The study of the relationship between music and mathematics has a thousand-year-long history which predates Pythagoras. Mathematics and music share a common basis of language and creativity. From the theory of tuning systems and temperament to physical acoustics, from harmonic analysis to spectrograms, from the structures of rhythms and pulses to the continuous stretching of the laws of harmony and the exploration of the musical forms carried out by contemporary composers, all elements of music lead to an immediate connection to mathematics. Established and recent research has witnessed the use of set theory to describe how musical objects are related and organised, the use of group theory in the context of transformational analysis of tonal and atonal compositions, the application of Grassmannians to the study of temperaments, and the investigation of category theory, topology and differential geometry to provide a basis of music theory.

The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications is glad to announce the launch of the first IMA conference on “Mathematics in Music”, to take place on 13-15 July 2022 at the Royal College of Music, London. The conference focusses onto the exploration of the connections between mathematics and music, in particular current developments of music theory, music performance, music perception and music technology based on or inspired by mathematical applications and concepts, including (but not limited to) category theory, group theory, topology, differential geometry, combinatorics, analysis, acoustic theory, as well as artificial intelligence, deep learning, language processing and coding.

The conference is aimed at mathematical researchers working at the frontier between mathematics or computation with music theory, musicology, music performance, sound engineering and composition, as well as at musicologists or computational musicologists, performers and composers using quantitative tools and formal methods from mathematics in their investigation and professional practice of music.

We are very keen that student researchers are a core part of this event and would very much like to encourage anyone studying music and mathematics to submit an abstract to join us for this conference. The event will include a student prize for the best submission, with the winning student being awarded a book voucher from the IMA and a free RMA membership from the RMA.