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Enrichment Paper

Name: Andres Guitarra


Course: FDMATH108
Teacher: Kasey Halling
Mathematics and Music
I am a musician that`s the reason I picked this theme. It was very
interesting to learn how mathematics and music are related in a deeply
way, because I`ve already knew it a little bit. But there are some things
very important I found in the readings. First, I found the vibrations of an
object makes sound, these vibrations are waves and produce sound.
Sound has pitch and frequency, basically if we play with the pitch and
frequency we can listen the different musician notes or melodies we know
or we listen. The frequency can be measure in Hertz or cycles per second,
when for example a string is moving up and down this is the frequency.
I also found that the Greeks invented the 7 notes we know as (C-D-
E-F-G-A-B) which is the diatonic scale, and after the musician Bach
adopted the 12-tone scale in which we can find the sharps and flat notes,
which are the black keys on the piano. And this part I really find
interesting because of the multiplicative factor (f) because every note of
this scale is separated by a half-step. And this so perfect because
doubling the frequency we have an octave witch is the same note or
frequency but higher. Also I found we can calculate the frequency of every
note with this factor: f= twelfth root of two.
But even with this factor is difficult to tune instruments in a perfect
way because the values of the frequencies are approximated.
Also with music, we can us the exponential growth to find
frequencies or notes.
To create the perfect sound is required numbers, because when a
note is playing in a violin or in another instrument, the string did not sound
alone, we have the entire violin which works like an amplifier, and sum of
all this waves gives the sound of a violin, guitar, piano, etc.
There are also other parts for this frequencies can be music, we have
the rhythm, tempo, and accent, those little things make the music so
different in every song or melody we`ve heard.
For example, Mozart in the commentaries of Mike May who studied
the sonatas of Mozart to know if he used mathematics to composed his
music. There can be many factors, but we have to remember that music
includes some principal things, like the tempo, and also the distribution of
the notes through the entire piece, those notes must be in the time the
composer have stablished and also this is sort of math to achieve it.
I learned also about the Golden Ration and Fibonacci Numbers. The
golden ratio is interesting because you can divide a song not necessarily
in the middle, but in some section you can rephrase the other part with the
exact measurement. And about the Fibonacci Numbers in the diatonic
scale was very interesting found it, because you realize this scale it`s
perfect in some way.
To conclude, I always thinking music is perfect, when you find the
exact time, frequency, tempo, etc., you can create a beautiful melody,
learn these things give me a wide vision about the importance of
mathematics, because math is exact, and music requires to be exact too.

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