Tropical Generalized Interval Systems

摘要

This paper aims to refine the formalization of David Lewin's Generalized Interval System (GIS) by the means of tropical semirings. Such a new framework allows to broaden the GIS model introducing a new operation and consequently new musical and conceptual insights and applications, formalizing consistent relations between musical elements in an original unified structure. Some distinctive examples of extensions of well-known infinite GIS for lattices are then offered and the impossibility to build tropical GIS in the finite case is finally proven and discussed.