Truly distilling quality of music down to metrics that would have predictive power… I mean that seems like an advancement beyond AGI given that humans can’t reliably do it by examining or listening to source material alone.
The metrics we have are Roman numeral analysis. We know the four chords to use that will make music sound familiar. We know the harmonies to use that will make music sound like jazz.
This makes sense since it’s possible to create music that sounds like a certain genre without trial and error.
This is to say nothing of non western music, and I’d be interested in an effort, like Chomsky, to define a universal grammar. But we have a lot of material to start with!
'There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla’s music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: there are not widely used analytical tools for studying this music, and there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that the music academy has been neglecting. Right now, “music theory” classes are mostly harmony and voice-leading classes, and that harmony is too often limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy. But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is “less intellectual” or “more instinctive” than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it’s hard to do better, because we don’t have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well.'
Of course, if you can play it from a CD it has to be 'quantised' at some point.
However I agree that conventional music theory doesn't care about such fine degrees of quantisation.
My impression is that it's not exactly mainstream. I'm also not sure to what extent it works for polyphonic music.
But rather than only what sounds good, it should be possible in principle to analyze a given piece of music and say, this is on par with the masters, this is not, etc.
Even more tangible if to determine what music is “great” that transcends time and culture. This is less subjective because a small body of work turns out to be great, yet it must have some intrinsic qualities that drive its longevity and universal appeal.
"Notation Must Die" ... excellent deep-ish dive into music notation by the inimitable Tantacrul
For an interesting analysis of rhythmic variations not represented by classical notation, this is one of the best articles I e seen so far
one could always decide to just not to (YAGNI).