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Music & Math

Music and Math
These two matters first seem to be completely different from each other, standing on the opposite sides of human activities – purely logical and exact science (math) “a queen of all sciences” and the beautiful, seeming to be far from most of the logical laws - music. Most may say that these two fields of studies are actually impossible to combine. Surprisingly, math and music tend to have a lot in common and organically complement one another. It turns out that math and music are often inseparable and can benefit each other greatly.
Music theorists often try to use mathematics in order to recognize musical organization and support original ways of examination of music. This has led to musical relevance to the set theory, abstract algebra, and the number theory. “Music researchers have also used mathematics to comprehend harmonious scales, and some composers have incorporated the Golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers into their work” (“Danil Fokker”).
The history of math and music correspondence is actually very old: the first individual to make a connection between math and music was Pythagoras of Samos, a famous logician and philosopher who lived in southern Italy in 5th century BC. He also is the first who got the idea that mathematics is actually present everywhere. Pythagoras has been searching for rationality in any activity, and music gave him a broad field to study. One bit of proof of fundamental rational numbers was present in the Greek music. At those times, music was not as much complicated as it is in the modern world. The Greek octave had only as much as five notes and Pythagoras mentioned that each note was a part of a string. So, if the first note was “A”, “B” was 4/5th of the previous, and consequently – “C” as the 3/5th, “D” – 2/5th and “E” – 1/5th of the whole note.
Most of the Greek instruments of the time had 6 strings corresponding to these notes. Though the length of the strings varied a lot the main idea...