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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#71

Post by fenomas »

lohankin wrote: post #55
haberman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree very much with your post's thesis (you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.) Just noticed one thing: > For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament It doesn't seems surprising to me. If you start from a pitch and go upwards in both octaves and perfect fifths (2:1 and 3:2, the two most fundamental intervals)…

Interesting idea indeed. I need to think about it. Edit after thinking: still, it doesn't explain the number 12 IMO. It could be 17 or something else. Probably, it's a long chain of coincidences at play: Western music settled on 7-note scales long time ago (long before equal temperament was invented), and we should start looking for explanations from here. Another edit: one of the important coincidences is that numbe…

Quora (of all places) has some really good articles about this. Check for example the second answer in this page:

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-only-12-pitch-notes-C-C-...

Re: Music theory for nerds

#72

Post by ktRolster »

andy_ppp wrote: post #48
ketralnis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music theory is an accepted and used term of art for the category of things that this article talks about. There are courses, books, university departments, and degree programmes that use the term. Nobody is going to stop using it because you skimmed it but it doesn't describe some other thing that you think it should. Some examples: * http://www.music.msu.edu/areas-studios/music-theory * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Grand parent is saying he wants an article that covers the "why does music sound good" part of music theory, something I want too. I think most people have a basic grasp of notes, scales and that a middle C is air oscillating at 440 cycles per second. How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!

How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory

You need something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Alfreds-Essentials-Music-Theory-Self-...

It's not something you're going to learn in an afternoon or a weekend, it's hard work and Beethoven was still working on it at the end of his life.

Last month I spent an evening analyzing and discussing a passage of Rachmaninoff, trying to understand how he knew how to write a certain sequence.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#73

Post by sirtaj »

MrManatee wrote: post #64

The article says that the "human ear loves ratios", but doesn't dig deeper into why. Here's my two cents. First of all, let's focus on harmony (notes played at the same time) as opposed to melody (notes played one after another). What sounds good in a melody is quite culture-dependent, but there are reasons why harmony is more universal. Second, let's focus on sounds that are produced by something long and narrow. In…

Melody in the form of the pentatonic scale is much more universal across cultures, though. Use of non-trivial harmony is significantly less widespread, it's usually no more than a melody played over a single root tone or chord. South-Asian classical and folk music is one example in which Western-style harmony is not used at all.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#74

Post by rspeer »

lohankin wrote: post #68
rspeer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? The minor third is a 6:5 ratio. Does that change your mind? Where do your tones and semitones come from? You've just rejected the explanation for why we have a 12-tone scale (it is a local optimum of tuning, closed under the operation of transposition, that satisfies lots of nice ratios), so what do you propose instead? Saying "…

Please read wikipedia article on temperament. 7-note scales were "discovered" long before equal temperament was introduced. Equal temperament is a relatively recent invention, initially was very controversial, and remained so for a long time. In other cultures, there's still a variety of scales and temperaments that have nothing to do with 7-note scales at all. (Jazz uses variety of scales, too - some even with 2 sem…

This is exactly what I'm telling you. Why are you being condescending to me about it? You're the one claiming that the semitones of the 12-tone scale are some sort of fundamental axiom.

Why didn't you know where minor thirds come from?

Why do you seem to be denying that simple harmonic ratios are where harmony comes from? (EDIT: he's not, it's fine)

Why are you promoting a theory of music with absurd axioms, which manage to explain the octatonic scale (which almost nobody uses) better than the pentatonic scale (which almost everybody uses)? That's not a sign of a good theory.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#75

Post by dietrichepp »

robbrown451 wrote: post #39
dietrichepp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it has to be somewhat arbitrary. But it is nice that the relative minor of C, which is two steps down, is A. Otherwise you would have to go five steps up (from A to F, hypothetically, if A B C D E F G A were a major scale).

If C was called A, that wouldn't be particularly arbitrary. It would certainly make more sense for people learning music. The C major scale is universally agreed to be the simplest, most basic scale, so wouldn't it make more sense for it to be ABCDEFG, rather than CDEFGAB?

It has to be somewhat arbitrary, because both the minor and major scales are common. Only 40% of popular music today is written in a major key.

Maybe, yes, you still learn the C scale first, but you'll learn the A scale the next week. In the grand scheme of things if you are having problems remembering the names of notes then moving the keys over two steps is not going to make the necessary difference.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#76

Post by rspeer »

lohankin wrote: post #68
rspeer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? The minor third is a 6:5 ratio. Does that change your mind? Where do your tones and semitones come from? You've just rejected the explanation for why we have a 12-tone scale (it is a local optimum of tuning, closed under the operation of transposition, that satisfies lots of nice ratios), so what do you propose instead? Saying "…

Please read wikipedia article on temperament. 7-note scales were "discovered" long before equal temperament was introduced. Equal temperament is a relatively recent invention, initially was very controversial, and remained so for a long time. In other cultures, there's still a variety of scales and temperaments that have nothing to do with 7-note scales at all. (Jazz uses variety of scales, too - some even with 2 sem…

BTW, please read something like "Musimathics", it'll be better than trying to learn music theory from Wikipedia.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#77

Post by dietrichepp »

hexane360 wrote: post #36
dietrichepp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "perfect fifth away from the tonal". Do you mean tonic? Perfect fifths are easy to recognize, they're notes which are both on lines or both on spaces, and there is a small gap between them. Yes, you have to remember that one of the fifths is diminished, but only one of them. Meanwhile, all the thirds are easier to recognize, since they have the same spacing. I would love to see an altern…

Yes, I did mean tonic. Yes, it's easy to tell a fifth relative to the root of a chord. What I'm talking about is the chord relative to the tonic.

So, you're looking for relative chord names? Like IV V I? Can't you just write those above the staff?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#78

Post by Retra »

robbrown451 wrote: post #39
dietrichepp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it has to be somewhat arbitrary. But it is nice that the relative minor of C, which is two steps down, is A. Otherwise you would have to go five steps up (from A to F, hypothetically, if A B C D E F G A were a major scale).

If C was called A, that wouldn't be particularly arbitrary. It would certainly make more sense for people learning music. The C major scale is universally agreed to be the simplest, most basic scale, so wouldn't it make more sense for it to be ABCDEFG, rather than CDEFGAB?

>The C major scale is universally agreed to be the simplest, most basic scale

No, it's not. There is no such thing as a "simplest, most basic scale." That depends entirely on your arbitrary choice of notation and conventions.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#80

Post by jcurbo »

leafo wrote: post #26

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.

As someone self-teaching themselves piano, this is really fantastic. I already play drums but have no notion of what notes are what on a staff and piano keys and have been slowly teaching myself. The MIDI keyboard support really makes this stand out.
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