Mathematical Music Quotes

I went to college for, like, a year and a half with the intention of doing some kind of art therapy or some kind of teaching of art, because I feel like art is a more free area in school than music is. I feel like music is too mathematic for me. Music school's so hard. It's math.

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

I've approached music with the understanding that knowledge is available regarding tones and their effect upon the body. I think the father of that knowledge was the mathematician Pythagoras who lived several thousand years ago. Pythagoras was also a fine musician and he knew specifically what tones would affect which parts of the body.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.

Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There's a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.