Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Melodies in the Marketplace that is Tonality

A small thought experiment. Read this lay-person friendly article about the complementary work of two of the recent Sveriges Riksbank Economics prize winners, Fama and Shiller, and then summarize it in your head, substituting for "market", "tonality", and for "securities prices", "melody."  The fit isn't precise (do we identify final tones in the tonic as dividends?), but I think you'll get a useful charge out of the exercise, particularly with regard to the questions of anticipation — which would predict some recurrent directionality — and random fluctuation — which would go along with melodic variety.

I don't want to push this any further than is warranted, but I have the suspicion that had economists been thinking in terms of tonality rather than markets in goods, services or securities, then they wouldn't have doddled about too long with Efficient Markets Theory. Efficiency may play a role in other aspects of music making, but a good, distinctive tune rarely works efficiently; indeed, for all the conservative tendencies that appear frequently in melodies (i.e. what goes up must come down, skips return by steps in the opposite direction, etc), the best tend to enjoy their eccentricities and extravagances.  Modeling this with a mixture of goal-oriented directionality, representing the habits and, when present, constraints of a tonal system and random fluctuation, representing composerly flights of imagination, is a reasonable point of departure.

1 comment:

Lisa Hirsch said...

I have just posted a link to this on Paul Krugman's blog. :)