This book introduces path-breaking applications of concepts from mathematical topology to music-theory topics including harmony, chord progressions, rhythm, and music classification. Contributions address topics of voice leading, Tonnetze (maps of notes and chords), and automatic music classification. Focusing on some geometrical and topological aspects of the representation and formalisation of musical structures and processes, the book covers topological features of voice-leading geometries in the most recent advances in this mathematical approach to representing how chords are connected through the motion of voices, leading to analytically useful simplified models of high-dimensional spaces; It generalizes the idea of a Tonnetz, a geometrical map of tones or chords, and shows how topological aspects of these maps can correspond to many concepts from music theory. The resulting framework embeds the chord maps of neo-Riemannian theory in continuous spaces that relate chords of different sizes and includes extensions of this approach to rhythm theory. It further introduces an application of topology to automatic music classification, drawing upon both static topological representations and time-series evolution, showing how static and dynamic features of music interact as features of musical style. This volume will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of music, music analyses, music composition, mathematical music theory, computational musicology, and music informatics. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and Music.

In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.

With contributions by numerous experts

This book offers an introductory course in algebraic topology. Starting with general topology, it discusses differentiable manifolds, cohomology, products and duality, the fundamental group, homology theory, and homotopy theory. From the reviews: "An interesting and original graduate text in topology and geometry...a good lecturer can use this text to create a fine course....A beginning graduate student can use this text to learn a great deal of mathematics."—-MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS

This book represents a novel approach to differential topology. Its main focus is to give a comprehensive introduction to the classification of manifolds, with special attention paid to the case of surfaces, for which the book provides a complete classification from many points of view: topological, smooth, constant curvature, complex, and conformal. Each chapter briefly revisits basic results usually known to graduate students from an alternative perspective, focusing on surfaces. We provide full proofs of some remarkable results that sometimes are missed in basic courses (e.g., the construction of triangulations on surfaces, the classification of surfaces, the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the degree-genus formula for complex plane curves, the existence of constant curvature metrics on conformal surfaces), and we give hints to questions about higher dimensional manifolds. Many examples and remarks are scattered through the book. Each chapter ends with an exhaustive collection of problems and a list of topics for further study. The book is primarily addressed to graduate students who did take standard introductory courses on algebraic topology, differential and Riemannian geometry, or algebraic geometry, but have not seen their deep interconnections, which permeate a modern approach to geometry and topology of manifolds.

This is the first volume of the second edition of the now classic book “The Topos of Music”. The author explains the theory's conceptual framework of denotators and forms, the classification of local and global musical objects, the mathematical models of harmony and counterpoint, and topologies for rhythm and motives.