is classical music like math?
 

I hear this often, and find it mis-leading. Sure, there is the physics of sound, which has math to it. Scales are like a simple number sequence. Intervals can be represented by frequency ratios. But the actual music written with these building blocks doesn't seem like math. What do you think?

It can be, but I would say no.

My first reaction was to say something sarcastic about apples, oranges and those people's voices being muffled due to their heads being up their own orifices.
But then I headed to the wikipedia page for mathematics and "...is the study of topics such as quantity (numbers), structure, space, and change" and especially "...seek out patterns and use them to formulate new conjectures" does actually apply to music.

Yes, if you think of it in terms of algorithms. The "form" of a song or musical composition is very closely related to algorithms, e.g. Euclid's algorithm.

OP: are you referring to the classical period of music or the more colloquial usage of "classical music"?

I think that while music is quantifiable in a similar way to math, the rules that lie in mathematics keeps me from comparing them too much. There are certain truths in math that can be approached in different ways but lead to similar basic theorems and such. Like any art form, music isn't cut and dry. The cuts in math are clear and defined, while music is murky and subjective. Most of the greats in the classical world are considered as such when they break or bend the rules and develop a new style.

I forgot how this post started off but I feel like I made some good points.

Whenever you minus an accepted rule and add your own rule, you're doing Math!

So 2+2=5 because my new rule says that the second two is the new three. Makes sense.

Music murky and subjective? Within the music norm itself, I find good music to be very clear. Perhaps you mean that, since its medium is sound, and not language, that we don't really know what it means And subjective?...expressing feelings....not always. Often, like in Bach, it's almost purely objective craftsmanship, just by the rules...(but with amazing sound)

(I mean "classical music" in general, not the Classical era.)

Classical music allows for this and Bach.

Bach, perhaps more than any other composer I know, strikes me as something like sonic geometry.

A lot of metal gives me a similar impression.

Nods to the post about algorithms above.

Much of Bach's music features improvisation. Does that fit with math?

Classical music is like Parcheesi

I guess that depends on whether math means anything to you in the abstract. The patterns the improvisations base themselves around remind me, in a way, of how algebra equations are structured.

Well yeah. They're both boring as ****.

Literally all music is composed using mathematics. Whether people utilize it instinctivly or deliberately is the only real question.

There is a certain amount of mathematics in the study of the theory of music. Mathematics though is a vast endeavour, with many branches. When people say "music is maths", what they are usually talking about is a very small subset of maths, namely number theory as applied to the notes of whatever scale you are discussing.

I think the idea that "music is maths" would have been news to many of the pioneer folk and blues musicians, who most likely just played and sang whatever sounded good to them, in many cases not even knowing anything about reading or writing musical notation, let alone any mathematical basis behind it.

Short answer: All music has mathematical principles governing the sounds and patterns of the sounds