Haebichan Jung
Sep 8, 2018 · 1 min read

Hi Sanjeev, thanks for sharing that video! I hugely enjoyed it.

Great comment about people writing music in different ways. I agree, and due to that complex psychological reality, there will never be one mathematic formula that can objectively explain the totality of the mathematic structures of musical language.

To me, there are two best forms of confirmation for non-scientifically-reducible problems like this: 1) listen to and emulate the scholarly opinion, and/or 2) build the solution yourself by creating your own architecture and listen to the results. But at the end of the day, even with the self-similarity matrices, the evidence is still partly opinion-based.

I especially like your comment about the creativity of the harmony. I actually interpret that video a little differently. To me, that’s just adding to the established chord progression, not uprooting something that was there and injecting something completely new, like what happens in the melody. In other words, you seem to describe the process of improvisation more than composition, which I argue has a different creative process.

The bit with the Amazing Grace will channel my point. Notice how the musician starts with the common chord progression -F-F-B_flat-F-C-F. He then tweaks some notes by either adding notes like C7_flat or A. But it’s just a different version of the original harmony that was previously written. Now I would say that that’s a creative endeavor, but in the field of improvisation, not composition.

    Haebichan Jung

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    Project Lead @ TDS | Data Scientist @ Recurly