Gareth Loy

“Natural examples of chaotic dynamical systems include the earth’s atmosphere and the vibrations of virtually all sources of musical sound, such as the scrape of a bow on the strings or the turbulent flow of air from the player’s lips over the fipple of a flute. Small differences in initial conditions can be amplified by such systems to such an extent that any error in measuring the initial conditions can render any long-range forecast of system behavior wildly inaccurate, even if there is no further disturbance to the system. The weather from day to day is never exactly the same. Notes played on a flute, though they may sound alike, are never exactly the same. Our ears gloss over these differences, hearing sound categorically. But if we wish to understand the precise mechanism of a dynamical system so as to accurately predict its behavior over time, the initial conditions must be known exactly.”
― Gareth Loy, Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music

“To communicate about music, we must be able to name the pitches and associate them with frequencies. This is not an engineering problem so much as a design question, and each culture has answered it in a manner that speaks to what is important to that culture. In the West the choices have been profoundly influenced by the ideas of Pythagoras”
― Gareth Loy, Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music