23 februari 2012

From Pythagoras to Helmholtz (and Beyond): Some Notes on Music, Sound, and Numbers

Prof. dr Henkjan Honing

Its not uncommon to think that the regularities underlying beautiful music should be beautiful as well. As if nature determines what is harmonic, beautiful or ‘well-formed’ music. This idea seems to echo the classical Greek concept, recurring in so many guises (polyphony being one of them), of a ‘harmony of the spheres’, the idea that the mathematical structure of music may reveal something about nature itself. Or the opposite idea: that an elegant formula that can successfully break the code of eminent composers’ music and expose the underlying numerical structure can show us how beautiful and ‘natural’ that music is. And: why does a well-tempered piano sound 'in tune'? I will argue, once again, that music does not reside in sound or numbers but in the listener’s mind. This is a concept that, as we will see, even contemporary science historians have difficulty embracing.

Henkjan Honing is KNAW-Muller professor in Music Cognition and will be appointed professor of Cognitive and Computational Musicology at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam in March 2012. Honing conducts research into the role of perception, attention, expectation and memory when listening to music, and studies the cognitive mechanisms underlying musicality. In his research, Honing uses theoretical, empirical and computational methods.