.

The Tonnetz is a torus, unwrapped onto the plane. On the first Wikipedia image ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz ) you can see the circles of major- and minor-thirds on the 60˚ lines, whole-tone and semi-tone scales along 30˚ and vertical lines, and the circle of fifths on the horizontals. Different presentations skew it in different ways, to emphasize different features, but it's very hard to make a diagram li…

>it's very hard to make a diagram like this that isn't topologically equivalent to the Tonnetz.

And more generally, it's just hard to have a good idea that Euler hasn't had first.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#30

Are there musicians of today, with popularity similar to Coltrane's in 1960, that study and explore the theory of music at this level? If not, why not? Was jazz, and bebop in particular, unique in this regard? It's a serious question; I don't know. I can't think of any current musicians but that's not conclusive. Also, I'm not sure exactly how popular John Coltrane was in 1960; certainly jazz was orders of magnitude…

I’d argue that Mehldau today is not less popular. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he did explore the theory of music at that same level, but I don’t have any evidence :).
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