This week’s recommendation comes from:
Joe Dostilio
IFL Mathematics Fellow
Joe says, “If you’ve read some of my past IFL Recommends, you might be noticing a pattern that I am often reading and listening to things about music and math and sometimes about the connections between them. As my kids approach the time in their lives when they may start to learn to play musical instruments, I thought about maybe starting to play an instrument again too … like, you know, something to fill up all the free time I have! I ran across this video and found the explanation of how math has been used to create different tunings for instruments and thought I’d share it. Enjoy!”
The Mathematical Problem with Music, and How to Solve It
Yuval Nov
“There is a serious mathematical problem with the tuning of musical instruments.”- Yuval Nov
The serious problem is one that mathematicians like Galileo, Newton, and Euler tried to solve. Watch the video to hear a very detailed and interesting explanation of how ratios and scaling ratios have been used to create different tunings. The video includes several audio demonstrations, so try to listen with headphones to try to hear the differences in tunings!