Math for Poets and Drummers

Abstract

You've probably heard that and music go together. I hear it often; I'm a mathematician and musician who studies the applications of math to music. Precisely how math and music go together, though, is somewhat mysterious. There is no doubt that their connection has a long history. The ancient Greeks discovered a correspondence between musical intervals with a pleasing sound and ratios of whole numbers, thus inspiring a persistent association between music and proportions in Western thought. However, the fact that scholars in ancient India made several mathematical breakthroughs while analyzing the rhythms of poetry has been almost completely overlooked in the West. In English, a poetic rhythm, called a meter, is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. English poets use about a dozen different meters. Much poetry, including Shakespeare's plays, is written in iambic pentameter?five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables to a line (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). Alexander Pope's 700+ line iambic pentameter poem An Essay on Criticism (1709) is a good example. In this excerpt, he ridicules critics who judge poetry solely on how well it follows strict metrical rules. (Most in the first line and these in the third line refer to the critics.)

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