"C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both."
Cringe. If I understand nothing of some subject, I would do well to just shut my mouth about it.
Music theory for nerds
201–210 of 390 posts
Re: Music theory for nerds
#202Why 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 think people with experience in the field are just annoyed with her poorly-conceived assertions at the end, e.g. "This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever." rather than pedantry.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#203> I suppose it’s possible to change the sound of an entire piece of music just by changing the key signature, but does anyone actually do that?
Much more interestingly, this touches on the reason why different pieces were given keys at all by their composers (think "foo in B flat minor by Chopin").
Musical instruments have to be tuned to a particular key. This is because of the frequency ratios: the circle of fifths is a lie, (3/2)^N != 2^M for any N and M, you can't be an in-tune fourth in one key and third in another, the frequency values are slightly off.
Thus, some instruments (e.g. Piano) are tuned to be in C, and the other keys sound different played on that instrument, because the ratios are slightly different. Other instruments are in B flat (e.g. Trumpet) and the combination of them with C-tuned instruments sounds interesting. Indeed, stringed instruments are tuned to N different keys where N = number of strings!
The mathematics of music is so cool, I found the dismissive tone in the article to be quite unnecessary and irritating.
EDIT: thanks to replies informing me that I'm wrong about instrument tuning. This means I've been tuning my guitars wrong all these years!
REEDIT: but perhaps I'm right about old-school music with a key in the name? Since instruments would have been tuned with a tuning fork and then harmonics pre-20th century according to one reply.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#204> 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…
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Re: Music theory for nerds
#205Why 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…
Exactly! Why would you write a blog post about something with you -- admittedly! -- know nothing about, and to rant and gripe, no less! Boggles the mind.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#206"C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both." Cringe. If I understand nothing of some subject, I would do well to just shut my mouth about it.
In fairness, the author said " I don’t understand why we need both", and not "We don't need both".
Re: Music theory for nerds
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Indeed the difference between C major and A minor is the only really interesting thing I learned out of this post.
Which is great! That's why i read HN basically.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#208Why 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…
As a geek and a formerly classically trained musician, I found it interesting to see how a geek discovers musical conventions.
I think his post raises interesting questions about western music's discoverability, something developers should be interested about.
And I believe, having spent a lot of time with many western classical musicians, that this poor discoverability is in part appreciated and encouraged by many professionals. When I read about the Sokal affair, about some humanities academic hiding their dubious competences and relevance behind some cryptic mumbo-jumbo, I first thought of my musical theory lectures.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#209This 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 think you sum it up pretty well. As a techie who has never understood music, and who is fascinated by watching my own kids learn and understand music theory (something I was never exposed to as a child), I found this an interesting article.
Clearly history, culture, notation and reproduction technology have all conspired to produce a certain flawed, but accepted, jargon that you just have to bite the bullet and learn. If we could start again using colours, numbers, augmented reality, etc., then it seems obvious we could come up with a better system, but that would be tantamount to proscribing a new alphabet, or telling everyone to start using base-16.
Re: Music theory for nerds
#210Why 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…
> Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be very confusing as the regular scale notes would be marked with accidentals. Presumably, they have in mind to straightforwardly eliminate BOTH key signatures and accidental markers; e.g., a staff in which adjacent positions are always one semitone apart, and all pitches and in…
A staff with a separate line or space for every semitone would probably be pretty unreadable, and the places corresponding to non-scale tones would go mostly unused in most music. Besides, the key signature at the start is very useful to any experienced musician as it immediately tells them how the piece is supposed to be played. You can think of it as a header that tells you how the rest of the notation should be interpreted.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all that the common Western staff has five lines and four spaces - it's a small enough number that subitizing [0] is possible. After all, the notation has evolved to be convenient to those who need to read or write sheet music, even though it might look weird to a layman.