Event

Mathematics & Statistics Graduate Student Seminar

Friday, September 21, 2018 13:00to14:00
Burnside Hall Room 1025 (Lounge), 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0B9, CA

Jordan Barrett will talk to us about what makes a beat catchy:

What makes a musical rhythm sound good? Thisfundamental question in music theory can be modeled by discrete methods in mathematics. Consider a hit song with an underlying beat. This beat normally cycles in groups of 16 short intervals, and so we could represent this beat as a directed cyclic graphCwith 16 vertices, and with a setSinV(C)consisting of all the “hits” in the beat. In this talk we will explore 6 of the most popular rhythms in music history and determine which of these 6 dominates popular music. This will lead to a graph theoretic interpretation of the fundamental question: What makes a good rhythm good? We will see a connection between the “catchiness” of a rhythm and the “evenness” of points on the corresponding cycle.

See you all there!

All graduate students are invited. As with all talks in the graduate student seminar, this talk will be accessible to all graduate students in math and stats.This seminar was made possible by funding from the McGill Mathematics and Statistics Department and PGSS.

 

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