Music and Mathematics (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles Music theorists often use mathematics to understand music. Indeed, mathematics is "the basis of sound" and sound itself "in its musical aspects... exhibits a remarkable array of number properties," simply because nature itself "is amazingly mathematical." Though ancient Chinese, Egyptians and Mesopotamians are known to have studied the mathematical principles of sound, the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece are the first researchers known to have investigated the expression of musical scales in terms of numerical ratios, particularly the ratios of small integers. Their central doctrine was that "all nature consists of harmony arising out of numbers."