Has anyone tried to approach music theory without any historical underpinnings (and preferably ignorant of it). I'm thinking of something that started with cog sci and signal processing, and maybe ML. Don't bother linking the obligatory xkcd. I know it is the height of hubris to think that approach would produce anything like quality music for decades, but I think it might give insight to things that were left over from technical limitations or random chance. How far down the rabbit hole have experimental composers gone in questioning everything down to the foundation, and then kept digging?
Not exactly what you're saying, but made me think of a time when once, in a guitar shop, the clerk was playing really cool sounds on the guitar. She was playing in Hawaiian Slack-Key tuning [0]. She said Europeans had left behind guitars after "discovering" the islands. The natives then developed their own way of tuning and playing them, outside of the European styles. Here's a random link to a song in the style I'm talking about [1].
Although a different tuning, it still uses equal temperament. I mean, it can be played on a guitar using standard tuning, but will require different positions.
I don’t think you can really throw music theory out because so much of it is inate to humans hearing and culture, and it’s largely a formalization of such.
However, the rub is that what most people consider music theory is western classical theory. There’s a lot of different music theories around the world , with different scales, structures etc…
Also a really good video on why “music theory” is often largely paired to western music https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA while there’s so many alternates out there
Some western instruments are easier to produce microtones on than others - violin/viola/cello/bass for example (or in a more rock/jazz idiom fretless electric bass).
The problem with creating a new music theory is the question what do you want the music theory to do? The main value of classical music theory is exactly the historical underpinnings that you want to drop
And I would take it one step further... What do you want to do with music? The people I know who studied theory were interested in becoming better musicians.
I'm a jazz musician. The people I know who can create their own compositions and arrangements in that genre all studied theory in college.
Music theory is just a labeling of the grouping of sounds that sound a certain way, right? And the reasons why they do.
Like you could combine a bunch of random notes together and it would sound terrible. THe reason why a certain scale is a scale is that it all jives together in a way that makes sense to the human brain.
Music theory is an approximation of what the aggregate human preference function for music is, where the aggregate is over a region and time. It's not really a theory per se, but you could definite "learn" many aspects of theory from enough labelled examples. Given many western music examples, you would easily learn circle of fifths and other common details; given indian music, you would learn microtones and other subtle touches that make indian music have depth.
Yah, music theory is an instrument of conservatism.
Most people just make what sounds good to them and that creates a massive power potential to extract by labelling some of that "good" and some of that "bad" in the eyes of an arbitrary system.
There is plenty of music theory not based on traditional western music.
The "atom" of all music is that frequencies with simple relationships (for example, exactly 1/3x) sounds "nice" (we can hear the harmony) and frequencies with complicated relationships (pi x) sounds sour (used intentionaly with great effect by bands like Sonic Youth for example).
The essence of western music is the decision to split the octave into 12 and have this be the notes we use (anyone who have tried this will discover that we run into trouble when our instument tonal range spans more than one octave, this is where "tunings" come in).
But there are alternatives: Spliting the octave into 53 parts has way more harmonies
The split into 12 is not just in western music. 12 appears in the 22 shruti system in Indian music due to not all 22 tones being used; the 22 can be seen as alterations in a 12 framework.
Music doesnt derive from music theory. Instead music theory develops to understand and examine music that already exists. A huge error that a lot of music theory hobbyists make is to overuse it or use it in contexts where it doesn’t make sense (e.g., using theory developed to understand Mahler to understand EDM).
As much as we like to imagine that music derives purely from the mathematical relationship between tones and that aliens would produce the same music we would based on universal physical principles, that’s not the case.
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