Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music
I love the dissection of harmony from a physics&#x2F;computation point of view; I&#x27;m going to read this in more detail.<p>But the wrapping is quite off-putting to me; the author seems to misunderstand <i>both</i> music theory <i>and</i> science, and rather deeply. I don&#x27;t see a scientific theory here at all. To be called science, it needs to have a hypothesis and be falsifiable, and after that get tested experimentally and proved - I don&#x27;t see that, nor even a stab at a metric that is verifiable. What I see here is note relations described using science terminology instead of music terminology. That&#x27;s not science, that&#x27;s just someone using the terminology they&#x27;re comfortable with rather than learn the accepted paradigm.<p>&quot;The more factored a theory and the more emergent the observed phenomena from the theory, the more satisfying the theory.&quot; - Feynman.<p>It&#x27;s ironic that this better explains existing music theory than the one presented here, even though Feynman wasn&#x27;t talking about music theory.<p>The author accuses music theory of being pseudo-science, when music theory is not and never was attempting to be science, and yet the author proposes a theory of music claiming to be science that in fact isn&#x27;t science.<p>Unfortunately, this &#x27;theory&#x27; here only seems to contend with the first two of the 32 chapters in my copy of &quot;Harmony and Voice Leading&quot;, and this mainly talks about what makes notes sound good, not what makes music sound good.<p>Also unfortunately, the author doesn&#x27;t seem to be aware of what&#x27;s going on in modern music theory, which is exploring things like how to compose music out of the beat frequencies that exist as harmonic dissonances between two or more notes. A lot of the physics of harmonics is currently already being incorporated into music theory.