Bo Burnham Quotes

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

Music is science more than art, and it is the main code of the universe.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.

I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.

I really believe in melody.

The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.

I could stop and say, Well that was a D minor, G seven, but I really don't want to know that. I just want to know that there's a combination of notes that makes a sound.

Music is math; music is spiritual.

My course is about really working on a sheet of music. You work out the chords, which note complements the other, and how they will make the feeling of tension, the feeling of resolution. It's all about harmonization. That's more of the theory of notation and everything rather than practical. I don't play any instrument.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

I didn't know that there were many rules in music when I first started writing.

Music has a lot in com­mon with math­e­mat­ics. But in music, two and two need not make four: they add up to what­ever you wish.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.