Music Patterns
Rough Draft
My brother-in-law reminded me that back in 2018 I had a rough idea. Here we are in 2020 and it’s been held hostage until now. If someone has time to run with it, be my guest. Maybe crowdsourced in a wiki?
Introduction: The world of software development birthed an approach for identifying and cataloguing patterns which has proliferated - design patterns, architecture patterns, database patterns, analysis patterns, anti-patterns, etc. This started with a book Design Patterns, written by a group of technologists colloquially known as the Gang of Four. In the tech world, patterns are identified solutions (ideally generic) to recurring problems of a particular type. Rather than recreate the wheel every time software developers need to solve a particular type of problem, they create a vocabulary around those patterns such that someone can say a single word and everyone is immediately on the same page. How these patterns are catalogued is also important - look at the Singleton pattern on Wikipedia as an example. This tells people how to identify the applicable problems, how to use this pattern to solve those problems, etc.
The effect of this proliferation of patterns has been to transform the world of software development from being mostly artisanal in nature, to having a growing set of standards and best practices that can be intentionally and consistently applied.
I suspect many people think of music and musicality in mystical or wishy-washy terms, but by using this same concept of patterns, we can identify and catalogue a whole class of music patterns related to piano practice, technique, musicality, composition, etc.