Wednesday, March 14th, 2018
Otkrytye Masterskie
Ligovsky pr. 99, St. Petersburg
19:00

Yuri AKBALKAN
Division of the Canon: Sound and Number
Lecture 1

Division of the Canon is the cycle of lectures by Yuri Akbalkan. The title of the cycle refers to Euclid’s treatise of the same name — Sectio canonis. The lecture topics cover a wide spectrum — from specific compositional techniques to interdisciplinary intersections of various phenomena in music.

The first lecture is about mathematics-based methods in music will be held on March 14th, 2018 at the Lecture Hall of the Otkrytye Masterskie, in the frame of the Algorithm of Art Festival, which dedicated to the Pi Day. Curator of the festival — Anastasia Melnikova.

Lecture 1. Sound and Number. About mathematics-based methods in music.

Connection between sound and number was established even since the times of ancient culture. Pythagoreans created a mathematical theory of music, discovering the dependence of musical harmony on the ratio of integers. An ancient musicology was created by scientists: the Pythagoreans Aristoxenus of Tarentum and Archytas, mathematicians Euclid and Theon of Smyrna, astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy and many others. The medieval quadrivium, which belong to the field of exact sciences, included arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.

In the framework of the lecture Yuri Akbalkan will talk about various examples and phenomena in the field of music and mathematics: musical and theoretical experiments and the algorithmic method of composition by Guido d’Arezzo, information-theoretic approach in the Leonhard Euler’s musical sound system, Michele Filippo’s organigrams, William Hayes’ idea of stochastic composition and its realization in the musical works by Iannis Xenakis, binary code aesthetic by Ryoji Ikeda and Mauro Lanza.