Alumna Maria Mannone's Paper Published in the "Journal of Mathematics and Music"

Maria Mannone's (PhD 2017, composition, student of Alex Lubet) paper "Introduction to gestural similarity in music. An application of category theory to the orchestra" was published by the Journal of Mathematics and Music. The paper is on new developments of the mathematical theory of musical gestures, with references to visual arts and can be downloaded for free here.  

Paper abstract:
Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional structures and strategies. Mathematics can also be applied to the entire making of music, from the score to the performance, connecting compositional structures to the acoustical reality of sounds. Moreover, the precise concept of gesture has a decisive role in understanding musical performance. In this article, we apply some concepts of category theory to compare gestures of orchestral musicians, and to investigate the relationship between orchestra and conductor, as well as between listeners and conductor/orchestra. To this aim, we will introduce the concept of gestural similarity. The mathematical tools used can be applied to gesture classification, and to interdisciplinary comparisons between music and the visual arts.