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Stream: community: events

Topic: groupoids in music

John Baez (Nov 20 2025 at 23:50):

I've been following Dmitri Tymoczko's work on math and music for a while, and lately we've been talking about groupoids in music theory - and now I'll finally get to meet him and talk to him here in Edinburgh!

Here's a less technical talk by him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgVt2kQxTzU

He's giving a more technical talk tomorrow on Zoom, which you can watch:

Date: Friday November 21, 2025
Time: 13:00 UK time
Location: Higgs Centre Seminar Room, Room 4305, JCMB.
Speaker: Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton University)
Title: Beyond the Geometry of Music
Abstract: People have been modeling music geometrically for more than 300 years. Early in the twenty first century it became clear that many existing models were orbifolds, quotients of Rⁿ (known to musicians as "n-note ordered pitch space") by various symmetry groups (e.g. the "OPTI" symmetries containing octave shifts, permutations, translations and reflections). Recently, however, it has become clear that some closely related musical models are not orbifolds, either because the parent space is inherently discrete or because the symmetry group does not act properly discontinuously. Music theorists thus need to be able to work with a wider range of quotients. My talk will survey some of the fascinating interactions between geometry and music, and will describe a new and more comprehensive framework using groupoids.
Online: https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/88480730026
Password: higgs_20

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Nov 21 2025 at 07:34):

This sounds like it would be up your street @Alex Kreitzberg

John Baez (Nov 22 2025 at 16:03):

You can now watch the talk here.