Set Theory (music)
Musical set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. Many of the notions were first elaborated by Howard Hanson (1960) in connection with tonal music, and then mostly developed in connection with atonal music by theorists such as Allen Forte (1973), drawing on the work in twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt. The concepts of set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equally-tempered tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that. One branch of musical set theory deals with collections (sets and permutations) of pitches and pitch classes (pitch-class set theory), which may be ordered or unordered, and which can be related by musical operations such as transposition, inversion, and complementation. The methods of musical set theory are sometimes applied to the analysis of rhythm as well.
Read more about Set Theory (music): Mathematical Set Theory Versus Musical Set Theory, Set and Set Types, Basic Operations, Equivalence Relation, Transpositional and Inversional Set Classes, Symmetry
Famous quotes containing the words set and/or theory:
“Such a set of tittle tattle, prittle prattle visitants! Oh Dear! I am so sick of the ceremony and fuss of these fall lall people! So much dressing—chitchat—complimentary nonsense—In short, a country town is my detestation. All the conversation is scandal, all the attention, dress, and almost all the heart, folly, envy, and censoriousness.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)