The history of attempts to explain music with math and science goes back to antiquity. In the past few years, though, it has become possible to perform automated analysis of large data sets, giving rise to the new scientific subfield of music information retrieval (MIR).
You can learn a lot of fascinating things about music this way. However, as more aspects of music become susceptible to mathematical analysis at scale, we need to think deeply about what questions this kind of enquiry can and can’t answer. Scientific study of music is great, but it can turn into scientism. Two recent papers show the promise and the pitfalls involved.
