I got sucked into a thread about music theory recently and was prepared to just end my participation by stating: "To each their own, so who cares how people use or don't use music theory as long as their song sounds good?" But instead, I crafted a post that finally articulated my feelings regarding art and science, which ended with the statement: "Yep, art is science." So yep, I think art is science. Here's the post…
In music, the key helps set the mood, the melodic space, of the song and the phrasing defines the structure, which further defines the mood.
In painting, the color pallet helps set the mood and the brush strokes define the structure of the image, which further defines the mood.
So a finished song or image is made up of an unique combination of pallet and form.
In nature, there are certain visual and aural pallets that generally reflect certain psychological states (i.e. mood). Using the color red for stop signs was not an arbitrary choice.
Over time, humans have identified those pallets, those naturally coherent groupings of tones or colors and have given names to those groupings (e.g. Major, Minor, Earth Tones, Pastels, etc) so that we don't have to reinvent them each time we want to create a form to express a particular mood.
So the theories that define musical and visual arts are not rules that were invented by humans. Instead, they are simply naturally coherent groupings of tones or colors humans have given names to, which map to particular moods due to the psychopathology of the human brain.
Yep, art is science. How's that for controversial?
So, how's that for controversial?
In the quest to break out of my ever present rut. I've started experimenting with alternate guitar/bass tunings. My thought is that I generally end up playing through certain fret patterns by habit and instead of doing the work to break those habits, it's much easier to mess with the tuners so that those same fret patterns produce new sounds. It's call bagging and sometimes it works.
The tuning I ended up liking the most is called New Standard Tuning and was 'invented' (or at least named) by Sir Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame. Normally a guitar is tuned in 4ths up until the change to a major 3rd, then back to a 4th. I don't like the normal guitar tuning. The switch to the major 3rd screws up the symmetry and makes me angry.
In contrast to normal guitar tuning, New Standard Tuning has you starting a low C, which is great for metal, and then tuning in 5ths all the way up to the last string, which is tuned to a minor 3rd. Again with the broken symmetry. There's a good reason for this switch to a minor 3rd at the high string, it's not possible to tune the high string up to a 5th because the tension would snap the string. So to keep the string tension down, it's only tuned up to a minor 3rd.
Hmmm, Mr. Fripp, maybe your guitar is trying to tell you something. Maybe it's trying to tell you that it doesn't want a 6th string. You see, when my 6th string snapped, as I was angrily trying to tune out the broken symmetry, I listened. So now I play a 5 string guitar, tuned to Even Newer Standard Tuning©, which trades the broken symmetry for a broken string. In addition to the perfect symmetry, which I guess is really perfect consistency, this now removes one more set of notes to learn. Patterns and chords are now one string shorter, making them more focused, direct and succinct. Brilliant! Thanks!
I need to get a new set of strings as well, as most strings are sized to Old Standard Tuning. For eNST, one needs a heavy C string to compensate for the drop and a light E string to compensate for the increase. Then I'll need to adjust the intonation and I'll be going all in for eNST! Maybe someday I'll bring back the 6th string, but not now, not yet.
In future posts I'm going to start talking about how to use NST. One thing I've found lacking in my searches have been diagrams and charts to show how existing scales and chords map into this tuning. So I'll talk about that as I learn it myself.