User:Frostburn/Music vs Math

I'm collecting a list of terms with different meanings in Xenharmonic Music Theory and Mathematics. These could be used to make a joke video in the future if we can come up with enough of them. Feel free to contribute to the table below.

Music vs. Math terms

Term	Musical meaning	Mathematical meaning
Chord	A set of pitches often played simultaneously or arpeggiated	A straight line segment whose endpoints both lie on a circular arc
Harmonic analysis	Study of chord progressions	Study of Fourier Transforms
Harmonic series	Overtonal ratios i.e. natural numbers	A diverging sum of reciprocals
Perfect	Rank-2 generator and its inverse	Number that is the sum of its divisors
Periodic	Geometrically cumulative	Repeating (non-cumulative)
Prime	Unison	Number with exactly two divisors; can be generalized to prime ideals in ring theory
Interval	A positive real number ratio of frequencies	A connected subset of [math]\displaystyle{ \mathbb{R} }[/math]
Variety	Number of distinct k-step intervals in a scale	An algebraic variety, such as the solution set of a system of polynomial equations
Set theory	Combinatorics and transformations of subsets of an edo	Study of infinite sets, usually based on ZFC axioms
Chromatic	Child MOS of a small MOS	Concerning colorings of vertices of a graph
#, b	Alteration by 7 fifths − 3 octaves	Isomorphisms between the tangent and cotangent bundles of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold; the isomorphisms are induced by its metric tensor
Scale	Collection of relative pitches, usually periodic	Infinite sequence of ordinal-valued functions on a subset of a Polish space satisfying certain properties

Ordinal rant

We all know how ordinal notation is broken. The 2nd after 2nd is 3rd instead of 4th which you would expect from 2 + 2 = 4.

Mathematicians understood this and came up with a degree 0. The degree 1 polynomial is ax + b while the degree 2 polynomial is ax² + bx + c. Multiplying two degree 2 polynomials results in a degree 4 polynomial and everything makes sense numerically. Colloquially we use ordinals and say that two 2nd degree polynomials make up a 4th degree polynomial.

Musicians never got the memo and we're stuck with the fact that two perfect 4ths make up a minor 7th instead of an 8th of some kind.

Spoob bless TAMNAMS for using step span instead of ordinals.

The wrong solution

The words "first", "second" and "last" are perfectly good ordinals with no intrinsic numerical association. We should just change the numerical notation to 0st, 1nd for "first" and "second" continuing with 2st, 3st, 4st, 5st, etc. pronounced "twost", "threest", "fourst" and "fivest" standing in for the old "third", "fourth", "fifth" and "sixth" respectively (a numeric shift of one).

Now we finally have that 1nd + 1nd is 2st.