Computer Modeling of Algebraic Structures in Music and Musicology

The MISA project (Computer Modeling of Algebraic Structures in Music and Musicology: Cognitive, Philosophic, and Epistemological Aspects) was selected by the CNRS when a position was created in the Musical Representations team at IRCAM.

The MISA project is a part of the theoretical research that has been carried out in the Musical Representations team for several years with mathematicians, musicologists, philosophers, and composers. One of the project's goals is to create a new dialogue among computational musicology, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. An analysis of the relationships between musical research and cognitive sciences reveals that music is the only art form that constitutes a subject of cognitive neurocience study. In the field of research, there are very few studies today on the mathematical approaches of music and cognitive activity.

We believe that using mathematical and computer modeling of musical structures, it is possible to discover a certain number of problems that could later become candidates for investigation of the cognitive and perceptive repercussions of algebraic methods. In the algebraic approach there is a constant connection between the process of formalization of musical structures and the choice of possible geometric representations. For example, the idea of symmetry is initially linked to the mathematical structure of the group so that in studying the perceptibility of the idea of symmetry and invariance in music one is also studying the cognitive effects of the action of a group in transformation of a given musical structure.

The MISA project has had a number of effects internationally through a network of research workers that it has brought together such as the creation of the Journal of Mathematics and Music published by the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music and of the 2011 annual Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM) conference was held at IRCAM following the first editions in Berlin in 2007 and in the USA at Yale in 2009. MISA provides the contents for the MaMux seminar (Mathematics/Music in relation with other disciplines) as well as the Musique et Sciences collection created by the Musical Representations Team in collaboration with the SFAM. Twelve volumes (in French, English, and bilingual versions) have already been published in this collection since its creation in 2007.

Partners: École Normale Supérieure, École Supérieure de Musique de Catalogne, University of Minnesota, Société française d'analyse musicale

Participants