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Pairwise Well-Formed Modes and Transformations
One of the most significant attitudinal shifts in the history of music
occurred in the Renaissance, when an emerging triadic consciousness moved
musicians towards a new scalar formation that placed major thirds on a par with
perfect fifths. In this paper we revisit the confrontation between the two
idealized scalar and modal conceptions, that of the ancient and medieval world
and that of the early modern world, associated especially with Zarlino. We do
this at an abstract level, in the language of algebraic combinatorics on words.
In scale theory the juxtaposition is between well-formed and pairwise
well-formed scales and modes, expressed in terms of Christoffel words or
standard words and their conjugates, and the special Sturmian morphisms that
generate them. Pairwise well-formed scales are encoded by words over a
three-letter alphabet, and in our generalization we introduce special positive
automorphisms of , the free group over three letters.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, paper presented at the MCM2017 at UNAM in Mexico
City on June 27, 2017, keywords: pairwise well-formed scales and modes,
well-formed scales and modes, well-formed words, Christoffel words, standard
words, central words, algebraic combinatorics on words, special Sturmian
morphism
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