Once I was preparing to work on a project with a vocalist. It occurred to me to mention that I had been studying melody. He looked at me as if I had grown two more heads and wanted to eat his children. It was his experience that he told me that the best musical creative ideas just ‘seem to happen’. You see in his eyes, I was a musical blasphemer.

Needless to say, I was surprised by his reaction. The title of the article comes from The Wizard of Oz. “Don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain,” said the magician. He didn’t want to ruin the mystery and mystique of the whole personality he had created. Well, in the case of music. if we draw back the curtain and look at the ‘man’, I actually think the mystery and wonder are heightened.

As my vocalist friend demonstrated, I believe there is an ongoing myth about artists and the entire creative process. It’s like some guy is minding his own business walking down the street and whoosh! A hit song is suddenly implanted in his head. Now, I’m not going to argue with the fact that there are times when the creative process itself can happen very quickly. Generally speaking though, this is preceded by countless hours, months, years, and perhaps even a lifetime of musical practice and experience. (There are exceptions where a guy is cleaning the gutters on his second story and he falls off the ladder and lands on his head. Suddenly, he starts playing Beethoven sonatas and the like without any previous musical experience. These cases are dark and fascinating and are still being studied by science. It is not a career I recommend.)

My friend could only explain the creative process as “some kind of happening” because he had no formal approach to it. He was trusting and at the mercy of his subconscious mind. He was looking at the wizard screen.
We want to open the curtain. For a long time, the human race has had a group of people who have been actively and consciously trying to unravel and unravel this beautiful and wonderful thing we call music. All of us who love and appreciate music have benefited from these efforts. It directly affects the instruments we hear and play, the scales that music is made of, the physical spacing of the frets on the guitar, the technology that reproduces the musical performances we hear.

I guess you have to say that the real beginning of this conscious path towards musical discovery and exploration began with the Greek Pythagoras. Pythagoras was one of our great minds. He pioneered geometry and is most famous for the Pythagorean theorem. Anyway, Pythagoras was walking through the town one day by the smithy. He suddenly realized that the sound of the hammer on the anvil was in direct proportion to the size of the hammer. If the hammer were twice as big, the sound would be one octave lower.

Music has never been the same since. Pythagoras went on from there to create the Circle of Fifths (or Cycle). This is how our major scale is created. Well, almost anyway. If you follow the loop strictly in the key of C, it will end on F sharp. Instead, the key of C has F, which happens to be the inversion of the first CG interval of the Circle of Fifth. And who noticed that? Pythagoras, of course. (By the way, prog guitar great Joe Satriani had a life-changing guitar moment when the Circle of Fifths became real to him one day.)

I should also mention that the Circle of Fifths is not perfect either. As it goes through the cycles and up through the octaves, you find that it gradually goes out of tune a bit. It has been pointed out that it should actually be called the Spiral of Fifths. This does not concern me as an imperfection. Quite the opposite. I see the musical spiral of fifths as a comparison to the perfection of the circle and the unlimited calculation of Pi. Our finite minds get a brief glimpse into infinity.

James Watson and Frances Crick received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, the famous double helix. All living organisms contain their own distinctive DNA. It is an autonomous model. Believe it or not, music has its own kind of musical DNA. Each sounding note (or tone) actually contains all other notes.

The main tone of sound (the main or the only one) that you hear is known as the fundamental. The other tones are known as overtones (above the fundamental) or overtones (you guessed it, below the fundamental). The fundamental would be a single waveform, and this would be subdivided ad infinitum into unlimited overtones and harmonics. Part of the distinctive nature of various musical instruments comes from the different emphasis these instruments place on high and low tones. By the way, when you listen to a three-chord song, the chords will most likely be based on the root (I), the first (octaveless) overtone (V), and the first reverse overtone (IV).

You have probably heard the term music of the spheres. Bet you didn’t know this was literally true. Vibrant stars have their own brand of music. Atoms have been described as miniature solar systems with electrons orbiting protons and neutrons. Well, not to be outdone by vibrating stars, atoms and molecules also make their own music. They have their own fundamentals and nuances. How cool is that?

The first efforts to convert sound into form were made by a French mathematician named Jules Lissajous in the 19th century. He was able to capture beautiful sine waveforms with tuning forks, lights, and mirrors. This was followed by many different inventions. People were amazed with the beautiful patterns captured by the music itself. This is very much alive today in cymatics: the study of sound and vibration made visible. This group theorizes that sound is like a bubble and not like a wave as was believed in the past.

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, Ray Bradbury or Gene Roddenberry to connect the dots and see that it’s only a matter of time before music is made on quantum computers with holographic synthesizers. Beam Me Up Scotty! I’m ready to play!