<aside> 🎶 This is part of a ongoing series called Building A Music Engine
It documents the process of me smashing my head against the keyboard to build a game called LETSGO
It’s gotten long enough to break into several sections:
Music systems are culturally defined rules to organize sound. Those rules create complex systems, that when navigated intelligently, can bring a human to tears.
The greatest musical performance ever recorded
The greatest musical performance ever recorded
Examples include Arabic Maqamat’s or Indian Shruti’s, or Western 12 Tone Even Temperament.
A few simple rules that establish the soundtrack of entire peoples.
The thing about these music systems is that the rules are constant- especially when musician’s bend those rules.
There are 12 notes in western music. Even when making microtonal music (in the western music system), those microtones are being thought of in terms of being “between” the 12 notes.
These constants allow for sprawl into deep complexity.
<aside> đź’ˇ *WolframAlpha creator Stephen Wolfram has a whole thing about the exponential complexity from simple rulesets.*
Music systems are relatively simple rulesets with deep complexity.
Music is the cellular automaton of how sounds make humans feel.
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In one essence, the rules are arbitrary. There are some mathematical correlations- which are exploited by musicians to give their music a specific effect.
But these rules exist because of the effect it has on the listener- not the mathematics.