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SUMMARY:Looking beyond the staff lines and listening behind the sound: Nov
 el applications of two old-fashioned paradigms to the analysis of musical 
 harmony - Talk by Dr. Thomas Noll\, Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya
DTSTART:20200113T160000
DTEND:20200113T170000
DTSTAMP:20260526T213340Z
UID:26af92d3dda2664fe82b419e5b714d915264f50c971921394f969fd3
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Thomas Noll (Germany\, Spain) is a leading researcher in m
 athematical music theory\, on the faculty of Escola Superior de Musica de 
 Catalunya in Barcelona. In addition to his PhD from Technische Universitä
 t Berlin\, he holds degrees in mathematics and semiotics. His 1995 dissert
 ation\, Morphologische Grundlagen der abendländlischen Harmonik\, was su
 bsequently published\, followed by over 50 journal articles and book chapt
 ers. Co-editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music from 2006–2012\, 
 and founding member of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Musi
 c\, he co-authored several articles with David Clampitt\, including one th
 at received the Society for Music Theory 2013  Outstanding Publication Aw
 ard. \nAbstract\nTwo traditional accounts to the analysis of chord progre
 ssions – Roman Numeral Analysis and Functional Harmony – have recently
  been joined by two paradigms which by themselves are timehonored domains 
 of music-theoretical reasoning and conceptualization. But their applicatio
 n to musical harmony is a more recent development. One productive idea is 
 to view chords and chord inversions as if they where scales or modes. This
  allows a productive transfer from a mathematical discipline called algebr
 aic combinatorics on words to the combinatorics of modes (including chords
  and their inversions). The meanwhile ramified body of knowledge includes 
 contributions by Eric Regener\, John Clough\, Jack Douthett\, Norman Carey
 \, David Clampitt\, Karst de Jong and others (including Daniel Harasim and
  myself :-). Thereby it turns out that some of the mathematical findings a
 re by no means alien to traditional music-theoretical knowledge. They rath
 er turn out to be natural consequences of insights which underly the inven
 tion of traditional musical pitch notation. The applications to chord prog
 ressions include aspects of voice leading as well as the patterns underlyi
 ng typical fundament progressions. Another productive idea is a quite unor
 thodox application of Fourier analysis\, which in connection with music is
  usually admired as the ultimative tool for the study and experimental man
 ipulation of musical sounds. It turns out\, however\, that it can also sui
 tably be applied to the study of pitch class sets (subsets of the chromati
 c 12-tone-system) and pitch class profiles (fuzzy subsets). The contributi
 ons to this direction are due to David Lewin\, Ian Quinn\, Emmanuel Amiot 
 and Jason Yust. Also here it turns out that the incorruptible mathematical
  results are not alien to traditional musictheoretical knowledge. The „p
 artials“ of the Fourier decompositions are closely related to prominent 
 pitch class collections. For given chord progressions in musical pieces th
 ey lend themselves to be interpreted as events in „analytical voices“.
  After brief informal introductions to these different mathematical approa
 ches I will dedicate the last part of my talk to the comparison of associa
 ted analytical results in selected musical pieces and to the detection of 
 instances of solidarity between these results. It is a challenging open ta
 sk at the borderline between theory and analysis to disentangle systematic
  dependencies from ideosyncratic piece-specific correspondences.\n\n 
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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