Emmanuel Amiot

  1. About the number of generators of a musical scale.

    Authors: Emmanuel Amiot
    Subjects: Group Theory
    Abstract

    Several musical scales, like the major scale, can be described as finite
    arithmetic sequences modulo octave, i.e. chunks of an arithmetic sequence in a
    cyclic group. Hence the question of how many different arithmetic sequences in
    a cyclic group will give the same support set. We prove that this number is
    always a totient number and characterize the different possible cases. In
    particular, there exists scales with an arbitrarily large number of different
    generators, but none with 14 generators.

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