While You Were Dreaming, Music Making Went Artificial

Pop music has become a well-stocked restaurant of cooking tools and sound.

For the last few years, every time you opened up a YouTube music education video you got a lecture on the “circle of fifths”. That’s a concept that began to take form in ancient Mesopotamia, found on clay tablets from 4,500 years ago. The Greeks took musical scales to a higher level, exploring the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian modes, and sophistication just continued to develop, largely around codification of these modes. Music theorist Heinrich Schütz came up with the “circle of fifths” in 1657 to explain the rules of harmony and modulation in music. 

The circle of flats and sharps intrigued the intellectuals among the legions of music students who followed, though while handy the concept was invisible to additional legions of amateur players who simply used their ears and followed their explorative whims, and copied records to develop their chops.

Then, some bewildered musical ape tossed his instrument high into the air above him, where it turned into an Arthur C. Clarke thing, a tool, like a spacecraft, that transcended the need for knowledge of anything, substituting instead the tools of Pan, that musical god, who could create entire musical soundscapes without having to know a thing about what makes space travel possible, or even worthwhile. We have the following video demonstration of our new musical reality, which is simply a menu at a well-stocked restaurant of cooking tools and sound.