Music and Mathematics (Weekly Blog #11)

Music theorists, at times, use mathematics to understand music. Mathematics is "the basis of sound" and sound itself "in its musical aspects... exhibits a remarkable array of number properties", simply because nature itself "is amazingly mathematical" (Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp 42-3). Though ancient Chinese, Egyptians and Mesopotamians are known to have studied the mathematical principles of sound, the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece are the first researchers known to have investigated the expression of musical scales in terms of numerical ratios; Particularly the ratios of small integers. Their doctrine was that "all nature consists of harmony arising out of numbers". From the time of Plato, harmony was considered a fundamental branch of physics, now known as musical acoustics. Early Indian and Chinese theorists sought to show that the mathematical laws of harmonics and rhythms were fundamental not only to our understanding of the world but to human well-being.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_mathematics