Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Judith Bruni on November 25, 2010 at 11:55pm

From what I have heard of the great teachings, that is exactly what music is. It can also be aligned with other arts, such as architecture: this also is to do with number and proportion, and any painting that is harmonious and beautiful will be seen to have a harmony that can be measured with numbers. Mozart was said to be able to hear the music of the spheres, and that music came to him fully formed, he just wrote it down very quickly before he forgot it. Astronomy is also of course to do with number.
The vibrations which give us pitch and tone echo on earth as well as in the spheres, and within our ears, souls and bodies. Some vibrations evoke light and colour, some sound, and I guess some taste, smell and touch.
How on earth does music make us feel happy, sad, elated, peaceful and so on, just by altering a few vibrations? Are we not very fortunate to be able to appreciate these things?

Permalink Reply by Richard C Brown on April 27, 2011 at 6:56pm

Thank You for reminding me.

Permalink Reply by Sonia Dunbar on April 27, 2011 at 9:08pm

I'm stretching back a bit to when I was writing my bachelor's degree thesis in the mid-1980s, but my recollection was that Greek number theory held the following:  1= God, 2= man, 3= woman, 4= justice, 5= humankind.  All of the perfect and major intervals (or at least the consonant intervals) in the Pythagorean tuning systems are based upon the various proportions of these numbers (e.g. 2:1 = an octave).  The architects of the great European cathedrals used these same proportions in their designs and many music directors at the cathedrals used the proportions of the specific cathedral to integrate into their compositions, either in terms of frequency of intervals, number of "movements", lengths of phrases, repetitions/variations on themes, etc.  There was a wonderful book published in the '80s called "The Pythagorean Plato" which goes into a fair amount of this.  Unfortunately, my music theory for non-Western/non-European music is weak, so I'd have to dig for mathematical/musical connections in other musics.

 

Interestingly, in the seven liberal arts, the first three traditionally studied were those relating to spoken language (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), this was followed by the four "mathematical" arts (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).