"There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

"
— Pythagoras

Music is an art of sound through the use of harmonies, rhythm and melodies. Mathematics
refers to numbers and calculations, often dealing with magnitudes, figures and quantities
expressed symbolically. So you can study everything in music -- melody, harmony, rhythm,
timbre -- from several different mathematical perspectives, including geometry, number theory,
trigonometry, differential calculus, combinatorics and signal processing. Also, the electrical and
electronic tools used to make modern music are based on a mathematical understanding of how
music works.

Firstly let's talk about rhythm. When you're tapping your toes to a catchy beat, you're basically
working with a periodic function -- in other words, a wave. Even music without a drumbeat has a
rhythm -- it determines where you place the notes (and even the silences!).

Next we can talk about melody. A musical note is made up of waves. These waves are produced
by vibrations of a string (like in guitars, pianos and harps) of a membrane (like drums) or of a
column of air (like flutes, saxophones and trumpets). High frequency vibrations are not heard as
discrete rhythms, but instead as more continuous sounds that have a particular pitch and timbre.
For reasons that are still being studied by mathematicians, musicians and scientists, the
particular notes that sound pleasurable when played in a sequence as a melody often have
particular mathematical relationships.

The "gap" between two musical notes is called an interval. An important number is the ratio of
the frequency between two notes. Cultures all around the world like to hear sequences of notes
involving small integer ratios among the frequencies of the notes. One such popular interval is
the perfect fifth which is the interval between C and G (or 'Do' and 'So', or 'Sa' and 'Pa' in Indian
classical music). The ratio between the two frequencies is 2:3. If you were building a harp, you
could use these ratios to determine the lengths of the strings.

The intervals between notes that sound good in a melody also form the basis of Harmony -- the
playing of multiple notes at the same time. A chord played on the piano or strummed on a guitar
consists of three or more notes played simultaneously or in quick succession, so they overlap
with each other. Chords that sound harmonious to most ears contain the same integer intervals
that are often considered melodious.

It could be argued that music is, in fact, a branch of mathematics. My final conclusion is that
music is a unique blend of mathematics, physics, and the unexplainable emotional right- brain
human perception phenomena.

If one person were to say that music is a set of mathematical relationships that can be explained
with algebraic equations, and another person were to say that music is a gift from God, that
mankind will never really totally comprehend, both of those individuals would be absolutely
correct.