[fc417fc802]

That's an excellent comparison and it raises an interesting question. When cooking a basic understanding of chemistry techniques will generally prove quite useful but when it comes to music I'm not so sure about math. Maybe some electronic artists who write their own tools?

[TheOtherHobbes]

There are features described with math, but if you try to approach music purely as math it evaporates.

DSP uses a lot of actual math for processing and synthesis. But trad music's chords, rhythms, melodies, and forms are linguistic grammars that can be annotated mathematically after they're defined.

The creation process isn't mathematical. Composers are always making choices from possibilities, and the choices rely on subjective taste.

With Coltrane there a lot of similar structures he could have used, and likely experimented with.

But he picked this particular one for subjective creative reasons.

[Pay08]

I'm certainly no chef, and am only somewhat familiar with one particular side of chemistry (physical chemistry) but I don't see how it would be useful in cooking. Unless you count boiling water as chemistry.

[fc417fc802]

The logic behind organic extractions, the temperatures at which different things oxidize or otherwise degrade, the temperature dependence of reaction kinetics (it's nonlinear which is incredibly important when you want one thing but not another), the thermal transfer characteristics of different materials and configurations, all sorts of stuff. The actual "doing" in cooking and baking is figuratively 95% chemistry (and 5% biology) even if the goal is different.

You don't see as much of that mindset in the mainstream of the layman but it's how all industrial processing is done. As an arbitrary example, given a process involving yeast you can construct time vs temp vs moisture vs salt curves to model its behavior.