On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Prof. Peter Johnstone wrote:
While looking for something else, I came across a reference to a recent book called "The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory and Performance" by G. Mazzola, published by Birkh"auser. Has anyone on the categories list seen this book? If so, can you say whether it is really about toposes and geometric logic as I (and most category-theorists) would understand those terms, or is it just a coincidence of terminology?
I have not seen the book, but a quick web search has been quite instructive[1,2,3,4,5]. The author is clearly writing about music theory, and deliberately using the language [2] and mathematics [3] of category and topos theory. The content of [3] seems to be more mathematics than music, but I doubt I can make much sense of either. It's hard for me to tell, but the evidence from the links below suggests that this is actually quite serious stuff, with an application of mathematics to the performance of music. References [1] Synopsis on amazon web site http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3764357312/qid=1039250777/sr=1-1/re... [2] Mazzola, "Music Performance and Interpretation" http://www.engineeringandmusic.de/individu/mazzguer/maguproc.html [3] Mazzola, "Mathematical Music Theory -- Status Quo 2000" http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/repmus/mamux/documents/status.pdf [4] Homepage of "Engineering and Music" http://www.engineeringandmusic.de/ [5] Mazzola's own home page http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/staff/mazzola/