Math in music? Who would have guessed? Math has always been regarded as an uninteresting subject containing only numbers and equations. Music, at the same time, is seen only as a simple combination of sounds thrown together. Music is a combination of sounds but math is what takes those uncomplicated sounds and structures them into music. Rules must be followed to create all the different types of music. All of these rules are founded on mathematics. Mathematics is the foundation for the stratification of the music theory.
Mathematics structures music from its smallest part to its most complicated segment. Notes are considered the smallest section of music. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, a note is defined as "a written sign representing the pitch and duration of a single musical sound" (Scholes 411). At the moment I will concentrate only on the duration of the sound. The duration of a note depends on the shape of that particular note (Kerr, Taylor 645). An illustration of the following notes will be given in the appendix: whole-note, half-note, quarter-note, eighth-note, sixteenth-note, thirty-second note, sixty-fourth note, and one-hundred twenty-eighth note. Out of all of these notes six of them are frequently seen in the music of today. Each note has a corresponding "rest". A rest is a note of silence in the music. It is the time when there is no sound (Rests 538).
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