ABSTRACT
Mathematics has often been called the science of patterns, and with a wee bit of mathematical knowledge, student can better appreciate the music they enjoy. Musical sounds are made up of pure tones, which correspond to objects vibrating in a wave-like pattern. Listening to music depends deeply on our inherent ability to recognize and appreciate trigonometric functions, whether they are mathematical or not. Two notes, an octave apart, always sound good together, though perhaps a little boring. Pythagoras discovered that ratios of small fractions were the key to nice sounding intervals. Logarithms convert powers into multiplication. Explain what this implies about repeating intervals. Old recording machines used magnetic tape for recording. It’s well known that the frequency of a recorded note is proportional to the tape speed—if they double the tape speed, they also double the frequency of the recorded tone.
