[microsound] category theory and composition

[Massimiliano Viel]

By the way there is a book devoted to the application of category theory to music.
I didn't read it so I can't go deeper about it, but maybe somebody out there might be interested in it.
It is "The topos of music" written by Guerino Mazzola.

http://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts-Performance/dp/3764357312



Il giorno 23/dic/2009, alle ore 05.43, Justin Glenn Smith ha scritto:

> I have heard the claim that Bach wrote out the entirety of possible music composition - that every possible variation was present in his music, and nothing could be new after him.
> 
> This, of course, is laughably false.
> 
> But I was thinking about a context in which this could be made a true statement. In category theory there is the concept of a functor, which is a structure-preserving mapping from one category to another. If we treated two genres of composition as categories, we could define a functor to take a composition in one of these genres and get a composition in the other, without losing structural information (ie. analogous patterns would exist).
> 
> Did I make this up? Am I remembering it from somewhere? Has someone tried it already? I am imagining mapping the sequence of pitches in a bach piece to spectral densities, and the durations to amplitude, and amplitude to pitch center, and timbre to duration. For example. With enough of a clinamen, of course, to keep things interesting (or maybe just keeping the clinamen of the original figured bass for example, but mapping it to a different part of the composition?).
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