Princeton Music Professor Explores the Math of Music

February 26, 2015

Dmitri Tymoczko, a professor of music at Princeton University, has discovered an unlikely way to study and classify chords: with geometry. Tymoczko will present his theories and findings in a presentation titled, “The Geometry of Music” on March 5 at 5:30 p.m. in the IT Building, Room 1004. The presentation is sponsored by the Campus Life Enrichment Committee (CLEC), which focuses on bringing cultural lectures and programs to the campus community. A reception will precede the presentation at 5 p.m. The lecture is based upon Tymoczko’s article, “The Geometry of Musical Chords,” the first music-theory article published in the 130-year history of Science magazine. In this article, he asserts the idea that a musical chord can be visually represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. By using the orbifold, Tymoczko can essentially map the chords of different types of music, finding relationships in styles as disparate as Medieval polyphony and contemporary jazz. Tymoczko is a music and philosophy graduate of Harvard University, and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy at Oxford University. He received his doctorate . in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has won numerous prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and two Hugh F. MacColl Prizes from Harvard University.