The Crossroads of Music, Math & Poetry

Leonhard Euler (pronounced Oiler) was a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician. His was a life full of contributions to mathematics and the sciences. Among mathematicians he is admired for, among many other things, an equation called Euler’s identity:

 

This equation is famous for the elegant way it pulls together five mathematical constants (e, i, pi, 1 and 0) in a single equation.

In a similar vein, while writing my ebook “Six-String Sleuth” I came up with the following poetic couplet which summarizes how to figure out the chords to a song:

To learn a song you find its key
whose scale gives chords and melody

These two lines of verse pull together, in Euler-esque fashion, five important musical ideas: song, key, scale, chords and melody.

To elaborate: when you find a song’s key, it will be either major or minor, and it will generate a scale (a major scale if it’s a major key; a minor scale if it’s a minor key). Using notes from that scale, you can (usually) find the chords and the melody to the song.

IMPORTANT EXCEPTION: Blues songs, which typically do not fit neatly into “major” or “minor.” Blues songs are their own animal.

If you are writing a song, you need only change the couplet’s first line a bit:

To write a song you choose a key
whose scale gives chords and melody

And there you have it: music, math and poetry, blissfully intertwined!