The Mathematics of Musical Composition
Gresham College Lectures
00:00
Playing in a Vertical Mirror
You can repeat things, but shift the notes rdown a bit. So beethoven's fifth, everyone knows that you've got your dadadada. And then you repeat it, but you shift it down a tone, dada, dada. This is called translation, where you shift up or down and sum some number of semitones or tones. What else can you do? Well, you can reflect. So there's this thing inversion, which you can think of as reflecting in a horizontal mirror. If you want an example of anything, go to bark. That's my rule in life.
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