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Audio engineer is an art or science?

Audio engineering is an art or science?

  • Art

    Votes: 13 52.0%
  • Science

    Votes: 12 48.0%

  • Total voters
    25

Multicore

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The best way I've heard to describe music theory is "tools to get yourself out of a creative corner".
Agreed, if you want one of the standard ways out of the corner that will sound comfortably familiar to audiences. So, for my own personal creative needs, it's best use music theory is some kind of broken form, or to show the ways out of the corner to be wary of.

Tonality is like an argument, and the answers to the questions are always the same. Play Gmin7, C13, and the next chord has to be one of three or four things. If you're looking to get away from that kind of thing, you have to use a different language.

And standard music theory doesn't furnish different languages. And in my experience advanced music theory or mathematics isn't very good at stimulating creative design of musical languages. Although I know some who are happy to work that way and I have great respect for Xenakis, who did, and hold up some of his work as top shelf composition.
 

Vacceo

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I believe there are many musicians now and have been many more in the past with none.

Anyway, what do you mean by an asystematic understanding of mathematics? To my understanding, mathematics is a formal language for reasoning about the specific kinds of tautology that the language is able to express.

Some features of music, e.g. harmony, rhythm, pitch intervals have been approximately represented in mathematical systems that can be analyzed and manipulated but such modeling is, I believe, outside of the practice of music itself and not necessary to it. Math is added on to music by those who choose to or have to because of how they are taught. (And some musicians have incorporated math into their creative process but this is as unessential to music itself as incorporating Schiller poems.)

Remember that while "Western" music has theory (of sorts*) that's taught to most pupils, that's not so in all music traditions. For example, musicians in Hindustani music, a tradition that's identified as a singular real thing for over 1000 years, learn without theory(**). Also look at how a number of expert scholars, skilled in mathematics, have tried to model that music and have been unable to get very far. They can't even agree how many pitches are involved (which suggests to me that trying to count them is asking the wrong question).

(*) It has some uses, principally to allow practitioners to communicate more efficiently, but musical creativity, it seems, usually involves breaking its rules, i.e. doing things the theory can't usefully say anything about.

(**) A TV series from 1992 has these two segments I cued up for you. The whole thing is really wonderful and worth a look for anyone who cares about music. Here the teaching process is stated as: imitation, repetition, exploration. If there is a unifying theory of human musical traditions, I guess that's closer to it than mathematics.
- One
- Two
Rythm is a repetition pattern that effectively shows an instictive understanding of basic mathematics. Even more than that, music is dependant on the use of time (just like sculpture needs the use of space), the only way to adjust to the dimension is by the use of mathematics, even in an extremelly crude and simple way.
 

Multicore

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Rythm is a repetition pattern that effectively shows an instictive understanding of basic mathematics. Even more than that, music is dependant on the use of time (just like sculpture needs the use of space), the only way to adjust to the dimension is by the use of mathematics, even in an extremelly crude and simple way.
I'd argue that it shows an instinctive understanding of rhythm, which, it turns out later, is partly amenable to mathematical representation but, when you look at it closely in human musical practice (rather than computer music) is much more sophisticated than what standard notation suggests. The familiar time signatures and subdivisions are radical simplifications.

I think the human musical faculties of rhythm and melody are closely related to the language faculties and were exapted from there. And I wouldn't say that language demonstrates instinctive understanding of mathematics either. We don't have Chomskyan regular expression engines in our brains. REs are just a partly successful way to describe some features of some human grammars.

The universe is full of interesting regularities, some of which look like things in maths. Stephen Wolfram wrote an amazing and enormous book called A New Kind of Science about how he thinks the universe is built out of cellular automata. It is truly a scholarly magnum opus. But X looking more or less like Y doesn't mean that X has Y built into it. It might but that's no proof.
 

Robin L

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I thought the question applied to those making/designing audio gear, thus choosing "science". Way back in the before before, "recordists" had to know more about adjusting/repairing audio gear then now. A lot of things that required adjustments or repairs were required of the folks running the tape recorders. Tape operators evolved/mutated to folks arranging and selecting microphones and working on the sound in a more artistic fashion, seeing as there was less that could be adjusted or repaired. So, being a recordist these days is more art than science. The best recordists I worked with were, in fact, engineers, got their degrees and so on. Not me, and early on I was a devotee of various sorts of snake oil, but no more.
 

Cbdb2

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Neither and both. Its a craft. From
https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-art-and-craft.html

Key Differences Between Art and Craft​

The difference between art and craft can be drawn clearly on the following grounds:

  1. Art is described as an unstructured and open-ended form of work; that expresses emotions, feelings, and vision. Craft denotes a form of work, involving the creation of physical objects, by the use of hands and brain.
  2. Art relies on artistic merit whereas craft is based on learned skills and technique.
  3. Art is well known for serving an aesthetic purpose. On the other hand, craft serves human objectives.
  4. Art gives particular attention to ideas, feelings and visual qualities. Conversely, craft gives stress on the right use of tools and materials, and the application of technique.
  5. There is a flow of emotion in art, which emerges from heart and soul. In contrast, the craft is the product of the mind.
  6. Craft can be quantified easily which is not in the case of art.
  7. The duplicability of art forms is not possible while craft forms can easily be copied.
  8. Art is the consequence of an individual’s innate ability. On the contrary, craft is the result of learned ability and experience.
 
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