A theory of future music
A music professor tries to imagine the music of the distant future.
I can imagine a lot of future things. I can guess at transportation centuries from now, or communication, housing, medicine, religion, or law. And despite the variables, my guess will be plausible, something refined and adapted across many generations. I can imagine whole worlds that way.
But when I try to imagine what music might sound like in the distant future—it's bloody hard.
I should be better at this. I taught college music history and theory for 19 years, including how it developed over millennia. I have a Ph.D. in music composition. I host a podcast called How Music Does That.
So wondering how music changes over time isn't a side quest for me. It's the mission.
I know what music sounded like 500 years ago. So why do I draw such a blank imagining music 500 years from now?
My companions in failed imagination
Gene Roddenberry put enormous effort into imagining a plausible 23rd century for the original Star Trek. It was my intro to worldbuilding. He imagined not just the tech, but the future of customs, politics, law, fashion, ethics, and society. The series creators and fans spun up functioning Klingon and Romulan languages, complete with vocabulary and syntax.
But none of the 12 Star Trek series did much to provide a theory of future music.
The musical tastes of every main character are conveniently retro. Captain Kirk listens to 20th-century rock. Picard relaxes to Bach and Mozart. Sisko likes Miles Davis, Tom Paris likes Elvis, and Data plays the violin and listens to Vivaldi.
Wow.
There were some attempts at the music of alien cultures, like Vulcan harp or Bajoran songs. That's easier—any amount of weirdness is to be expected. But aside from Uhura singing brief modal songs exactly twice that I know of, there's very little attempt to guess at the evolution of human music. Even the episode of Strange New Worlds that was framed as a musical, with every character singing, sounds very much like a pop-rock musical from the 1990s—same chords, same meters and rhythms, same phrase structures and vocal style:
Even the Federation Anthem from Deep Space Nine, which takes place in the 24th century, yet another hundred years in the future, is cut from the same cloth as any tedious I-IV-I-V-I national anthem by a mutton-chopped British colonial in 1875:
And don't get me started on the attempt to imagine music a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:
I was briefly excited to learn that a major plot element of the movie Cloud Atlas was a composition, the "Cloud Atlas Sextet," that starts as a solo piano piece in 1936:
...then reappears in new forms over the course of many generations.
But when I heard the piece performed by a choir of clones more than two centuries later:
...simply transcribed from piano to voice, but otherwise indistinguishable in form or tonal language from the original, I was disappointed again.
I'm grateful at least that they didn't try the obvious but unlikely assumptions that future music will be strange and indecipherable to us, a spattering of disconnected pitches in a soup of electronic sound.
It's much more likely that—assuming we are still here to create it—music 500 years from now will be different but tantalizingly familiar, just as most music today would be to a 16th-century listener.
Listening back in time
Here's a song written almost exactly 500 years ago. It's about getting drunk until the room spins:
This doesn't represent all music of the 16th century any more than "My Humps" represents all music today. It's one example of one genre by one composer in one country and culture in one stylistic strand of a single era.
No one would mistake "Quand je bois du vin clairet" for a 21st-century pop song. But at the same time, I get it. It follows the same basic rules as music today: in a key, with functional chords, a beat and a meter, with a melody I can follow. Even without speaking Middle French, I can tell from tempo and rhythm that it's emotionally upbeat.
Even the oldest surviving song in the world, the 2000-year-old Epitaph of Seikilos, follows the basic conventions of Western music today:
If music in the distant past is that recognizable, it's reasonable to assume that music in the distant future will be as well.
Maybe Cloud Atlas didn't miss the mark after all.
A theory of future music
There's no way to pinpoint what music will sound like at any given future moment. But if the last two millennia are any guide, there are a few things we can say with confidence.
Music will always be a sonic art. That seems obvious, but it's worth establishing this baseline. Someone might use a million drones to create a wonderful "symphony" of lights and colors, but the definition of music is unlikely to expand to include such a thing. The unique ability of musical sound to communicate emotion through that stunning cerebral interplay will continue to hold a defined place in human experience.
Music will not be one thing. Just as music has more than 6,000 different genres today, and despite the undeniable global homogenizing underway, it will probably have more than 6,000 different genres in the distant tomorrow. So wondering "what music will sound like in the future" is already a misleading question.
Music will deal in relationships of pitch and of time. These have always been and will always be the two dimensions that make music what it is. Pitch is about the vibrations that produce musical sound and their relationship to each other; rhythm and meter are about slicing up the experience of time. Different types of music will emphasize one over the other, as they do today, but both will continue to be central to what music is.
Music will still use those two dimensions, plus form, contrast, dynamics and tone color, to create an emotional narrative that imitates the experience of life by unfolding through time.
Music will still tend to be tonal. This one is controversial in some circles but shouldn't be. Tonal music has a central pitch to which other pitches relate. There are many ways to do this—Arabic maqams, Indian ragas, Indonesian gamelan, African and Asian scalar pentatonics, and Western major and minor modes, to name a few. Ordered sequences of notes forming the basis for melodies and harmonies, with one pitch at the center—it's just too emotionally useful to cast aside.
Not that we never tried. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and others tried to "liberate" music from the restraints of tonal hierarchy a hundred years ago through atonal and serial music.
It didn't take.
Avant garde composers tried throwing chairs, barking, and generally being as unpredictable as possible.
It didn't take.
My money says tonality in some form is going to stick.
Perhaps the most common assumption about music in the future is that it will be electronic. Obviously some will be. But our fascination with the ability of a human to use an instrument (more directly) fashioned from the earth, or to manipulate their own vocal folds to produce music—an apparatus evolved for a different purpose—is never likely to fade. That kind of authenticity is already valued in an over-produced world. So acoustic music is likely to remain in the mix.
And despite my snark at Star Trek, a lot of the music of the future will actually be the music of today, a continuous performance tradition. And like Bach and Mozart performances (mostly) are today, those will be faithfully rendered as they were back in the day, and covered, and reimagined. And the existence of a thousand-plus-year tradition of tonal creation will exert a powerful ancestor effect on contemporary music creation in the 26th century.
Music doesn't change linearly like technology. It is cyclical. Trends and genres cycle from simple to complex and back to simple, acoustic to electric to acoustic, large-scale to intimate. The complex rock and jazz fusion of the 1970s gave way to the simpler, more direct sounds of punk and new wave in the '80s, then back to complexity in the late 1990s and 2000s (with innumerable offshoots and exceptions). Classical music does the same, era to era. Any given moment in popular music tends to have more in common with music one cycle earlier than with its immediate predecessors.
This continual return to the start of a bell curve is fundamentally different from the evolution of technology, making music a more direct reflection of the syntax and semantics of its own history.
Music for one
There is one prediction I'm willing to make, one innovation I think we can expect within a few decades: music composed by artificial intelligence specifically for you.
Algorithms already serve up music based on prior listening, but that's child's play. I'm talking about AI that assesses the emotional contours of your personal neurology at a given moment, then serves up a unique composition with the exact blend of tone color, dissonance and consonance, conflict and resolution that you need or want.
It would be a natural extension of the field of music therapy, which already applies the experience of music, both listening and creating, in therapeutic settings. A Google AI that can examine brain activity and identify the song you recently heard is another step toward the neural mapping required for neurally bespoke composition, and a field called brainwave entrainment studies the use of external stimuli, including music, to produce desired brain states.
It's not that large a leap to the scene from the movie Her in which the operating system Samantha composes a piece just for Theo, sort of:
But instead of music to describe what it would feel like to be there with him, it would be music designed to respond to what he is feeling. Individually tailored, therapeutic, AI-generated music.
And we will hate it, and we won't be able to resist.
I think something so tightly individualized that no one else can "get it" would be fascinating and possibly useful, but always an adjunct to music meant for shared experience. If it's still around 500 years from now, it would be just one of the countless faces of music. And most of that music, like the drunken 16th-century chanson, would still be comprehensible to us. You would know from the tonal focus, the harmony, the tempo and the rhythm what it's trying to say.
