Music theory dates back to ancient Greece. The word "music" comes from the Greek word "mousikhv."

In ancient Greece, music had a wider meaning for it embraced the idea of ratios or integers as the key to understanding both the physical visible universe and the spiritual invisible universe. There is an intimate relationship between music and mathematics. Pythagoras of Samos, a famous philosopher in the 5th Century B.C. was the first person to make the connection between math and music. Pythagoras introduced the ideas that all intervals of a scale form a series of pure 5ths with a frequency ratio of 3:2. Since the time of Pythagoras, it is known that tonal harmony is closely related to the numerical relation of the frequencies.