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.