Philosophy · The Answer Is 42

Why 42? The Answer Was Always There

From Dead Sea Scales: The 5 Missing Notes™ by Christopher Dean

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer called Deep Thought spent 7.5 million years calculating the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

42

Nobody understood it. After millions of years of computing, they’d forgotten the question. The answer was correct. The context was gone.

Music Theory Has the Same Problem

We started with 7 notes. Pythagoras derived them from the perfect 5th around 300 BCE. For centuries, that was the complete system. Then someone added B♭. Then the other 4 black keys. Then key signatures. Then clefs. Then figured bass. Then Roman numeral analysis. Then Schenkerian analysis. Then set theory. Then Nashville numbers. Then chord charts. Then tablature. Then YouTube tutorials. Then $15/month subscription apps that teach “modes” through gamification without ever explaining where modes come from.

A thousand years of adding variables. Every generation added another layer of how on top of the original why. To the point where a kid picks up a guitar in 2024, Googles “what scales should I learn,” and gets 47 conflicting answers, 12 different charts, and a Reddit thread arguing about whether Dorian is really just a minor scale.

The Answer

The major scale uses 7 of 12 possible notes. The 5 remaining notes are not accidents — each one is the gateway to an entire family of scales. 5 families × 7 modes = 35 extended modes + 7 originals = 42.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a forced reference. It’s the actual math. 7 + 35 = 42. The answer to music was always there. We just forgot the question.

The Question

The question was never “what scales should I learn?” or “what mode goes over a minor chord?” or “how do I sound more jazzy?”

The question was: “What are the 12 notes, how are they organized, and why do they sound the way they do?”

7 notes. 5 missing. 42 modes. 10 operations. 2,048 combinations. 1 parent scale. That’s the answer. And like Deep Thought’s answer, it only makes sense if you remember the question.

The 5 Missing Notes™ didn’t come from a theory textbook. They came from the same place the black keys came from: a musician who heard something missing and refused to ignore it.

— Christopher Dean, Dead Sea Scales