Could there be a mathematical formula to determine the quality of a song – or of a symphony?
Yes and no. The quality of a song is a personal opinion. I might like “Any Way You Want It” by Journey and you might hate it. Neither of us is wrong (although you are an idiot if you don’t like that song). Therefore, there cannot be a mathematical formula to determine the quality of a song. However, musical notes are vibrations in the air – waves just like the graph of sine functions with different amplitudes and periods. Think about when you blindly hit keys on a piano. It sounds terrible because all of these waves are crashing into each other. But when an experience pianist touches the piano he makes a beautiful chord. The notes he hits creates wave that fall nicely upon each other (i.e. sine functions with periods that have a common ratio.) So in this sense, yes you can create a formula to determine if something is or isn’t musical. You just can’t determine a formula to determine if the music has good quality.
