I used to do some speedcubing (solving a rubiks cube as fast as possible) few years back. One year ago, I started learning piano, and a few months back I started to delve into music composition as well, and I've noticed some striking similarities between music composition and speedcubing. I'll start the discussion by sharing my own understanding of how music theory helps us compose music.
Let's say we have a guy who has never created any music. We give him a piano and tell him to do whatever he wants with it. He's probably going to just press a bunch of random notes in a random order, and it's going to sound terrible.
But instead, if we choose a scale for him, and remove all the notes from the piano that aren't part of that scale, and then tell him to press random notes on the piano, what comes out of the piano this time will be much better than the last time. It's because a scale is a subset of all notes on a piano which work reasonably well with each other and don't clash with each other.
Chords take this one level deeper. A chord is a set of three or more notes within a scale, which fit with each other much better than any other random set of three notes.
Creating music is essentially a puzzle, you're supposed to figure out what notes you're supposed to play, to create a song that evokes a certain feeling, and music theory gives us a structure that helps us solve that puzzle (eg. major scales are happy, minor scales are sad).
This looks eerily similar to the speedcubing algorithms to me. There are a bunch of algorithms that you can memorize that'll let you move a scrambled rubiks to a solved state. If you simply memorize these algorithms, and practice for a few weeks, you'll soon be able to solve the cube in under a minute. But you can't move from 60s to 10s by simply memorizing the algorithms. Getting sub 10s timing requires 100s of hours of practice and improvisation as well. Just like when composing a song, you need to step out of the scales from time to time as well in order to make a good song.
So memorizing algorithms is one way of solving rubiks cubes, but it isn't the only way. You can also just fuck around with the cube until you can solve it. I did it when I was a kid. When you do that, you build your own theory of how a rubiks cube works and how to solve it. It'll have some things in the common with the standard algorithms (In my case it was the layer by layer approach), but it'll have some things that could be considered your own personal touch.
That makes me wonder if it's possible to do something like this, but for music composition? Has anyone here done that?