Thinking about the shape of the path

Data visualizations Sphere of Chords Some argue that music is merely a side effect of traits that evolved for other functions. Our perceptual and cognitive abilities may have accidentally resulted in a system that finds pleasure and interest in musical stimulation. This idea should perhaps be the null hypothesis, and is by no means implausible. Music's perceptual basis could derive from general-purpose auditory mechanisms, its syntactic components could be co-opted from language, and its effect on our emotions could be driven by the acoustic similarity of music to other sounds of greater biological relevance, such as speech or animal vocalizations. Familiar relationships between sets of musical notes, such as transposition between chords, directly translate into geometrical structures such as this Moebius strip - where each dot represents a whole class of equivalent two-note chords - or into more complex structures with many dimensions. Composers have an understanding of these geometries without realizing it, (...). Excerpts from: "The Evolution Of Music" by Josh McDermott. © Copyright 2010 Michael Paukner. All Rights Reserved.