Physics and Mathematics in Musical Composition A Comparative Study

How is music born? Is music made by humans or does it already exist and wait to be found? How do composers create (or find) music? Having these questions in mind the authors ask more questions: How can we share our feelings with other people when listening to music? Can these be visualized? Why did Helmholtz have a problem with the third? Why is precise tuning so important in European music and less so in other cultures? What are the differences among the continents? What makes dissonant tone intervals uncomfortable in many cases? What enables us to distinguish the music of Mozart from that of Beethoven? Why are we fascinated by birdsong? Why does some music survive, whereas other just disappears? And finally, along which lines will music develop in the future? Drawing upon physics and mathematics, the authors search for answers to these questions and attempt to unravel in some depth the enigmas of how our minds are affected by the perception of music.

Kinko Tsuji studied interdisciplinary science and obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Tokyo in 1976. As a researcher she worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and at the Max-Planck-Institutes in Munich and in Dortmund. From 1981 to 2018 she worked in the company Shimadzu Europa GmbH, developing applications for ultra high-speed cameras. Furthermore, she was active in the “Japan Business Council in Europe” in Brussels and served as a chairman of the planning committee. She edited "The Micro-World Observed by Ultra High-Speed Cameras" (Springer, 2018) and with Stefan C. Müller "Spirals and Vortices" (Springer, 2019). Her newest book is "Physics and Music" (Springer, 2021).

Stefan C. Müller is a physics professor at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. After obtaining his doctoral degree at the University of Göttingen in 1978, he spent 3 years of postdoctoral research in the USA, first at MIT and then at Stanford University in California. He was a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute in Dortmund from 1982 to 1994, before transferring his research to Magdeburg. He was editor of “Complexity and Synergetics” (Springer, 2018) and, together with Kinko Tsuji, of "Spirals and Vortices" (Springer, 2019). The most recent book written by Kinko Tsuji and himself is "Physics and Music" (Springer, 2021).