Fumbling on Ecstasy
New member
bobaphat said:Learning stuff about music theory can never do you harm IF:
1 You never forget that music is not something like science at all, so dont expect clear cut answers, and dont act like there are
I find it intersting to see peoples' perception of science as cold hard fact when it's anything but. Keep in mind that science just like music is theory. Newtonian Physics for instance is a collection of formulae that does a good job explaining many aspects of everyday kinetics and gravity, just like music theory is a collection of formulae that explain what notes sound good together. However, the laws of Newtonian Physics break down when objects start approaching the speed of light, so the Theory of Relativity was created by Einstein to explain everyday kinetics as well as kinetics at the speed of light. My point of this story being that even science is not clear cut. It's laws and forumulas are constantly being ammended as new phenomena are discovered. If you ask me, music is by far more clear cut than science. The rules of music theory haven't changed in centuries (excluding jazz theory). Science is constantly changing. What is taken as fact today is laughed off as primative thought tomorrow. Music and science are almost identical in their nature. In music, you have a set of chords and notes to work with, that you must arrange into progressions and melodies respectively to make a song. In Science, your data consists of numbers that you must arrange in a certain way to make an explanation that makes sense, much like a song. As a musician and a working analytical biochemist, I can attest that the process of science is EXACTLY like the process of music. One just seems more creative than another because it's called an art, but science takes just as much creativity. You have to be creative when you design experiments so that you get the data that you're after. Science in my opinion is just as much of an art as music. The funny thing is, that most scientists I know have some sort of a creative hobby. For many scientists the thrill is in creating or discovering something. This is why most of them have creative outlets outside of work.