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…
It can be clear to a newcomer that a system has problems without needing to understand everything, or even very much. Sometimes the newcomer is wrong, but a quick scan of the comments here indicate that a number of musicians agree.
Music theory for nerds
191–200 of 390 posts
Re: Music theory for nerds
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps it is genuinely useful? Music is an interest of mine, but not an active obsession. I've learned songs I want to play only through tabs, because every time I attempted to learn sheet music online, I ran away out of the fear of the heavy fog that exists in most descriptions about sheet music. Not to mention insufferable smugness, much like wine and craft beer snobs, about how sheet music is superior. This gu…
While there are some interesting parts, you have to filter the absurds like "C Major and A Minor are the same thing"
That's where the discussion right here on HN is helping :)
One could argue that that is also a positive thing to have come out of the article having been written in the first place!
Re: Music theory for nerds
#193Earlier 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 for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it! As someone who majored in music composition, I have a very simple answer. I'd have some sort of idea in my head of what I wanted the music to sound like (or the emotion to evoke). Then I'd fiddly around for quite some time, discarding the things that didn't meet my criteria. That's sort…
> like "odd meters like 5/8 and 7/8 generally evoke intensity and tension" or "brass chorale in a major key sounds triumphant" or "gong crescendo roll is scary"
Can you recommend any books that teach these sorts of general rules, or the emotive feeling generally associated with different keys and modes?
Re: Music theory for nerds
#194This 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 did learn to sight-sing in high-school with a lot of effort (but I sucked at sight-reading on my main instrument, the piano) and I agree with the article writer.
When you read these sentences, you can very easily speak them out loud, you don't have to mouth each and every vowel to hear it in your head. This is not the case for music notation, even for very experienced musicians. The clue is that they associate notes not with sounds or intervals, but with absolute positions (fingerings, etc.) on their instrument. Maybe they can sight-read a melody with a little effort, but for most of them it will be much simpler to just play it - and this goes triple if it's not tonal and idiomatic for a style you know. Music notation is really a somewhat instrument-independent tabulature.
Solfege or numeric notation systems, which exist in many versions, are much better for reading in your head once you learn them. They're terrific for singers. But for instrumentalists, usually your instrument is already biased to certain keys, and going from notation->sound in your head->fingers would therefore be much harder than going straight from notation->fingers.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#195Earlier 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.
Is there an article/book/video anyone can recommend that explains the advantages of modern staff notation in terms that beginners can understand? In particular, I think everyone would agree that it's it's much harder for beginners to hunt and peck sheet music in modern staff notation than it is for a novice typist to type words on a QWERTY keyboard. (At least when the sheet music is written in any key except C major,…
> Can the beginner's question be answered, except by saying, "uh, trust me, it's great, just keep practicing"?
Basically: not really.
Musical notation... notates a bunch of stuff, not only pitches.
Unless you have a basic understanding of all the factors involved in reading and writing music, you won't be able to understand the choices fully, and you'll have to accept them.
TLDR: music notation needs to express the five qualities of sound: pitch, duration, loudness, intention and timbre. You can't just look at pitch.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#196If 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.
I've been teaching myself piano after someone gave me one.
Here's a great set of online lessons [1] (not free, costs about $20 per month if you put in your email address). The guy is really talented, and teaches non-classical stuff like pop, boogie woogie, etc. I'm super inspired by it!
I also found this [2] which does have free lessons and also looks good.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#197Why 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 ne…
I don't think the commentor is suggesting that music is an unworthy topic to be on the top, rather that the post is insufficiently insightful to be on the top.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#198Why 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…
Re: Music theory for nerds
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
As a computery person, what bothers me the most is the 1-based indexing of intervals. I get that music theory predates zero, but it makes it incredibly frustrating to work with (e.g. add a third to a fourth and you get a... sixth).
> (e.g. add a third to a fourth and you get a... sixth)
Better:
In equal temperament, log base two: add 4/12 to 5/12 and you get 9/12.
In ratios (depending on tuning, these could be loose approximations): multiply 5/4 by 4/3 and you get 5/3.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#200Why 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…
The whole thing reads like https://xkcd.com/793/