My Experience at MCM 19 -- a small blog by Matt Klassen
It was a great privilege for me to attend the conference MCM19 in Madrid this summer.
In this short blog I will mention some of the highlights of my experience at this conference,
and invite others to continue the conversation.
Thank you to the organizers!
First of all, thanks again to the organizers of this fantastic conference!
Great work to all of you, and I am already looking forward to the next one!
The organizers are all listed here.
Who am I?
In case I didn't get to chat with you, I am from Redmond, Washington, USA. I gave a talk
on Wednesday called: Constraint-Based Systems of Triads and Seventh Chords, and Parsimonious
Voice-Leading. I am pictured below trying out some Ramirez guitars near Puerta del Sol
in central Madrid, and also in the last session at MCM19 seated (on the right) next to
Alexandre Popoff, and Moreno Andreatta.
Collaborative talks
Here is something I really loved to see at the conference: Collaborative talks of many kinds!
One of my favorites was the talk by Jason Yust and Dmitri Tymoczko,
Fourier Phase and Pitch-Class Sum, which was a really genuine
effort by two leading researchers to come together and see how their approaches to similar
concepts could enlighten and complement each other. This is a great service to the research
community, and a great model to follow! Another one was the talk by Thomas Noll and Karst de Jong
Embedded Structural Modes:Unifying Scale Degrees and Harmonic Functions.
This was a great example of collaboration between musical and mathematical elements, with live
illustrations on the piano, always a great plus!
Musical Examples
I was delighted to hear the musical examples performed by Moreno Andreatta and illustrated by
Gilles Baroin in the "Math'n Pop Concert". Thank you for keeping the connection between math
and music very much alive in this performance. I hope to see more of these in the future.
Music Theorists doing Mathematics, or Mathematicians doing Music Theory?
Before coming to this conference, I was not sure if there would be more Music Theory Ph.D. researchers,
or more Mathematics Ph.D. researchers attending. I find the cross-over subject matter very appealing
and I am happy to say that I found both types! I am technically of the latter type, although I have
been a serious musician since about age 16, before I found an interest in mathematics. This is indeed
a great research field, full of interesting problems and applications.
A question on constraint-based systems
After my talk on Wednesday, Thomas Noll asked me a very good question: "Did you use the
constraint-based definition of triads in the proof of the structure theorem for the group
of transformations?" My answer was: No, not explicitly, however it is something that I was
thinking about for the larger systems. In fact, as I worked on this, on the way home, I was
able to extend the proof to the constraint-based system of seventh chords, in a way which
does leverage the definition. The basic idea is that because of the constraint-based approach,
the chords in the system have lots of connections to other chords and the paths which are used
to produce the group elements are easy to construct in an organized way.
So thanks for asking, Thomas!
Music composition using a Hamilton path of seventh chords
Since time was short for the presentation, I neglected to play a musical example which is relevant.
The example is a composition for piano by Bruce Stark, my colleague at DigiPen in Redmond.
This piece utilizes a portion of the chord sequence which was quoted in my talk, pictured below.
The link to Bruce's performance is here:
Prelude No.6 by Bruce Stark.
Also, the chord sequence in the composition is referenced here:
chord sequence , and more compositions of Bruce Stark are here:
Bruce Stark's Page
Theorbo video
A few people said that they would like to see the whole video (of which I played a short excerpt in
my talk) so here it is: Tocatta Arpegiatta
Since I am somewhat new to the subject of Mathematics and Computation in Music, it was a great
experience for me to prepare a paper, to receive very helpful comments from reviewers, and to
begin to catch up on a mountain of reading in this very interesting field! Additionally, I would
like to thank all of the participants at MCM19 for making this a very welcoming experience.
Matt Klassen