The Future of Music: A Chaos Theory

Most of us can probably remember our high school physics or chemistry teacher mentioning the word “thermodynamics” at some point during the semester. Maybe as you were drawing random geometrical shapes in your notebook you also picked up that there were these “laws” of the thermo-whats its. And as the end of the class drew near, you may have even heard over your impatient pen-tapping a brand new word that was recorded as… “trophy??” in your notebook just before it was slammed shut for the day. It wasn’t until the night before the test that “trophy??” became “entropy,” and fit nicely in a set of parentheses on the reverse side of a flash card entitled “Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

Hello again.

As I tried to illustrate with the trippy-looking image above, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any isolated system (not in equilibrium) the amount of entropy or disorderliness will tend to increase over time. When explaining this to me, my Physics teacher reminded us that at the beginning of time and space as we know it, the Universe was one big organized point of energy. You basically can’t get more “orderly” than this. The Big Bang then hurled all this energy and newly created mass in all directions, and since then the Universe has been constantly expanding, getting more and more unorganized.

Keeping all this in mind, I happened to listen to Alice in Chains’ newest single called “Check My Brain” over the weekend. It’s a pretty rockin’ song with a catchy chorus and your typical Alice in Chains vocal harmony arrangement.

However, the main Intro and Verse guitar riff of this song really threw me off guard. The riff basically revolves around one note, on one fret, on one string of the guitar that is bent to create the particular sound. When I first heard this riff and realized that it played a very important part in the song,  I immediately thought:

“Huh, that’s interesting. It seems as if they have chosen to abandon any sense of melody or chordal progression. Well, why shouldn’t they, when there are people like me yelling at other bands for using the same chord progressions. I guess that is one way to avoid copying other artists’ melodies or chord progressions in your “hook”…just abandon traditional concepts of melodies and chord changes. Interesting.”

Alice in Chains

After thinking this over a little more last night, this particular decision that Alice in Chains made in writing this song reminded me very much of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Would it not make sense, given that there are a finite (although large) number of chordal progressions, melodies, harmonies,etc., for the art of writing music or writing a “song” to follow the Law of Entropy? Since the number of chord progressions and melodies not yet “written” decreases everyday, how can songwriters continue to press out new and interesting music everyday? The solution seems to be to branch out, to experiment, to mold or even sometimes completely abandon the available orderly set of melodies, harmonies, and chords dictated by the concept of Western tonality.

Does there exist other evidence throughout the history of the music we have been listening to that suggests this trend towards disorderliness and experimentation? If so, just how disorderly can you get? Will this continue? What does this mean for the future of music?…

O darn. Looks like we are out of time. Tune in later on this week to see what I’ve found out.       Later.

DUN DUN DUN!!!!!!!!!