Logic & Music

>I wonder, as Morrison did a while back, how many folks on the
>forum are real musicians, and how many are theorists...

Perhaps "music makers" would be a better choice here than "musicians",
the distinction being that making music can (in my mind anyway) include
composition, arranging, and to some degree production, as well as
performance.



>...although I do have the highest respect for
>the monsters of theory, to be sure, and have learned a lot from studying
>them. Music transcends any form of logic, and for that I am
>grateful...let the discussions continue...Hstick

"Monsters of theory": I like that! That's the kind of phrase that only
a creative guy like Neil could come up with! Creative especially in the
myriads of connotations, mostly positive, that "monsters" could suggest!

There are many things though, in music as life in general, that have NO
quantifiable basis. These are the realm of mysticism, and certainly music
has plenty of that. And there are things in music and life that are
ENTIRELY quantifiable and, best we can tell, are completely understandable
in that quantifiable basis. Those are the realm of science, and they are
completely unmysterious. Music has a handful of those things too.

But most of all, best I can tell, music contains things that are
SOMEWHAT quantifiable, by which I mean that we can use a model to assign a
number to them and use math to point us to some insights that would be hard
to come by otherwise. But for these "somewhat quantifiable" things, that
model is only good up to a point.

One such model is a well-known one: That the smaller the numbers in a
frequency ratio, the more "smooth" and intuitively meaningful the interval
between the two frequencies. That model can let us use math to point to
some interesting possibilities, but it has very big limitations too, the
most obvious one being that timbre vastly affects its outcome.



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