Is Music Science the most failed science?
Music Science is the supposed scientific study of music.
Music is a major aspect of human behaviour. People compose music, people perform music, people listen to music.
The world is full of different musical items that have been composed and performed.
All of those musical items are potential raw data for the scientific study of music.
You might think, given the significance of music, and our personal familiarity with music, and the excessive amount of raw data available for study, that music science might have made some kind of progress.
Well, if you think that, then here is a list of basic questions that music science has not succeeded in answering, at all:
What is music?
Why should a thing like music exist at all?
Does music have a biological function?
If music has a biological function, what is it?
If music does not have a biological function, is it a consequence of something else that does have a biological function? What is that biological function?
It is true that music scientists have come up with various tentative suggestions for what music might be, and what the biological function of music might be, if indeed it has a biological function.
Unfortunately, as well as being generally unconvincing, all of these theories fail to answer any of the following questions:
Why do musical items have all the various specific features that musical items have, such as:
Pitch scales?
Harmonic intervals?
Regular beats?
Smooth changes, such as crescendos & diminuendos?
For each musical item, and especially for every musical item that is popular, ie a significant number of people enjoy listening to it, why is that musical item musical?
How many questions are included in the last item of that list?
How many popular items of music are there in the world?
The boundary between popular and not-so-popular is a bit fuzzy (and subjective). KaraFun has 58,000 tracks in their karaoke catalog. So 58,000 is a good lower bound.
In other words, we have at least 58,000 questions that music science needs to answer.
And not a single one of those questions has been answered.
That is, music science cannot explain the musical quality of any known popular musical item.
(We could compare this to the question “How do living organisms reproduce?”. There was a time when scientists did not understand how any species of living organism reproduced. But of course once they understood how one particular species reproduced, they more-or-less understood how all species reproduce.)
It is true that music science is not the only area of science where scientists seem to be stuck.
For example, there are some significant questions in other areas of science that scientists have completely failed to answer, and might never answer, such as:
How did life originate?
What is the correct theory of quantum gravity?
However, scientists studying these questions suffer from a lack of access to the raw data, ie we weren’t there when life originated, which probably only happened once in some specific location on Earth thousands of millions of years ago, and studying quantum gravity experimentally is super-hard because it requires access to particle accelerators an enormous factor more powerful than what we have today.
But, with music, we are surrounded with an embarrassing abundance of evidence and raw data.
There really is no excuse.
What is music?
>Sound arranged predictably, but in complex enough way that it is challenging to predict.
Why should a thing like music exist at all?
>Because humans evolved to predict the world to survive. Music is a super-stimulus for this prediction mechanism.
Does music have a biological function?
>No.
If music does not have a biological function, is it a consequence of something else that does have a biological function? What is that biological function?
>Yes, it is the consequence of the attention/reward mechanism. This mechanism helps us direct our attention towards new information (helping us find food, navigate social situations, learn survival techniques, etc) and rewards us when we find this information or improve our understanding.
Why do musical items have all the various specific features that musical items have, such as:
Pitch scales?
Harmonic intervals?
Regular beats?
Smooth changes, such as crescendos & diminuendos?
>All of the above create strong expectations that can be fulfilled or violated in complex and engaging ways. Regular beats create a strong expectation that sound will occur on the beat (or the subdivision of the beat, or in a certain rhythm, etc). Smooth changes create a strong expectation that the change will continue (such as an increase or decrease in intensity). Harmonic intervals are related to repetition: simple ratios like the octave (2:1) and perfect fifth (3:2) are predictable, while dissonant ratios like a semitone (16:15) are less predictable. This introduces multiple dimensions of expectations. Pitch scales (approximately) string together relatively consonant harmonic intervals and create their own strong expectation (that notes will be in the scale). All of this helps to arrange sound predictably (because there are true underlying patterns), but in a complex enough way to be hard to predict.
For each musical item, and especially for every musical item that is popular, ie a significant number of people enjoy listening to it, why is that musical item musical?
>Because the musical item is predictable yet challenging (engaging) to predict for most people. Popular music may sound “formulaic” or “boring” to people who listen to music more often, because they are so familiar with common chord progressions, song structures, melodic ideas, etc, that popular music is no longer engaging to predict; it’s just boring and predictable. Yet these same people get into more and more niche music over time, because that music lies on the edge of predictability relative to their experience. There are so many popular musical items because the patterns themselves and our capability for predicting them have broad overlaps. Yet cultural differences are still explainable by this model - the collection of “familiar” patterns depends on what music surrounded you growing up, which explains, for example, the difference in scales between some cultures.