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Comment by salty_biscuits | Hacker News Reader

It's just the Knuth quote

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

There is nothing wrong with trying to turn an art into a science. Music just has a bunch of implicit rules that people want to make explicit. Musicians find this frustrating because they aren't interested in understanding music this way. Both perspectives are fine.

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Of course both perspectives are fine. And fair enough for you to point it out. I may have misinterpreted the person I was replying to. I got the impression that they wanted to better understand music from a musical point of view, and I responded that wanting to know optimal beat frequencies and such was probably not a fruitful route. But you're right, if one wants to view music as a deep treasure trove of source material for some kind of scientific analysis that makes one happy...go for it! And realize that that's probably not the route to becoming a musician, in the traditional sense.

I think most musicians recognise that the implicit rules are so complex that any reductive approach is going to fail if you want something like a simple formula for generating interesting music. It's just like language.

Yes. But/and I see posts on HN about every two weeks that indicate that most programmer types (a group that includes me) do not recognize that. (Your analogy to language is apt, I think.)

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