Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 understa…
Music theory for nerds
91–100 of 390 posts
Re: Music theory for nerds
#92> It completely obscures the relationship between the pitches, though. It doesn't actually obscure the relationship between the notes -- it makes them clearer. For example, I see the notes C, E, and G on some sheet music, maybe with some accidentals on some of those notes. I know that I'm therefore supposed to play a C triad. Now, there are multiple kinds of triads, but once I know I'm supposed to play a triad, it's…
Not to mention that A minor is generally considered to contain two additional notes compared to the A natural minor scale (AKA the A Aeolian mode).
Re: Music theory for nerds
#93I'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…
> 1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted? Why do we like text when read forward, but not backward or inverted? There are, of course, works that are palindromic or otherwise written to be read/heard backwards, but most of the time that kind of global transformation tends to ruin the "spelling"/"narrative". > 2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions? Just like text, evoking emo…
Actually, great composers such as Beethoven and Bach and Chopin had very definite ideas about what emotions are evoked by certain keys. They even argued about it with their peers. Music is not something that is reducible to mere quanta and waves and frequency. You all are missing the human part. Sorry, but it's true.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a lot like why the QWERTY keyboard remains dominant.
Yeah, it would be really hard to change all the millions of documents written with QWERTY.
It'd still probably be hard to convert thousands of existing computer keyboards to anything else. Every keyboard at every school, office, home, etc.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#95> It completely obscures the relationship between the pitches, though. It doesn't actually obscure the relationship between the notes -- it makes them clearer. For example, I see the notes C, E, and G on some sheet music, maybe with some accidentals on some of those notes. I know that I'm therefore supposed to play a C triad. Now, there are multiple kinds of triads, but once I know I'm supposed to play a triad, it's…
Not to mention that A minor is generally considered to contain two additional notes compared to the A natural minor scale (AKA the A Aeolian mode).
Well, two _or_ one. The melodic (two) and harmonic (one) minor scales.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 understa…
Or http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-music.html
That may be a very good book, but I'll be honest, it doesn't look like a very gentle introduction.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#97Earlier 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…
The number 12 is just a coincidence, that 3^12 = 531441 ≈ 524288 = 2^19
This means that 3/2 ≈ 2^(7/12) [accurate to about 0.1%]
And also 4/3 ≈ 2^(5/12) [also accurate to about 0.1%]
And also 9/8 = (3/2) / (4/3) ≈ 2^(2/12) [accurate to about 0.2%; putting two factors of 3 in makes the approximation only half as good]
You also get another nice coincidence, that 5^3 = 125 ≈ 128 = 2^7
This means that 5/4 ≈ 2^(4/12) [accurate to about 1%]
There are some people who have written music in a 41-note equal tempered scale, because then you get an even better approximation to the 3/2 ratio:
3^41 = 36472996377170786403 ≈ 36893488147419103232 = 2^65
(3/2) ≈ 2^(24/41) [accurate to about 0.03%]
Re: Music theory for nerds
#98No two Musicians take the same path to learning music.
I enjoyed this perspective. Particularly the focus on sine wave theory and frequencies (which also serves Audio Engineering).
Quite a departure from the traditional rhythm, melody, harmony, and form framework. But it works :)
Re: Music theory for nerds
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not learning it from wikipedia. I'm playing for 50+ years. Best resource is Jazz Piano Book by M.Levine. (I read lots of others, but... everything I learned, I learned from this one).
Re: Music theory for nerds
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing I most want to change is how time signatures are notated: I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.
That works, and would be an improvement, so long as your rhythms are based on constant integer subdivisions. It's possible (and fun) to play music where the rhythmic structure changes smoothly and continuously. But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate, so music cultures that depend on notation or oral communication have left this territory largely unexplored. The handful of classi…
> But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate
It's really easy to orally communicate. You can just sing it!
(I know what you mean, is it's difficult to describe using a computer keyboard. Using a pen and paper it is really easy, given that you can just draw notes and time signature changes in the margin.)