Music and Mathematics - Connections To Set Theory

Connections To Set Theory

Musical set theory uses some of the concepts from mathematical set theory to organize musical objects and describe their relationships. To analyze the structure of a piece of (typically atonal) music using musical set theory, one usually starts with a set of tones, which could form motives or chords. By applying simple operations such as transposition and inversion, one can discover deep structures in the music. Operations such as transposition and inversion are called isometries because they preserve the intervals between tones in a set.

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