Perhaps of interest to some...

===========================================================
The new shape of music: Music has its own geometry, researchers find

And the so-called musica universalis or "music of the spheres" emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies -- the sun, moon and planets -- could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors – Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University -- have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called "geometrical music theory" that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into "families." They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way "x" and "y" coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.
FULL ARTICLE: http://www.physorg.com/news127659537.html
===========================================================

I read an article a long time ago that seemed much more promising, saying that using Markov processing, that they could identify key characteristics of music from specific composers, and could even use the characteristics with random-number generators to create music on-demand that *sounded* like the Beatles or Mozart or Manilow, just by processing samples of theirs.

Finding a way to plot the geometry may be handy, but it sounds less impressive than the Markov approach.

More interesting would be if someone could explain why some music sounds happy and other music sounds sad. That, I believe, has to do with subconscious cues in the way that people express emotion in their voice. I have noted that the words that a person *emphasizes* as the most-important word/phrase in the sentence are "spiked" in pitch/frequency. My brother, a musician, pointed out to me that most peoples' voices are in the key of C, and people who are flat sound stupid. I don't have perfect-pitch, myself, but I trust his, and he demonstrated what he was saying convincingly.