MCM 2013: The Fourth International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (review)

The fourth International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2013) took place last summer at McGill University in Montreal. Since its beginning in 2007, the biennial conference, organized by the Society of Mathematics and Music (SMCM) has taken place on the two sides of the Atlantic in alternation. Previous conferences were held in Berlin (2007), New Haven, Connecticut (2009), and Paris (2011). Thanks to the low registration fee, the conference is easily accessible to everyone, especially students.

The conference was hosted jointly by the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, and by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT). Contributions in the field of mathematics and computation, applied to musical problems, were presented along with paper and poster sessions. The 20 paper presentations were grouped into nine sessions: Analytical Algorithms, Generalized Tonnetze, Tone Systems and Interval Content, Musical Performance: Theory and Analysis, Harmonic Spaces, Corpus Studies of Harmony, Sturmian Words, Group Actions on Ordered Sets and Style, and Creativity. The nine posters were grouped into two sessions. Unfortunately, only the abstracts for the poster sessions appear in the conference’s proceedings. Overall, both the paper and poster sessions were characterized by an increased use of computational methods to analyze large musical corpora. This approach raises questions about the relationships between research methods in mathematics and music, and other approaches that are more common in the field of music information retrieval, such as machine learning and statistical analyses of data sets. The variety of topics in the MCM conferences since 2007 clearly shows a plethora of approaches within the math and music communities, as well as the evolution of certain topics. For example, there seems to be an increasing number of works related to word theory since 2011. The 2013 edition dedicated a whole session to Sturmian words (an infinitely long sequence of words), investigating both scale and rhythmic applications. Additionally, Gilles Baroin organized an exceptional multimedia session about inherent pedagogical problems in math and musical research.

Pedagogy was, indeed, one of the major themes of this edition. A panel discussion entitled “Mathematical Music Theory in Academia: Its Presence, Role and Objectives in Departments of Mathematics, Music, and Computer Science” took place at the end of the first day and was chaired by Mariana Montiel. A discussion round table was organized by Guerino Mazzola (University of Minnesota), David Clampitt (Ohio State University), Thomas Noll (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya), Thomas Fiore (University of Michigan-Dearborn), Emmanuel Amiot (CPGE Perpignan), and Anja Volk (Utrecht University). The participants agreed on the point that the intersection between mathematics and music is still, today, an uncommon idea for a majority of students specialized in either of the two fields. Nevertheless, they find it to be an exciting prospect, full of promise. Some participants lamented the lack of books accessible to nonspecialists in the mathematical theory of music, with the notable exception of a few nonspecialist texts such as Music: A Mathematical Offering by Dave Benson, or The Geometry of Musical Rhythm by Godfried Toussaint. At present there is no comprehensive textbook on mathematical models in music theory, analysis, and composition, from the study of temperament to discrete Fourier transforms and chordal and rhythmic classifications. The Springer Computational Music Science series, co-edited by Guerino Mazzola and Moreno Andreatta, is planning to soon fill this gap with a textbook, and we hope to learn more about it at the next MCM conference.

A concert took place at the end of the second day at the CIRMMT in the New Music Building. Compositions by Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, Preston Beebe, Luciano Berio, and Luis Naón were played by McGill University students. The audience was particularly impressed by violinist Marjolaine Lambert, who performed Anthème II by Pierre Boulez. A...