332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Let me start today's episode with two quotes from two very different important thinkers in human intellectual history. One is from Gottfried Leibniz, who says, Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. The other is from Thelonius Monk, the famous jazz composer and pianist, who said, all musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
I learned about the existence of both these quotes from today's guest, Dmitry Tomosco, and they express basically exactly the same idea, right? That there is something in music, in the playing of music, maybe even in the experiencing of music. that is subconsciously mathematical. This connection between math and music is very, very well known and has been explored in great details, but there's something else going on. You know, music is not simply abstract mathematics, it's not theorems and proofs, it's embodied somehow.
You play the notes or you sing the notes and then you hear the notes, you experience the notes. So that's physics. As well as mathematics, not to mention psychology and physiology and things like that. There's a lot going on in the world of music that intersects with science and with mindscapy topics in all sorts of ways. At the same time, there's another famous story that may or may not be apocryphal, but I know that I love telling it, I probably told it before, of Albert Einstein, who loved playing the violin, and he became a celebrity, of course, Einstein, so he got to play the violin with
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