Introduction

It's Not Your Fault!

Tonal music is one of the human soul's greatest creations. Many people attempt to learn to understand, play, and create tonal music, but most of them fail. This high rate of failure is not the fault of music teachers. It is not the fault of music students. It is not the fault of tonal music, which is actually quite simple. The high failure rate of music students is solely and exclusively the fault of the traditional system of representing and controlling musical information. This traditional system will be referred to hereinafter as the Common Western Musical System, or CWMS.

Humankind's understanding of music has grown since CWMS was developed and standardized. Over the centuries, many new truths have been revealed by scientists, engineers, and artists. Combining these old and new truths allows musical information to be represented and controlled in a new way – a new way that respects past wisdom, embraces present technology, and enables future creativity.

This new way is the ThumMusic System.

Motivation

The creation and development of the ThumMusic System has been motivated by three factors. First, I simply could not believe that something as elegant as tonal music could possibly be as complex as it was always said to be. Second, I had a deep-seated desire to make music easier to teach, learn, and play, so that more people could enjoy the many benefits of music-making. Third, I suspected that if I could deliver these benefits to the world, then I could provide financial security to my family.

The key to delivering these benefits was – in a word – “simplicity.”

Simplicity

Albert Einstein once said that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Scientifically, simpler models are often able to more accurately predict a wider range of results than previous, more-complex models. Plate tectonics, evolution by natural selection, and electromagnetism are well-known examples of relatively simple models with great predictive power. This combination of simplicity and predictive power is known to scientists as “elegance,” and the search for elegance motivates scientists just as it motivates artists.

Simplicity is an important factor in human cognition, too.[1] Consciously and unconsciously, the human brain constantly (a) scans its current and remembered sensory input, trying to find patterns from which it (b) builds and tests mental models, with which it (c) makes predictions of cause and effect.

Simplicity is also important in the design of educational materials. Education is enhanced by (1) organizing sensory input into its simplest form – that is, the form which fully describes a given model with the least possible information – and by (2) exposing that input to the most possible senses in the most consistent manner over time.

Audience

In writing this document, I assumed that its reader – you – would know quite a lot about music theory. If you can't go out right now and teach a class on music theory, then you probably won't get much out of this document. In fact, if you're a beginner, reading this document will tend to make music theory seem much more complicated than it really is. This document must compare and contrast the ThumMusic System to its traditional alternative, and if you're a beginner, then by definition you don't understand either system. The document's constant comparing and contrasting of two different things that you don't understand is likely to confuse you.

If you already have a reasonably solid grasp of music theory, then please, read on. This document is for you.

Goals

The goals of this document are to explain what the ThumMusic System is, to describe what benefits it is expected to deliver compared to CWMS, and to encourage you to help support the widespread adoption of the ThumMusic System. You can learn how to support the ThumMusic System at the end of this document.

Next - Background

[1] See Chater, N., and Vitányi, P., “Simplicity: A unifying principle in cognitive science?” http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/tcs02.pdf.