A Lesson In Advanced Music Theory

Bah.

While advanced music theory is all well and dandy, this is not, as the title may imply, a lesson on it. This is not to say, however, that it’s not a lesson on anything. No – merely not on advanced music theory.

But I will mention this in my quaint little introduction: the lesson does have to do with music. It has to do with the importance of music – not the complicated infrastructure of it. I will repeat once more:
No lessons in advanced music theory may be found here. None.

Humankind is such a funny thing, really, to have created something so ridiculously complex as advanced music theory. People have the tendency to do that – to make something so incredibly in depth that only the people who created it would fully understand the vast magnitude of its inner workings.

Because so much of the human language is jargon to other humans, almost half of the current words in the ridiculously massive dictionary are never used by any other person than the one who has to use them; and since so many don’t have to use them, the words are just forgotten in the ridiculously thin pages of the ridiculously massive dictionary.

I would like to take this time to mention that this story has no jargon in it. You will all understand every single word on these hopefully normal sized pages, which are not ridiculously thin, and not in a ridiculously large book.

Now I realize I’m going on about dictionaries and jargon and advanced music theory, but this is only to make sure you realize that the story has nothing to do with advanced music theory and jargon and dictionaries. Zilch.

So now that I’m done, and I assume you realize it, I will return to the main point of my story:

My big old purple world.

It’s not actually purple.

I suppose that’s kind of important. The sky is purple – purple and blue and green and white, stretching off far into space. Stretching towards me. The ground itself is brown, with little black laces running through it and little brown people running around it.

They’re not really little, they just appear little from my vantage point here in some distant nebula in some distant galaxy with just enough telescopic power to be completely and utterly fascinated by these miniscule creatures.

Now would be a good time to explain to you what is so fascinating about these people. It is not their bland lives, not their tiresome jobs, nor even their lonesome little love lives, which are just as boring as any other organic organisms love life. What I find captivating about these little creatures is their language.

It’s a language of noise, and not syllables. There is only one close relationship between their language and another human language. This other language belongs to an African tribe, which added to their dialect a series of clicks, which meant just as much as the letter “a” or “h”.

The reason the languages are so close, even though they are quite distant, is because these people speak by music. They hum, and each different combination of notes, like letters, makes a different kind of word. And when they write, they write scores, not books.

Now I would go into more detail, but that would lead to jargon, so I won’t.

The language was invented by some space explorers who managed to land their vehicle on the barren purple world, shortly after deploying me in my nebula. But even though the world’s air is fit for breathing, if you once opened your mouth, toxins would enter your body, and you would die.

So they made a different language. So they made a different civilization.

Now here is why this place is better than Earth, where I was manufactured:

People lie on Earth, and they steal and cheat and swear and do underhanded things with no real purpose other than to make their life span as noticed as possible, so that when they die more people will either feel happy or sad.

Now something interesting before I continue. People can’t swear here because every single curse word requires you open your mouth. Genius.

And this is why people can’t lie and cheat and do underhanded things here: in music and song, there are no impurities. So each note and each measure may be a word, but in no way and without any possibility can you lie through music.

Beautiful sounds don’t permit ugly acts, and notes can’t speak non-truths.

I’ll be running out of power soon. My solar panels have been battered over the years by small meteors, and my batteries can only last so long. Even my lens is scratched, so that I can only see things clearly from the bottom right of my vision.

Anyway, though this language is incredibly fascinating, much more so than the grotesque and unreasonably varied languages of Earth, which, incidentally, is currently just as polluted and scarred as usual -

Yes, I occasionally check in-

-though the language is infinitesimally more interesting than Earth languages, one single thing can get tedious if observed for too long. Even satellites can get bored, you know.

So before I go, for I have merely days left out here in my nebula, let me say this as a masterful conclusion to a story that I hope in the future will not be inserted into the ridiculously thin pages of a ridiculously large book:

I kept my word. No jargon.