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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#21

Post by princeb »

zeta0134 wrote: post #14
analog31 wrote: post #4

This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. Indeed. I'm a musician, and something non-musicians often ask (especially techies, it seems) is why we use such an archaic notation system. The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading which is the ability to perform a composition directly from a written sheet, with little or no rehearsal.…

I can sight read for winds and voice, but not for Piano, despite being able to play Piano relatively well. Thus, this explanation will probably apply mostly to single-voice musicians. 1. Find Do. This is the first note of the Major scale in the key which you are playing. Find it on the page, and burn it into your mind; everything you're about to do centers on the location of Do. In the key of C (white keys on a piano…

> 2. Learn your intervals

> 4c. Get a good feel for common jumps

i think that's why the current system works so well. most musicians have intervals burned into their muscles. to use an excel reference, reading R1C1 from the staves is much faster than reading A1, because you can read R1C1 from any line in the staves.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#22

Post by jacobolus »

princeb wrote: post #3

if you were hoping for a nerdy treatise on musical rhythm, harmony, form, cadences, sequences and motifs, and evolution from baroque to classical to romantic to modern... well this is not it. edit: just a comment about the temperament- before the octave was equally tempered intervals were rational fractions of the root. after the equal temperament was developed instruments could go across different keys without sound…

Well temperament is not the same as equal temperament. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

The whole point of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier music is that tunes transposed to different keys sounded different, so you needed to compose the music specifically for each key.

There’s some ongoing musicological debate about the details, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier

Re: Music theory for nerds

#23

Post by tux1968 »

andrepd wrote: post #8

TLDR: a person who knows nothing about music or music theory gripes about music and music theory. Admittedly knows nothing, right off the bat and several times throughout the text. How can you declare something to be "terrible", "the worst notation for anything ever", and so forth if you admittedly know nothing of the subject? I know nothing about databases, would reading the Wikipedia page on NoSQL entitle me to dec…

Interesting objection. To my eye it read as relatively humble and playfully thoughtful.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#25

Post by pdkl95 »

andrepd wrote: post #10
analog31 wrote: post #4

This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. Indeed. I'm a musician, and something non-musicians often ask (especially techies, it seems) is why we use such an archaic notation system. The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading which is the ability to perform a composition directly from a written sheet, with little or no rehearsal.…

>why we use such an archaic notation system. The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.

> nobody has managed to propose a better one

A new notation system will need to be a lot better to justify the change, because there is also a lot of value in compatibility with everything that already exists.

I'm not sure a sufficiently better system exists, because as you say, the traditional notation works. It has its quirks and rough corners, but music is complicated enough that any system would probably have similar imperfections.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#26

Post by leafo »

If anyone is interested in learning to read music, I've been slowly building a tool to practice: http://sightreading.training/

source is here (built in react, es6): https://github.com/leafo/mursicjs

It's still lacking a lot (like rhythm), but the different generators definitely give my brain a workout. It works best if you hook up a midi keyboard.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#27

Post by hexane360 »

dietrichepp wrote: post #20

> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like t…

I think the "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches" is more about the relationship to the tonal than anything else. A note a full step above the tonal sounds the same in any key. When first glancing at a piece of music, the relationship is obscured; to tell something is a perfect fifth from the tonal, you first need to recognize the tonal.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#28

Post by ludston »

hardmath123 wrote: post #13
andrepd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why we use such an archaic notation system. The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.

One attempt was Hummingbird. http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com

Which in durations are represented spacially, which in my opinion has two negative effects.

The first is that spacial recognition takes more effort than symbol recognition, because it's comparative.

The second, and more important being that complex sequences of notes will be very dense on the page, and simple sequences of notes will take up a lot of space on the page, so suddenly there is a tradeoff between having sheet music that doesn't take 10 pages, and having enough space to represent hemi-demi-semiquaver sequences when they inevitably appear somewhere.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#29

Post by ektimo »

I've skimmed a lot of articles on music "theory" but none of them provide anything like what I'm looking for. A music theory should explain:

1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted?

2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions?

3. How could you write a program to pick out music that people find especially good (versus music that has surface similarities)?

In other words, why does a particular sequence of sounds A, B, C lead to a mental state M that has particular internal qualities?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#30

Post by gtani »

Interested to see where this goes. The 5 blogs/books cited at the end look especially interesting.

I never thought about music notation until i learned guitar. Previous to that i was "gifted" years of lessons in piano, woodwinds and percussion, and reading treble clef was easy. I never tried to read sheet music in guitar books because i never had to, i just read tabs and played. Besides some classical books and jazz books by Berklee profs and others (Leavitt, Martino, Goodrick), there's very few guitar books that don't have tabs.

So you could argue that's a notation. You could also say that FL piano rolls and renoise timelines (what OP is trialling) are notations, as are lead sheets and chords charts in Nashville format (the Roman numerals like ii-V-I you see all over the place). They're sufficient for people to play music, they happen to be dynamically typed and GC'd vs static typed and manually alloc'd

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