Convexity and the well-formedness of musical objects

Aline Honingh, Rens Bod
2005 Journal of New Music Research  
It is well known that subsets of the two-dimensional space Z 2 can represent prominent musical and music-theoretical objects such as scales, chords and chord vocabularies. It has been noted that the major and minor diatonic scale form convex subsets in this space. This triggers the question whether convexity is a more widespread concept in music. The current paper systematically investigates the convexity for a number of musical phenomena among which scales, chords and (harmonic) reduction. We
more » ... ypothesise that the notion of convexity may be a covering concept of musical phenomena and possibly reflects other mathematical properties of these musical structures. Furthermore, convexity can be used in a pitch spelling model. * corresponding author 1 Convexity has also been observed in rhythm space (Desain and Honing 2003) .
doi:10.1080/09298210500280612 fatcat:3r52jyylvzabvpeoujhwlbyqwa