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Music theory for nerds

eev.ee

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#171

Post by clentaminator »

ludston wrote: post #28
hardmath123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

With Hummingbird's inclusion of a trailing line as part of the indicator of note duration you also have to read ahead in the score and then jump back if you want to use the trailing line to identify the duration, which is a lot harder than just identifying by local information in the form of a set of note tails and whether or not a note is filled in. While there are additional parts to the glyphs for half and whole notes, these aren't the dominant part of the symbol.

Another question is whether or not the length of a trailing line is absolute or relative to the bar itself.

On the subject of filled notes, Hummingbird is also conveying a lot of information that for performance of a score is useless. Note letters (A-G) aren't actually important for performance, only the action or position that they map to for each instrument. No musician parses a score and translates each note to a letter and then each letter to an action, instead going directly from note to action.

Essentially, telling you the note letter with a glyph shape on top of the position on the stave is adding noise to the signal.

I'll admit I'm coming at it from a position where I'm perfectly comfortable with traditional notation, so part of the reason that it appears difficult is simply because it's unfamiliar, however the terseness of traditional notation and ability to read in one "parse" without forward- and back-skipping seems to give it the advantage.

That and over 300 years of existing music, too ;)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#172

Post by ccozan »

lohankin wrote: post #53
BurningFrog wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot like why the QWERTY keyboard remains dominant.

No, it's not the same. Current music notation is a result of long evolution, unlike QWERTY. Try to invent usable alternative - then you will appreciate the convenience of current notation.

What are you talking there? Qwerty is indeed not that old as the musical notation but it is ~150 years old, and it was invented for the typing machines in order to avoid jams, so it does have some history and evolution [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY

Re: Music theory for nerds

#173

Post by skrebbel »

arnarbi wrote: post #145

Why is this at the top of HN? While the author is right that western music notation has shortcomings, almost none of the (admittedly poorly understood) reasons they list are a factor in that. > [Key signatures] completely obscure the relationship between the pitches, though. Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be ve…

> Why is this at the top of HN?

What the ..? Because it's a cool blog post of course! It carefully and clearly explains things the author understands about music (in a much better way than I've seen before), and then clearly and carefully goes on to describe and comment on some things the authors doesn't understand as well.

Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming. I've never seen a comment like yours on top of an HN thread about any of her posts. What's going on, somehow because this is about music and not programming we need to get all pedantic?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#174

Post by skrebbel »

I'd like to elaborate a bit, in the same "for nerds" manner, on where Eevee seems to get lost a bit with scales and notation. He (she? not sure) calls the A minor and C major scales the same, because they contain the same notes. That's not an odd thought, but it's like calling sine and cosine the same because both functions contain the same set of values, in the same order.

The difference is phase. Basically, scales aren't just an ordered set of notes, they also have a starting point. This note, the note the scale is named after, is often the last note of a tune played in that scale, and often the first too (especially for more poppy tunes). So if you play Für Elise in C major, like Eevee suggests, the entire melody will be pitched 3 semitones higher than playing Für Elise in A major. And it'll sound awkward because you're supposed to play it on a minor scale.

Once you understand this, the whole notation thing makes a lot more sense as well.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#175

Post by metachris »

arnarbi wrote: post #145

Why is this at the top of HN? While the author is right that western music notation has shortcomings, almost none of the (admittedly poorly understood) reasons they list are a factor in that. > [Key signatures] completely obscure the relationship between the pitches, though. Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be ve…

It's top of HN because a lot of people find a physical/technical introduction interesting...

Re: Music theory for nerds

#176

Post by karlb »

Many musicians much better than me are surprised at how I can play a song just by hearing it on the radio. My breakthrough came from understanding music was realizing that the real “meaning” of a note lies in its position relative to the tonic note (e,g, I-II-II, etc, also written do-re-mi). Suddenly, almost all of the clutter was removed, and the problem became manageable.

Let's consider the three-note tune “do, re, mi”. If that tune were played in the key of C, it would become C-D-E. If it were played in G, it would become G-A-B. But in either case, it's the same tune but with each frequency increased by the same percentage.

Trying to understand music by understanding the letters is like trying to read in a world where every article has been enciphered into a different “key”: e.g., the word "cab" in “the key of A” (the alphabet we normally use) would be written as "dbc" if the article were written in “the key of B”. In the latter case, you could discern meaning only once you realised that the letter “d” represented the third letter of the alphabet. There's nothing meaningful about a “d” but there is something meaningful about a “4th letter of the alphabet”.

Once you start to “decipher” all music into I, II, III, IV, V, etc., the complexity becomes manageable. You can start to learn to recognize the sound of a III note, or of a VI minor chord. After all, there are only eight notes in the major scale.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#177

Post by fenomas »

SwellJoe wrote: post #118
zeta0134 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, and learn Solfege. If you're a musician, you already know these things in principal, even if you don't know the words or the terminology. In particular, you should be able to "hear" the distance between Do-Mi-Sol without too much difficulty, because you hear those distances in music a lot." I believe the Solfege named intervals (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do) are only taught as a historical oddity…

Exact opposite for me. I learned do-re-me as a kid and then ever saw it again, until I started reading about music theory recently. Then I saw it a lot - e.g. voice leading rules saying that a voice must start from Do and end on a ti-do step, etc.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#178

Post by rodgerd »

blake8086 wrote: post #130
theseoafs wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this over again, it seems like the author's not yet fully wrapped their mind around "big picture" stuff like keys, chords, basic compositional structure, etc. It's an... interesting choice to write a piece proclaiming that musical notation is absurd when you're only a beginner.

If a beginner can't immediately grasp musical notation, isn't that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd?

So if you can't read Italian after a half-arsed effort to learn it, is this proof Italian is broken?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#179

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

brunorsini wrote: post #144

In case anyone is searching for a really smart, modern method for learning music theory, this is it: https://www.hooktheory.com The author devised his own system for visually representing notes, it makes it much easier to understand things like scale degrees and relative notation (and thus the theory around famous harmonies, melodies, etc). I think music tools are in desperate need for improvement... Starting with no…

No, instruments really don't. The point of conventional instruments is that once you learn them - which takes years - you can instantly express almost any musical idea using all the possible degrees of freedom available on that instrument.

With something like Ableton Push, you're one step removed from the sound generation, because you're triggering automata with a very limited expressive repertoire. (With Push, it's often just a triggered sample, which has almost no expressive potential at all.)

You can change keys instantly on a piano. You can play any chord you can get your fingers around, in any inversion, using any voicing, with fine control of the relative level of each note in the chord.

With button controllers the best you'll get is one chord per button with no fine shading of levels, no control over inversions or voicings, and so on.

It's absolutely fine to make music like this, but it's not fine to demand that all music be made like this.

Controllers like Push are good for performing effects - filter sweeps, and such - which aren't possible on a keyboard. But that's a different skill to learning scales, and much more expressively limited.

Electronic art forms generally are more rigid and less expressive than non-mechanised media. In theory you should be able to do more, but in practice no one has cracked the problem of building high-bandwidth expressive automata that are as physically responsive and open as traditional instruments/media.

Aesthetically, that can be a problem. A lot of machine-assisted art is either chaotic and formless, or formulaic and repetitive. The best classical music and classical performance lives in an expressive and creative sweet spot between those extremes, and it's incredibly hard to hit that spot with machine assistance.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#180

Post by rodgerd »

arnarbi wrote: post #145

Why is this at the top of HN? While the author is right that western music notation has shortcomings, almost none of the (admittedly poorly understood) reasons they list are a factor in that. > [Key signatures] completely obscure the relationship between the pitches, though. Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be ve…

> Why is this at the top of HN?

It's catnip for the part of the HN audience who thinks:

1/ I am smart at computers and basic maths, so I must be smart on an absolute scale.

2/ I can't understand this easily, so therefor it is obviously broken.

Much like "timezones are hard, therefore wrong", "why should I learn other human languages, they don't work like I expect", "running a society is harder than telling a computer what to do, so people are stupid".

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