There is a long history of connection between the world of music and the world of mathematics.

A squared plus B squared equals C squared; that is of course the Pythagorean theorem from basic geometry,
named for the Greek philosopher and religious teacher from 5th century BCE, Pythagoras.  Pythagoras taught the
belief that numbers were a guide to the interpretation of the universe. Mathematics could explain everything,
including music.

Legend states that one day Pythagoras was walking past a smithy’s workshop, listening to the sound of the
blacksmith’s hammers on the anvil. He turned his attention to the percussive sound that was produced and noted
that some strikes sounded much higher than others. He was certain that there was a mathematical explanation
for the different pitches he was hearing. So he entered the smithy’s shop and observed that they were using
different sized hammers. Some of the hammers were large and others smaller, but they were ratios of each
other: one being twice the size of another one, one being two-thirds the size of the last. Pythagoras declared
these relationships as absolute intervals of music.

It’s a great story, but completely false. That’s not how these ratios actually work. But if we apply the story to
lengths of string rather than hammers, we have something much more plausible. 

Pythagoras believed that the planets themselves, all heavenly bodies, rang out notes of vibration based on their
orbit and distance to each other.
CREDIT GALILEA / WIKIPEDIA CREATIVE COMMONS

Pythagoras is attributed with discovering that a string exactly half the length of another will play a pitch that is
exactly an octave higher when struck or plucked. Split a string into thirds and you raise the pitch an octave and a
fifth. Spilt it into fourths and you go even higher – you get the idea. This concept is known as the overtone series
or harmonic series and it is a feature of physics, affecting waves and frequencies in ways we can see and hear and
ways we can’t. 

Pythagoras believed that the planets themselves, all heavenly bodies, rang out notes of vibration based on their
orbit and distance to each other. We humans simply lack the ability to hear this music of the spheres.

These mathematical ratios helped to define every system of intonation throughout history. In other words, we
tune our modern day instruments using the mathematics that Pythagoras discovered almost 2,500 years ago.

1. Pythagoras believed that the study of music and mathematics enabled

a person to understand and see the structures of nature. He believed that
physical care and healing of the human body could be understood and
directed through music, which he believed was capable of creating
harmony within the soul and the harmony of existing with nature.7
2. He believed that music could be used to purify the body, which created
health.8
3. Pythagoras believed that music could be used to eliminate emotional
stresses and prescribed certain songs to be played at the end of the day
to relieve these say to day stress levels. He also believed that there were
certain types of music that corresponded to the time of day and
corresponded to the seasons. This idea was also prominent in Egypt and
Babylon, and was also found to be an intrinsic part of Indian music as
well.9
4. Pythagoras himself was also known to be a Lyre player and due to the
exploratory nature of his consciousness and the fact that the Lyre was a
stringed instrument, it is quite probable that he spent a considerable
amount of his time and effort investigating musical pitches and ratios of
string vibrations.
5. His inquiries developed into a complete science of determining pitches
based on ratios, which led to the original developments of Greek music
theory.
6. There exists a well-worn popular legend/myth (of which there are
several versions of this and they are all debatable) that Pythagoras
passed by a blacksmith’s shop and heard the hammers creating tones
of different pitches. The purported legend claims that he found that the
hammers had different pitches based on their size and weight. The
legend continues by explaining that he found that if a hammer was
exactly twice the weight/size of another, the subsequent pitch that was
created would ring exactly one octave higher.
7. Many scholars dispute the actual validity of this legend, however the
important fact remains; although the ancient Egyptians and
Mesopotamians may have first discovered it, Pythagoras was the one
who made popular the idea of inherent basic ratios that existed in the
pitches which were created by plucking strings of different lengths.
Since he actually was a Lyre player (of which, during that time period,
was a popular stringed instrument all across Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Anatolia and Greece), it is quite plausible that his discoveries were
based on experimentation with different string lengths instead, rather
than the popular legend (myth) of the blacksmith’s hammers.
8. As Pythagoras spent 21 years (some authors say 22 years) living in
Egypt, he was inducted into the Egyptian priesthoods, and then after
that he spent 12 years living and receiving instruction from the
Priesthoods of the Magi in Babylon. Since he was admitted into higher
areas of learning by both the Egyptian and Babylonian priesthoods, it is
highly probable that these ideas did NOT originate from the
“blacksmith’s hammer legend” but were actually presented to him in a
much more orderly, logical manner by his Egyptian and Babylonian
mentors, as there is evidence of his “Pythagorean theorem” previously
existing and being used by Babylonian mathematicians and Egyptian
Pyramid builders.
9. According to ancient Greek researcher Dmitra Karamanides, “The
Babylonians used what we now call the Pythagorean theorem more
than 1,000 years before Pythagoras.”10
1. Pythagoras promoted what became the basic fundamental idea of all
music theory from antiquity to even modern times; that by dividing the
length of a string into ratios of halves, thirds, quarters, and fifths created
the musical intervals of an octave, a perfect fifth, a second octave, and a
major third respectively.
2. Pythagoras’s vital importance for music theory is his establishment of
the numerical and mathematical basis of acoustics. From his discoveries
we not only get (in Geometry) the Pythagorean theorem (which contain
the 3:4:5 ratio. The 3:4:5 ratio triangle can also be exemplified in reverse
as 5:4:3, of which we get the fifth, fourth and double octave), but in music
we get:
3. The Pythagorean concept of division by proportions – This is based on
the relationship of the harmonic and arithmetic means as they are
represented by the numbers 6, 8, 9 and 12.
1. The ratio 12:6 (2:1) produces the octave
2. The ratio 9:6 (9=3*3 and 6=3*2) and 12:8 (12=4*3 and 8=4*2)
produces the 5th (9:6=12:8=3:2=3:2)
3. The ratio 8:6 (8=4*2 and 6=3*2) and 12:9 (4*3 and 3*3), the 4th
4. The ratio of 9:8, the major 2nd.11
5. Pythagorean tuning – Which defines all notes and intervals of a
scale from a series of stacked pure fifths – C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-[G#D#-
A#-E#-B#(C).] The pure fifth is the divisional proportion of the string
with a numeric ratio of 3:2.
6. Pythagorean Intonation – This is the result of the pure tuning of
5ths and 4ths .
7. Pythagoras discovered the numeric/mathematical
measurement of intervals by division and multiplicatoin of their ratios.
In order to find the mathematical ratio for the sum of two intervals, one
must multiply the numbers. To find the ratio of their intervallic
difference, one must divide the ratios.12
8. The ratio for the octave is 2:1
9. The ratio for the 5th 3:2.
10. The ratio for the 4th is 4:3 (octave – 5th, which equals 2:1 ÷ 3:2)
11. The ratio for the whole tone, 9:8 (5th – 4th, which equals 3:2 ÷
4:3)
12. The ratio for the major 6th, 27:16 (5th + whole tone, hence 3:2 ×
9:8)
13. The ratio for the minor 3rd, 32:27 (octave – major 6th, hence 2:1
÷ 27:16, or 4th – whole tone, hence 4:3 ÷ 9:8)13
4. The ratio for the major 3rd (also called the ‘ditone’ or , 81:64) (whole
tone + whole tone, hence 9:8 × 9:8); for the ‘limma’ or diatonic minor
2nd, 256:243 (4th – major 3rd, hence 4:3 ÷ 81:64); for the somewhat
larger ‘apotomē’, 2187:2048 (whole tone – limma, hence 9:8 ÷ 256:243)
and so on.14
5. The Pythagorean “Limma” (which is represented by 256:243, the
difference between a perfect 4th (4:3) and two whole tones (9:8 + 9:8 =
81:64).15
6. The Pythagorean “Comma”, in which the strict tuning of 5thintervals
around the circle of fifths ends up being off by 24 centswhen one arrives
at the enharmonic equivalent note of B#. An perfect octave is comprised
 of a measurement of 1200 cents. Seven octaves is equivalent to 8400
cents. The perfect fifth is a measurement of 720 cents.
7. Using fifths, and counting up 7 octaves we get: C-0+G-702+D-702+A-
702+E-702+B-702+ F#702+C#702 [+ G#-702+ D#702+
A#702+E#702+ B#(C)702= 8424 cents
8. Using octaves, we get: C-0, +C-1200, +C-1200 +C-1200 +C-1200 +C-
1200+ C-1200+ C-1200 = 8400 cents. So B# is larger than C by 24
cents.
9.  Pythagoras discovered that the musical consonances which were
represented by the ratios that could be exemplified in what he referred to
as a tetractys: 1, 2, 3, 4. The ratios are relations of string lengths or
frequencies.16 The numbers derived from the ratios of the Octave, the Fifth
and the double Octave are 1, 2, 3 and 4.
10. In his investigations, he divided these string lengths in this way and
discovered what are called the first five overtones which create the
common intervals which have become the primary building blocks of
modern musical harmony.
11.

12. According to Dr. Richard Crocker (Professor Emeritus, Yale/UC

Berkeley),“Pythagoras invented the theory of music. He and his disciples
drew attention to the fact that musical intervals could be expressed as
numerical ratios and that the more consonant intervals had ratios with
very mall numbers, like 1:2. Pythagoreans are usually credited with
dividing the octave by a fourth and fifth, constructing a scale using the
whole-tone 8:9. Having found the ratios of the most consonant intervals,
the Pythagoreans observed that the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 added
up to 10, and the coincidence of this with the musical relationship
just described proved irresistible. The “tetractys” or first four
numbers, became a cornerstone of Pythagorean theory and with that,
the number of consonances was fixed”17
13. Pythagoras further experimented with measuring tones created by
different string lengths and he discovered the harmonic overtone
series and mapped it out.
14. Pythagoras measured specific string lengths sounded against each
other and discovered that these intervals, not only as they relate to the
fundamental frequency, but to each other and found that these ratios
produced the following intervals;
1. 1:1 = Unison,
2. 2:1 = Perfect Octave
3. 3:2 = Perfect Fifth
4. 4:3 = Perfect Fourth
5. 5:4 = Major Third
 He also discovered that the number twelve was the most
divisiblesmall number and that all of these basic ratios can be expressed
as mathematical ratios of twelve:
1. 12:12 (unison)
2. 12:6 (octave)
3. 12:8 (perfect fifth)
4. 12:9 (perfect fourth)
 iv. Pythagoras’ use of mathematical ratios became the basis for
ancient Greek musical theory and what is important to understand is that
it was also revitalized and used extensively later on by theorists from the
Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and further.
 v. It was Pythagoras’ discovery of the overtone series and
interval ratios that became the core foundation of almost all music theory
from his ancient time of antiquity through the middle ages, the
renaissance and even into the Baroque period. Extensive analytical
writings on Pythagoras work were incorporated by many important later
theorists including his immediate successors such as Archytas,
Nichomachus of Gerasa, Porphry, and also several milleniums later in the
Roman era by Boethius and the Medieval era by theorists such as Glarean,
Vicentino, Tincturis and Gioseffo Zarlino. Studies of the ratios using the
monochord were also included in the works of Jean Philippe Rameau and
many theorists to the present day as well.
 The Tetractys: Pythagoras is credited with the concept of what
is called the Tetractys, which when represented graphically, resembles
the exact geometry of one side of an Egyptian Pyramid.
 According to James Haat, “Pythagoras and his followers
developed a series of analogies between musical consonances – derived
from proportionate lengths of a stretched string – and natural
phenomena. In Plato’s Timaeus the creation of the World-Soul, a model
for the physical universe, is accomplished through the use of Pythagorean
proportions; duple and triple geometric series are filled in with arithmetic
and harmonic means, as a result of which one can see ‘the whole heaven
to be a scale and a number’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics). The musical scale
thus produced is that of Pythagorean tuning, and the World-Soul is
created through the use of a kind of celestial monochord.”18

 The Tetractys is represented by 10

locational units stacked on one another as the sequence of 1, 2, 3 and 4.
 These ratios form exactly one side of an Egyptian Pyramid and
are also inherent in the ratios represented by the harmonics of a vibrating
string. The top string representing the pure state of a vibrating string as
the number (1), the next string with the harmonic node at the exact
halfway point in the string producing a 2:1 ratio or octave represented by
the number of vibrating segments of the string (2). The next string
represented by the number 3 showing a 3:1 ratio of vibrating lengths of
the string producing a tone a musical fifth above the octave. The last
string length is represented by the number (4) which clearly shows four
separate string lengths vibrating as a result of the harmonic from the
length of 2/3 of the entire string producing a tone exactly two octaves
above the primary tone. These are the numbers of the Tetractys (1,2,3,4)
exemplified in the harmonics of string vibration.

 Harmonics of a Vibrating String forming a Tetractys:



      

When you first hear them, a Gregorian chant, a Debussy prelude and a John Coltrane improvisation
might seem to have almost nothing in common--except that they all include chord progressions and
something you could plausibly call a melody. But music theorists have long known that there's
something else that ties these disparate musical forms together. The composers of these and virtually
every other style of Western music over the past millennium tend to draw from a tiny fraction of the
set of all possible chords. And their chord progressions tend to be efficient, changing as few notes, by
as little as possible, from one chord to the next.

Exactly how one style relates to another, however, has remained a mystery--except over one brief
stretch of musical history. That, says Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, "is why, no
matter where you go to school, you learn almost exclusively about classical music from about 1700 to
1900. It's kind of ridiculous."

But Tymoczko may have changed all that. Borrowing some of the mathematics that string theorists
invented to plumb the secrets of the physical universe, he has found a way to represent the universe
of all possible musical chords in graphic form. "He's not the first to try," says Yale music theorist
Richard Cohn. "But he's the first to come up with a compelling answer."

Tymoczko's answer, which led last summer to the first paper on music theory ever published in the
journal Science, is that the cosmos of chords consists of weird, multidimensional spaces, known as
orbifolds, that turn back on themselves with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot
out to prove to students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side. Indeed, the simplest
chords, which consist of just two notes, live on an actual Möbius strip. Three-note chords reside in
spaces that look like prisms--except that opposing faces connect to each other. And more complex
chords inhabit spaces that are as hard to visualize as the multidimensional universes of string theory.

But if you go to Tymoczko's website music.princeton.edu/~dmitri) you can see exactly what he's

getting at by looking at movies he has created to represent tunes by Chopin and, of all things, Deep
Purple. In both cases, as the music progresses, one chord after another lights up in patterns that
occupy a surprisingly small stretch of musical real estate. According to Tymoczko, most pieces of
chord-based music tend to do the same, although they may live in a different part of the orbifold
space. Indeed, any conceivable chord lies somewhere in that space, although most of them would
sound screechingly harsh to human ears.

The discovery is useful for at least a couple of reasons, says Tymoczko. "One is that composers have
been exploring the geometrical structure of these maps since the beginning of Western music
without really knowing what they were doing." It's as though you figured out your way around a city
like Boston, for example, without realizing that some of your routes intersect. "If someone then
showed you a map," he says, "you might say, 'Wow, I didn't realize the Safeway was close to the
disco.' We can now go back and look at hundreds of years of this intuitive musical pathmaking and
realize that there are some very simple principles that describe the process."

How is the Beatles' "Help!" similar to Stravinsky's "Dance of the Adolescents?" How does
Radiohead's "Just" relate to the improvisations of Bill Evans? And how do Chopin's works exploit the
non-Euclidean geometry of musical chords?

In this groundbreaking work, author Dmitri Tymoczko describes a new framework for thinking about
music that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from medieval polyphony to contemporary
rock. Tymoczko identifies five basic musical features that jointly contribute to the sense of tonality,
and shows how these features recur throughout the history of Western music. In the process he
sheds new light on an age-old question: what makes music sound good?

A Geometry of Music provides an accessible introduction to Tymoczko's revolutionary geometrical

approach to music theory. The book shows how to construct simple diagrams representing
relationships among familiar chords and scales, giving readers the tools to translate between the
musical and visual realms and revealing surprising degrees of structure in otherwise hard-to-
understand pieces.

Tymoczko uses this theoretical foundation to retell the history of Western music from the eleventh
century to the present day. Arguing that traditional histories focus too narrowly on the "common
practice" period from 1680-1850, he proposes instead that Western music comprises an extended
common practice stretching from the late middle ages to the present. He discusses a host of familiar
pieces by a wide range of composers, from Bach to the Beatles, Mozart to Miles Davis, and many in
between.

A Geometry of Music is accessible to a range of readers, from undergraduate music majors to

scientists and mathematicians with an interest in music. Defining its terms along the way, it
presupposes no special mathematical background and only a basic familiarity with Western music
theory. The book also contains exercises designed to reinforce and extend readers' understanding,
along with a series of appendices that explore the technical details of this exciting new theory.
Princeton, N.J. - Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though
sounds were physical objects with geometric shape -- and now a Princeton University musician
has shown that advanced geometry actually does offer a tool for understanding musical
structure.

In an attempt to answer age-old questions about how basic musical elements work together,
Dmitri Tymoczko has journeyed far into the land of topology and non-Euclidean geometry, and
has returned with a new -- and comparatively simple -- way of understanding how music is
constructed. His findings have resulted in the first paper on music theory that the journal
Science has printed in its 127-year history, and may provide an additional theoretical tool for
composers searching for that elusive next chord.

"I'm not trying to tell people what style of music sounds good, or which composers to prefer,"
said Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko), a composer and music theorist who is an assistant
professor of music at Princeton. "What I hope to do is provide a new way to represent the space
of musical possibilities. If you like a particular chord, or group of notes, then I can show you
how to find other, similar chords and link them together to form attractive melodies. These two
principles -- using attractive chords, and connecting their notes to form melodies -- have been
central to Western musical thought for almost a thousand years."

Tymoczko's findings appear as a report in Science's July 7 issue.

Making graphical representations of musical ideas is not itself a new idea. Even most
nonmusicians are familiar with the five-line musical staff, on which the notes that appear
physically higher represent sounds that have higher pitch. Other common representations
include the circle of fifths, which illustrates the relationships between the 12 notes in the
chromatic scale as though they were the 12 hours on a clock's face.

"Tools like these have helped people understand music with both their ears and their eyes for
generations," Tymoczko said. "But music has expanded a great deal in the past hundred years.
We are interested in a much broader range of harmonies and melodies than previous
composers were. With all these new musical developments, I thought it would be useful to
search for a framework that could help us understand music regardless of style."

Traditional music theory required that harmonically acceptable chords be constructed from
notes separated by a couple of scale steps -- such as the major chord, whose three notes
comprise the first, third and fifth elements in the major scale, forming a familiar harmony that
most audiences find easy to enjoy. Many 20th-century composers abandoned this requirement,
however. Modern chords are often constructed of notes that sit right next to one another on
the keyboard, forming "clusters" -- dissonant by traditional standards -- that to this day often
challenge listeners' ears.

"Western music theory has developed impressive tools for thinking about traditional
harmonies, but it doesn't have the same sophisticated tools for thinking about these newer
chords," Tymoczko said. "This led me to want to develop a general geometrical model in which
every conceivable chord is represented by a point in space. That way, if you hear any sequence
of chords, no matter how unfamiliar, you can still represent it as a series of points in the space.
To understand the melodic relationship between these chords, you connect the points with
lines that represent how you have to change their notes to get from one chord to the next."

One of Tymoczko's musical spaces resembles a triangular prism, in which points representing
traditionally familiar harmonies such as major chords gather near the center of the triangle,
forming neat geometric shapes with other common chords that relate to them closely.
Dissonant, cluster-type harmonies can be found out near the edges, close to their own
harmonic kin. Tymoczko said that composers have traditionally valued a kind of harmonic
consistency that does not require that the listener jump far from one region of the space to
another too quickly.

"This idea that you should stay in one part of space," he said, "is an important ingredient of our
notion of musical coherence."

To bring these ideas to life, Tymoczko has created a short movie that illustrates the chord
movement in a piece of music by 19th-century composer Frederick Chopin. His E minor piano
prelude (Opus 28, No. 4) has charmed listeners since the 1830s, but its harmonies have not
been well explained.

"This prelude is mysterious," Tymoczko said. "While it uses traditional harmonies, they are
connected with nonstandard chord progressions that people have had trouble describing.
However, when you plot the chord movement in geometric space, you can see Chopin is
moving along very short lines, staying primarily within one region."

The movie is available at http://www.princeton.edu/pr/media/chopin/chopin3_350k.mov

Tymoczko said that the geometric approach could assist with our still-murky understanding of
music ranging from the mid-1800s through the contemporary period, including the cluster-
based compositions of Georgi Ligeti, whose work formed a dramatic part of the soundtrack to
the film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"What all this implies is that you can begin with any sort of harmony your ear enjoys, whether
it's a familiar chord from a 300-year-old hymn or the most avant-garde cluster you can
imagine," he said. "But once you have decided where to start from and what region of space
your harmony inhabits, very general principles of musical coherence suggest that you stay close
to that region of space."

Tymoczko, whose compositional influences include classical music, rock and jazz, said he does
not expect people will start writing music by "connecting the dots" as a result of his research.
But he hopes it will at least provide a new tool for understanding the relationships behind
music.

"Put simply, I'm a composer and I like to write and play music that sounds good," he said. "But
what does it mean to 'sound good'? That's a question that the musical community has grappled
with for centuries. Our understanding of the Chopin piece, for example, had previously been
very local -- as if we were walking in a heavy fog and could only see a few steps in front of our
feet at any one time. We now have a map of the whole terrain on which we can walk, and can
replace our earlier, local perspective with a much more general one."

Commenting on the significance of the work, Yale's Richard Cohn said that Tymoczko has made
a useful contribution to a fundamental problem in music theory.

"Dmitri's solution is exhaustive, original, and expressed clearly enough to be meaningful even
to those musicians and scholars who do not have Dmitri's mathematical abilities," said Cohn,
who is the Batell Professor of the Theory of Music at Yale. "His work leads to a deeper
understanding of why composers in the European tradition favor certain types of scales and
chords, and it suggests that melody and harmony are more fundamentally intertwined than has
been previously thought. His achievement will become central to future work in the modelling
of musical systems."

###
Abstract

THE GEOMETRY OF MUSICAL CHORDS

Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University

Musical chords have a non-Euclidean geometry that has been exploited by Western composers
in many different styles. A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space
called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of
another. Composers in a wide range of styles have exploited the non-Euclidean geometry of
these spaces, typically by utilizing short line segments between structurally similar chords. Such
line segments exist only when chords are nearly symmetrical under translation, reflection, or
permutation. Paradigmatically consonant and dissonant chords possess different near-
symmetries, and suggest different musical uses.

The content of a collection of notes is often more important than their order. Chords can therefore be
modeled as multisets of either pitches or pitch classes. (“Chord” will henceforth refer to a multiset of
pitch classes unless otherwise noted.) The musical term “transposition” is synonymous with the
mathematical term “translation” and is represented by addition in pitch or pitch-class space.
Transpositionally related chords are the same up to translation: thus the C major chord, {C, E, G} or {0, 4,
7}, is transpositionally related to the F major chord, {F, A, C} or {5, 9, 0}, since {5, 9, 0} {0 + 5, 4 + 5, 7 + 5}
modulo 12Z. The musical term “inversion” is synonymous with the 3 mathematical term “reflection,”
and corresponds to subtraction from a constant value. Inversionally related chords are the same up to
reflection: thus, the C major chord is inversionally related to the C minor chord {C, Ef, G}, or {0, 3, 7},
since {0, 3, 7} {7 – 7, 7 – 4, 7 – 0} modulo 12Z. Musically, transposition and inversion are significant
because they preserve the character of a chord: transpositionally related chords sound extremely
similar, inversionally related chords fairly so (Movie S1). A voice leading between two multisets {x1,
x2, ..., xm} and {y1, y2, ..., yn} is a multiset of ordered pairs (xi , yj ), such that every member of each
multiset is in some pair. A trivial voice leading contains only pairs of the form (x, x). The notation (x1,
x2, ..., xn) (y1, y2, ..., yn) identifies the voice leading that associates the corresponding items in each list.
Thus, the voice leading (C, C, E, G)(B, D, F, G) associates C with B, C with D, E with F, and G with G. Music
theorists have proposed numerous ways of measuring voiceleading size. Rather than adopting one, I will
require only that a measure satisfy a few constraints reflecting widely acknowledged features of
Western music (16). These constraints make it possible to identify, in polynomial time, a minimal voice
leading (not necessarily bijective) between arbitrary chords (16). Every music-theoretical measure of
voice-leading size satisfies these constraints. I now describe the geometry of musical chords. An ordered
sequence of n pitches can be represented as a point in Rn (Fig. S4). Directed line segments in this space
represent voice leadings. A measure of voice-leading size assigns lengths to these line segments. I will
use quotient spaces to model the way listeners abstract from octave and order information. To model
an ordered sequence of n pitch classes, form the quotient space (R/12Z) n , also known as the n-torus Tn
. To model unordered n-note chords of pitch classes, identify all points (x1, x2, ... xn) and (x(1), x(2), ...
x(n) ), where is any permutation. The result is the global-quotient orbifold Tn /Sn (17–18), the n-torus
Tn modulo the symmetric group Sn. It contains singularities at which the local topology is not that of Rn .
Figure 2 shows the orbifold T2 /S2, the space of unordered pairs of pitch classes. It is a Möbius strip, a
square whose left edge is given a half twist and identified with its right. The orbifold is singular at its top
and bottom edges, which act like mirrors (18). Any 4 bijective voice leading between pairs of pitches or
pairs of pitch classes can be associated with a path on Fig. 2 (Movie S2). Measures of voice-leading size
determine these paths’ lengths. They are the images of line segments in the parent spaces Tn and Rn ,
and are either line segments in the orbifold, or “reflected” line segments that bounce off its singular
edges. For example, the voice leading (C, Df)(Df, C) reflects off the orbifold’s upper mirror boundary (Fig.
2). Generalizing to higher dimensions is straightforward. To construct the orbifold Tn /Sn, take an n-
dimensional prism whose base is an (n–1)-simplex, twist the base so as to cyclically permute its vertices,
and identify it with the opposite face (Figs. S5, S6) (16). The boundaries of the orbifold are singular,
acting as mirrors and containing chords with duplicate pitch classes. Chords that divide the octave
evenly lie at the center of the orbifold, and are surrounded by the familiar sonorities of Western
tonality. Voice leadings parallel to the height coordinate of the prism act as transpositions. A free
computer program written by the author allows readers to explore these spaces (19). In many Western
styles, it is desirable to find efficient, independent voice leadings between transpositionally or
inversionally related chords. The progressions in Fig. 1 are all of this type (Movie S3). A chord can
participate in such progressions only if it is nearly symmetrical under transposition, permutation, or
inversion (16). I conclude by describing these symmetries, explaining how they are embodied in the
orbifolds’ geometry, and showing how they have been exploited by Western composers. A chord is
transpositionally symmetrical (T-symmetrical) if it either divides the octave into equal parts or is the
union of equally sized subsets that do so (20). Nearly Tsymmetrical chords are close to these T-
symmetrical chords. Both types of chord can be linked to at least some of their transpositions by
efficient bijective voice leadings. As one moves toward the center of the orbifold, chords become
increasingly T-symmetrical, and can be linked to their transpositions by increasingly efficient bijective
voice leading. The perfectly even chord at the center of the orbifold can be linked to all of its
transpositions by the smallest possible bijective voice leading; a related result covers discrete pitch-class
spaces (16). Efficient voice leadings between perfectly T-symmetrical chords are typically 5 not
independent. Thus composers have reason to prefer near T-symmetry to exact Tsymmetry. It follows
that the acoustically consonant chords of traditional Western music can be connected by efficient voice
leading. Acoustic consonance is incompletely understood; however, theorists have long agreed that
chords approximating a few consecutive elements of the harmonic series are particularly consonant, at
least when played with harmonic tones (21). Since elements n to 2n of the harmonic series evenly divide
an octave in frequency space, they divide the octave nearly evenly in log-frequency space. These chords
are therefore clustered near the center of the orbifolds (Table 1), and can typically be linked by efficient,
independent voice leadings. Traditional tonal music exploits this possibility (Fig. 1A-C, Movie S4). This
central feature of Western counterpoint is made possible by composers’ interest in the harmonic
property of acoustic consonance. A chord with duplicate pitch classes is permutationally symmetrical
(Psymmetrical), since there is some nontrivial permutation of its notes that is a trivial voice leading.
These chords lie on the singular boundaries of the orbifolds. Nearly Psymmetrical chords, such as {E, F,
Gf}, are near these chords, and contain several notes that are clustered close together. Efficient voice
leadings permuting the clustered notes bounce off the nearby boundaries (Fig. 2. Movies S2 and S4).
Such voice leadings can be efficient, independent, and non-trivial. Since trivial voice leadings are
musically inert, composers have reason to prefer near P-symmetry to exact P-symmetry. Nearly P-
symmetrical chords such as {B, C, Df} are considered to be extremely dissonant. They are well-suited to
static music in which voices move by small distances within an unchanging harmony (Fig. 1D). Such
practices are characteristic of recent atonal composition, particularly the music of Ligeti and Lutoslawski.
From the present perspective, these avant-garde techniques are closely related to those of traditional
tonality: they exploit one of three fundamental symmetries permitting efficient, independent voice
leading between transpositionally or inversionally related chords. A chord is inversionally symmetrical (I-
symmetrical) if it is invariant under reflection in pitch class space. Nearly I-symmetrical chords are near
these chords, and can be found throughout the orbifolds (16). For example, the Fs half-diminished
seventh chord 6 {6, 9, 0, 4} and the F dominant seventh chord {5, 9, 0, 3} are related by inversion, and
are very close to the I-symmetrical chord {5.5, 9, 0, 3.5}. Consequently, we can find an efficient voice
leading between them (6, 9, 0, 4)(5, 9, 0, 3) (Fig. 1C) (16). Nearly Tsymmetrical chords, such as the C
major triad, and nearly P-symmetrical chords, such as {C, Df, Ef}, can also be nearly I-symmetrical.
Consequently, I-symmetry is exploited in both tonal and atonal music. It plays a salient role in the
nineteenth-century, particularly in the music of Schubert (22), Wagner (23), and Debussy (Fig. 1C). The
preceding ideas can be extended in several directions. First, one might examine in detail how composers
have exploited the geometry of musical chords (Movie S4). Second, one could generalize the
geometrical approach by considering quotient spaces that identify transpositionally and inversionally
related chords (24). Third, since cyclical rhythmic patterns can also be modeled as points on Tn /Sn, one
could use these spaces to study African and other non-Western rhythms. Fourth, one could investigate
how distances in the orbifolds relate to perceptual judgments of chord similarity. Finally, understanding
the relation between harmony and counterpoint may suggest new techniques to contemporary
composers.