Does music theory qualify as a theory?

[mhardy6647]

Theoretically speaking one can compose music in a silent way.

Well, I mean... John Cage. Right?
(ahem)

 

[Multicore]

Theoretically speaking one can compose music in a silent way.

That album changed my life as a teenager I guess around 1980. In a good way. A couple of years ago, while doing a podcast about the album, I found this interview about the experience for the young John Mclaughlin. I think it shows what an extraordinary band leader Miles Davis was.

 

[Philbo King]

A wide variety of viewpoints, certainly.
I'll keep my thoughts to myself...

 

[OnLyTNT]

Music = Mathematics

I'm not much knowledgable on the subject but roughly you take 440 Hz sound wave and label it A4 as a note and your tuning reference. You build your basic scale on it which is C Major (series of full notes and half notes etc which is also mathematical.. I can't get into details profoundly) and other scales are driven from this point. You play your scale and it sounds "musical" to your ears so you call it music (actually all these were happened in reversal ). This can be called as a "theory" I believe and widely known as Western music I think? For example, in the middle east there are microtonal scales and other forms of tunings etc... So, as you can see there are other theories or systems and all these are mathematically representable...

 

[Multicore]

Semantics, mixing up definitions
View attachment 340571

Also OP mentions number theory, and number theory does not magically explain the universe of, or take the wonder and joy out of, numbers. It provides a series of tools to add to the toolkit to solve more complicated problems. One could argue music theory does the same.

The dictionary quote is useful in how it clearly separates meanings 1 and 4 but otherwise it punts on the qualifying conditions by deferring to the meaning of "principle(s)".

 

[Multicore]

Music = Mathematics

Music is culturally evolved. Numbers and the laws of physics existed before there was any life.

I mentioned already the attraction of explaining music in terms of numbers but people have been trying since forever and have shown that it doesn't get us very far.

But for the sake of discussion, given the hierarchy of physics > biology > human culture > music, how come music = mathematics? How did this correspondence or equality come to exist?

I'm aware that the physics of sound creation, the practicalities of ensemble playing (and ultimately the ambitions of composers) provided local evolutionary attractors that have stabilized certain aspects of music within geographical space and time to the point that they became characteristic of their tradition (I guess that's analogous to the evolution of words within languages). So yes, we can observe some countable things and ratios in music and that universal laws influenced the cultural evolution, although that varied a lot by tradition.

But (1) to a musician, composer or listener practicing in a given tradition (or a few) that doesn't touch most of the design space that they operate within. Very little.

But (2) I still don't think this line of thinking gets us any closer to discovering any kind of Universal Grammar in which can account for consonance or dissonance.

 

[OnLyTNT]

Have you ever studied "modern music theory"? About mathematics, here is C Major's well known "interval" formula: 2 2 1 2 2 2 1. If you play anything within this scale it will sound in consonance. Musicians can "jam" without any written music following the scale and predict what others will play. "Half" notes, pitch, tempo...everything is mathematics. What do you do when you see something like "4/4" or "3/5" or "1/16" according to "modern music theory"?

Remember, It' s a "theory", you can come up with a theory about anything, "music" no exception. Do you believe music is sacred or something?

 

[bluefuzz]

how come music = mathematics? How did this correspondence or equality come to exist?

Because someone (the Pythagoreans?) made it up. E.g. the same way most other major cultural artifacts, religions, political ideologies etc. have come into existence: someone was bulshitting someone else sitting round a campfire, bar or alter somewhere and (due to a surfeit of wine, weed or enlightened wisdom) they just ran with the idea . Classic meme transmission ... ;-)

For me musical theory is the Yin to the Yang of musical practice. A way of describing to others (and yourself) via symbols (in a medium other than sound) how the music of your culture works. There are of course many musical theories depending on country, culture, religion, language etc.

It's a theory in roughly the same sense as a political theory or economic theory. Definitely not in the sense of a scientific theory.

 

[Sokel]

Because someone (the Pythagoreans?) made it up. E.g. the same way most other major cultural artifacts, religions, political ideologies etc. have come into existence: someone was bulshitting someone else sitting round a campfire, bar or alter somewhere and (due to a surfeit of wine, weed or enlightened wisdom) they just ran with the idea . Classic meme transmission ... ;-)

If you want to know a little about the stuff,Hippocrates* who banned all the woo stuff was in a direct line of thought with Pythagoras.

*fun fact,he insisted on sanitation,wrote books about it but poor Dr Semmelweis had to struggle to bring it to practice couple of thousands of years after and he got mocked by the establishment of course.

Campfires,woo and superstition was far,far away from their line of thinking.

 

[OnLyTNT]

The Minor Third Communicates Sadness in Speech, Mirroring Its Use in Music Meagan E. Curtis and Jamshed J. Bharucha

I believe this is worth reading.

 

[Philbo King]

Personal opinion:
Aside ftom the rudiments of reading music scores, to me music theory tells me which chords can fit a melody and which melodies can fit a chord progression. It also indicates where and when extended chords (9ths, 11ths, 13ths, augmented, diminished and beyond) can be used in an aesthetically pleasing way. There are also timimg and rythmic elements that are essential to keep everything sounding like monastery chants.

Perhaps it is better called 'harmonic theory'.

 

[mhardy6647]

The Minor Third Communicates Sadness in Speech, Mirroring Its Use in Music Meagan E. Curtis and Jamshed J. Bharucha

I believe this is worth reading.

The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music - PubMed

There is a long history of attempts to explain why music is perceived as expressing emotion. The relationship between pitches serves as an important cue for conveying emotion in music. The musical interval referred to as the minor third is generally thought to convey sadness. We reveal that the...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[LeShog]

Music theory is called this way, but from a technical point of view it’s a language. If you think at it as a language you’ll find it behaves like a language. The only difference being is that it is universal to the human race. But still you’ll find an evolution in the centuries of this language, a refinement and simplification (like all languages tend to, that’s why latin is so fricking hard) and diverse dialects (and rules that follow) all around the globe. Japanese popular music is tonal, but still it’s built on slightly different ratios than western music. The breaking point with Schonberg is so dramatic because he wanted to use another language, not anymore the universal tonal one, but a more intellectual one. After him many experiments followed to seek and search new languages with new grammar rules, but what really works for us humans is tonal music. We feel at home, relaxed with tonal music. Maybe it’s in our DNA. Or maybe respecting certain frequency ratios is very harmonic for everything natural. Our instincts are directly tied to what and how we hear things and this is an important evolutionary trait: this way we can sense when something’s off and flee. The language of music uses this evooutionary trait we have to give us pleasure it’s a technique, a “how to”, a language, not a theory.