The Shape of Music by Dmitri Tymoczko covers fascinating ground in suggesting that the human affinity for mathematics is bone-deep, as long as the bone we’re talking about is the malleus. Tymoczko offers a jumping off point for a wider discussion about the way that humans receive the world while talking about the way chord progressions using the analogy of musical notes positioned on a clock face:
The reason these chords all sound alike is that the human ear is more sensitive to the distances between notes than their absolute position on the clockface.
So in music humans are more sensitive to the relative than the absolute; likewise the visible universe in general is more sensitive to the relative (acceleration) than the absolute (speed), as Newton’s bucket showed. Humans have been in love with the idea of absolutes since at least Plato, but perhaps it’s time to throw away our dreams of perfection and accept that relative values are the only ones we can rely on. An absolute morality makes no more sense than an absolute music.
A fascinating article which I have shamelessly hijacked for my own purposes. Read it all, and while you’re at it read Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945 by Guido Fackler, for a reminder of the perplexing role of music in human history. (HT the latter: Norm!)
UPDATE: Well, gosh:
This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.
I feel a thesis coming on.