“The bases of music are rhythm and harmony. Rhythm is ordered recurrence in time… As the planets move around the sun, they repeat their orbits periodically; thus there is already a primitive kind of rhythm in their motion…. Harmony… can be considered a special kind of rhythm…. pure musical tones are produced when the vibrations are… periodic or… repeat themselves regularly in time. Two tones harmonize if their intervals of repetition are in rhythm—or, in mathematical language, if their periods are in proportion. Kepler… in the third book of Harmonice mundi… attempted to make other… related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion.”

—  Frank Wilczek

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

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Frank Wilczek 49
physicist 1951

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“The bases of music are rhythm and harmony. Rhythm is ordered recurrence in time… As the planets move around the sun, they repeat their orbits periodically; thus there is already a primitive kind of rhythm in their motion. …Harmony …can be considered a special kind of rhythm. …pure musical tones are produced when the vibrations are… periodic or… repeat themselves regularly in time. Two tones harmonize if their intervals of repetition are in rhythm—or, in mathematical language, if their periods are in proportion.”

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Kepler... in the third book of Harmonice mundi... attempted to make other... related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion.
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

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