Date: 2 October 2015, 4:30pm
Location: Hempfield High School, Room 213
 Speaker: James Hughes, Elizabethtown College
   Title: Mathematical Modeling of Voice Leading in Music: From
   Set Maps to Orbifold Fundamental Groupoids

Abstract. The serious use of mathematics by researchers in music
theory has grown substantially since the work of David Lewin and others
in the 1980s.  One area of mathematical music theory that has undergone
interesting development is voice leading: the particular ways that
harmonic changes are realized through assignment of different pitch
sequences to a collection of distinct "voices" (musical parts, melodic
lines, etc.).  I will give a brief survey of some of the ways voice
leading has been modeled mathematically, ending with a case for using
orbifold fundamental groups and groupoids of chord spaces that I made at
the fifth biennial Mathematics and Computation in Music conference, held
last June at Queen Mary University in London.