Convexity and the well-formedness of musical objects
Aline Honingh, Rens Bod · Journal of New Music Research · 2005
It is well known that subsets of the two-dimensional space ℤ2 can represent prominent musical and music-theoretical objects such as scales, chords and chord vocabularies. It has been noted that the major and minor diatonic scale form convex subsets in this space. This triggers the question whether convexity is a more widespread concept in music. This article systematically investigates the convexity for a number of musical phenomena including scales, chords and (harmonic) reduction. It is hypothesised that the notion of convexity may be a covering concept of musical phenomena and possibly reflects other mathematical properties of these musical structures. Furthermore, convexity can be used in a pitch-spelling model.