How far we can hope to achieve a full scientific theory of music

How strange that music is deemed a phenomenon in need of scientific explanation. We don’t, in general, construct objective theories of how great paintings ‘work’, or great literature, dance or sculpture. We are interested in what is happening at a perceptual level when we experience these arts, but there is always a space in which we leave them to speak for themselves, beyond the reach of cold facts. Yet with music, scientific studies seem to be on the trail of an absolute, all-encompassing explanation that connects neurology with creativity, auditory physiology with acoustic physics. There seems to be a conviction that the composer Arnold Schoenberg was right when he cautioned: “One day the children’s children of our psychologists will have deciphered the language of music.”

This ’scientification’ of music is part of a very old tradition. In antiquity and the Middle Ages music was not an art in the modern sense; it was one of the four sciences of the syllabus called the liberal arts, alongside geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. Scholars studied music to learn about the natural harmony of the world, and performed music was often dismissed as frippery. The early sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius ranked it as the least of his three classes of ‘music’, and agreed with Pythagoras that music should ideally be studied while “setting aside the judgement of the ears”.

The practice of music does have something of the mathematical about it. Some of the experiments in compositional symmetry, such as the palindromes and mirror reflections of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Hadyn, are little more than the parlour tricks of an age that delighted in such amusements. But many other musical forms and theories have deeper, more formal organization, from the interwoven fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach to the quasi-mathematical laws of composition developed by Paul Hindemith.

In the final throes of Schoenberg’s twelve-note serialism in the 1960s, composers such as Pierre Boulez insisted on a mathematical rigidity that almost sucks their music dry of ex-pression and makes onerous demands of the listener’s ability to perceive ordered forms, and in some types of non-Western music, pattern and structure rather than emotion or tone-painting provide the foundations of composition. This is the case in polyrhythmic African drumming, for instance, and the shimmering soundscapes of Javanese gamelan.

Even musicians are uncertain of what kind of art it is they are engaged in, and what, if anything, can be said about it. ‘Is there meaning in music?’ asked US composer Aaron Copland. He felt there was, but admitted to being unable to articulate what that meaning is.

Almost the only thing we can say about music as a cultural phenomenon is that it seems to be universal. Music serves very diverse ends, sometimes with more apparent emphasis on the ritualistic than the hedonistic. Even when it is taken very seriously - in some Native American cultures a ceremony has to be started again if a single note is out of place - anthropologists have often struggled to understand how or to what extent cultures apply intellectual and aesthetic judgements. Sometimes music is a commodity for sale and exchange; elsewhere it is inseparable from dance.

Given this range of what music is and what functions it serves, how can we make sense of it as an acoustic, cognitive, cultural and aesthetic phenomenon? That need not be deemed an entirely hopeless task, but it is not one that science will accomplish alone.