211–220 of 390 posts
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…
> 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…
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?
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…
Because it was voted to the top after being deemed interesting by HN users. Social boormarking website et al.
>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.
That's assuming otherwise keeping the same notation, which is totally against the point of the author.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I.e the music world's analogue to: "but of course you need to make XML configuration files for everything and FactoryFactorySingletons etc, that's how we do things in J2EE".
> C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both. Well, an orange and a carrot are the same color, but does that mean we don't need both? These two keys have the same signature, and that's it. To say they are identical is false. > I don’t know anything about music. You got that right. > I suppose it’s possible to change the sound of an entire piece of music just by changing the key signature…
> > I don’t know anything about music. > You got that right. This is gratuitous negativity. It adds nothing to your post except to emphasize disdain for the author. It's especially uncivil in response to the author's own statement of humility. This post would be better (and much more constructive) if you explained (or linked to an explanation of) how C major and A minor are different, or how the concept of modulation…
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 ne…
"I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it"
"I’m a bit out in the weeds from here on. C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both."
This is why it shouldn't be here. Too little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's good to be intrigued about things as you study them, but it's dangerous to start forming strong opinions and tearing them down when you don't have a solid foundation. I see this often on HN, in the form of, OOP sucks, Abstraction will kill you. I learned golang for a week and you should never use it...
I believe everyone should have a medium for expression and express themselves, the problem is that "newbies" to the topic sometimes read these highly opinionated posts and believe it to be the truth and get primed for the wrong information. I like music BTW and system programming too, yes, the musical notation is weird, but you have to dive in to grok it. It's like system programming, WTF is ioctl()? But dive in and it makes sense, accept it and move on, unless you can come up with better.
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…
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.
That's why this exists. There's a lot of cruft out there when you look for music theory that isn't what the HN crowd is interested in. The circle of fifths is useful but it isn't music theory, it's this magic thing without explanation that you're told to memorize in most expositions. The opening of this blog is a good, HN-oriented approach towards actually the theory behind music scales.
> 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).