Music and Math

Dennis Miller and Hubert Ho

Thursday, December 8, 2016, 7-8pm

MIT List Visual Arts Center, Bartos Theatre
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 

What is the nature of knowledge? Where does music lead the mind? Dennis Miller and Hubert Ho think about these big questions through the particular lens of music. Music relates to many other fields – to visual art, moving images, to mathematics. In a formal sense they both embrace music composition as a problem solving challenge – aiming to create a unified whole which communicates to the audience. On the one hand a composition defines its own authority. But broader concepts, spanning disciplines, such as form, pattern-recognition, symmetry, and recursion can be identified through music.

Both Miller and Ho address the relationship between mathematics and music, looking at their art form through the lens of another discipline. Incorporating mathematical insights, however, does not preclude the necessity, possibility, or desirability of a spiritual or emotional connection to music. Does mathematics have a role in what they experience internally as composers, and in listeners’ experiences of resulting musical compositions?