Music theory for nerds • Hacker News Board

Re: Music theory for nerds

#341

Post by autarch » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 8:54 PM UTC

estefan wrote: post #193

autarch wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

AFAIK there are no such books. As for whether certain keys evoke certain emotions, that's highly debated other than "major happy, minor sad (other modes weird)".

The way I learned about how composition worked was mostly two things. One, listening to lots of music, ideally with the score in front of me so I could zoom in on some particular bit I really liked. Two, writing music and seeing how it turned out in practice.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#342

Post by MereKatMoves » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

robert_tweed wrote: post #318

MereKatMoves wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without trying to cite what currently happens in the UK, I think it is fair to say that kids are handed instruments like the recorder at a fairly early age, and those that do well are encouraged to progress. That's a sieving process for sure. When they get to secondary school, music as a subject is most often just a minor inconvenience in the curriculum to most pupils, and those who have ability are pushed into learn…

It's also interesting to compare and contrast the apparent results. The UK has a fairly long history of producing a far above average number of world-class musicians. France on the other hand seems to have a broader musical culture, or at least, so it seems in Paris during the Fête de la Musique .

I'm hesitant to afford any particular value to educational practices in this case. Let's take the specific musical skill of composition, which I believe is at the root of musical traditions in any country...

The French have a much richer and deeper musical tradition. For example the 'blood lines' of Renaissance Troubadours and Trouveres, or the French Operatic Style, to name a couple. English 'classical' music tradition had a golden age which had Tallis, Byrd and Dowland but kinda stopped with Purcell and didn't really flourish again until Elgar. Elgar himself was writing in an identifiably English way, but his language was very much based on the Germanic tradition (which been imprinted on the English style by the likes of Handel,Haydn,Schumann and Mendelssohn).

All that time, let's say broadly 1700-1900 the French were much closer to their own 'cutting edge' of musical development, although the Germanic style was still very much dominant throughout Europe. What the French had, was a progressive heritage that had somehow been preserved - Ravel and Debussy (the impressionist style) could only have come from France, which I think would relate to your reference to a broader musical culture.

Of course by the mid 20th Century, in Classical music at least, the French started leaping ahead of the UK again, with Stravinsky, Les Six, Satie and numerous others building a significant new tradition that still exists today through the legacies of Messiaen and Boulez. England had Britten, Vaughn Williams and few others of note.

I think the reason you see a broader base in French 'national' music (for example at la fete) is as much down to the fact that England produced and still does produce exemplary pop/rock with a worldwide market. The French pop culture is insular and that's a good thing IMHO because it maintains integrity and does not to attempt to compete in a global market that is pretty much a cultural vacuum these days.

As for the standard of professional performers, I think there isn't too much difference in numbers produced or quality. Being a pro musician is very hard and the attrition rates are not down to which country you make your career in.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by SwellJoe » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

nicky0 wrote: post #133

SwellJoe wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

Doesn't everyone learn Do-Re-Mi from "The Sound Of Music"?

Well, sure, but what's that got to do with actual music instruction and how musicians talk about music? Movies aren't always entirely accurate representations of the world, particularly on highly technical topics.

Knowing solfege because you heard it in a movie and using it on a daily basis in the process of teaching or making music are independent concepts.

Anyway, conversation here has brought it to my attention that it is still pretty common, there are some areas where it is useful (maybe even better than numbers, as in the singing and vocal training area; I personally have recognized the limitation of numbers when singing minor notes, for example), and that my own experience was only partly representative of music pedagogy in the US and elsewhere. That said, when I'm teaching people about music, I still plan to only use numbers...the areas where solfege would be useful are pretty advanced, and require more than watching Sound of Music to understand.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by jacobolus » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #339

jacobolus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intervals in a 7-note scale inherently don’t add up like that, because they’re not based on even divisions. So regardless we need to have 12 different named intervals for various numbers of semitones: For instance, “minor second”, “major second”, “minor third”, “major third”, “perfect fourth”, “augmented fourth”, “perfect fifth”, “minor sixth”, “major sixth”, “minor seventh”, “major seventh”, “octave”. Reducing a…

> Reducing all those ordinal numbers by one really doesn’t help all that much. You still have to remember how the “minor” and “major” labels interact for every interval in the scale, which is a horribly confusing mess. Those interactions are pretty intuitive. Where defined, major + minor = perfect (considering an octave as perfect), perfect + major/minor = major/minor. As long as you remember which notes exist, you c…

They’re not remotely “intuitive”. They only make sense to someone with years of training.

If instead you used digits from –5 to 6, using arithmetic mod 12, it becomes obvious that e.g.:

  -2 + -3 = -5
  4 + 3 = -5
  5 + 5 = -2
  -5 + -1 = 6
  4 + -3 = 1
  etc.

The “perfect” intervals are just ±5 (ratios very close to 3:2 and 4:3). The “major” intervals are –3, –1, 2, 4 (approx. ratios of 5:3, 15:8, 9:8, 5:4). The “minor” intervals are –4, –2, 1, 3 (approx. ratios of 8:5, 16:9, 16:15, 6:5).

Then it’s easy to see that your “major + minor = perfect” formula only works for some intervals, Etc. Overall the simple heuristics are more obfuscatory than helpful IMO.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by Ericson2314 » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #291

Ericson2314 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default the next note is half as long as the previous. But sometimes that's inconvenient. For example 9/8 is usually 3-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2... A bar is devided into 3 dotted quarters and a dotted quarter into 3 8ths, and anything further down is split in half as is normal.

Oh that sounds great, but very difficult to read/play

Sometimes when there's a bunch of triplets the editor will just write "simile" and drop the triplet notation.

This could work like that and only the time signature would need a brand new notation, so no I don't think it would be super hard to read.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by dequis » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

buzzybee wrote: post #158

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…

eevee seems to be a relatively popular writer, however I became less enamored with the persona as I realized that a lot of the work on display is shoot-from-the-hip hot takes, a smattering of summarized research minus the essential components of appreciation, concrete experience, asking for directions, or admitting "I might be wrong". I expect this kind of thing from sophomore CS students, not a blogger who presumabl…

>or admitting "I might be wrong"

The post left open questions all over the place and the introduction states this very clearly:

>I stress that I don’t know anything about music and this post is terrible. If you you so much as know how to whistle, please don’t read this you will laugh at me.

Maybe there may be other posts where you could complain about a lack of humility, but this is not that one.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by brunorsini » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 12:40 AM UTC

_9nob wrote: post #337

brunorsini wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be pegged on what current controllers can do... And that's exactly what I am saying: they often suck! But they can improve and I am confident they will. When I am learning a brand new instrument I can literally feel my brain knowing exactly what I want to do way before my fingers/mouth/feet are able to perform the task at hand. How is this not an interface problem? With button controllers the best you'll…

Once you actually practice a physical instrument for a reasonable amount of time things like the concept of "memorizing where the minor 7th is" quickly become non issues - the only memorization involved is that of your muscles i.e. the cognitive load is essentially nonexistent. Involving more parts of your body than your cognition is one of the joys of playing a physical instrument, versus pressing a button and think…

I play several! But of course I'm not proficient in all of them, which is the whole point. There isn't an "universal controller" that is expressive enough across a variety of timber types... Yet if that existed one could master one interface and do a lot more musically with that acquired skill.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by brunorsini » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 12:43 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #307

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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." But the degrees of freedom of conventional instruments are severely limited compared to what is possible. Let us also recall that every "conventional instrument" was at one time not only unconventional, but e…

Let us also recall that every "conventional instrument" was at one time not only unconventional, but even radically new.

Amen.

Thanks for sharing the talk! I'm a proud owner of one of those keyboards he is playing, a ROLI Seaboard. It is indeed an amazingly expressive, fantastic product

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by Ericson2314 » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 1:07 AM UTC

zhemao wrote: post #333

Ericson2314 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of it hasn't been researched very mathematically, to my knowledge. If you google music+grammar you can get some stuff with a linguistic approach, which may be less empirically grounded but certainly a richer theory than the alternatives. And don't get me wrong, science is good but as musician mathematician a richer theory that overreaches reality is much more fun, and besides most of this stuff is cultur…

> Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Form, Timbre I think dynamics (or at least dynamic contrast) is also an important element. > Timbre is the easiest to appreciate due to its lack of rich structure It does have a rich structure, we just don't really understand it yet. Timbre is essentially the linear combination of harmonics of a single pitch. You could express it as a Fourier series. But we don't have a good model of how to…

Fourier analysis indicates there is a huge space of timbre, but not necessarily a rich one. In my experience while timbres can be annoying, they aren't wrong like a an arbitrary harmonic progression is. Harmony being such a minefield is what makes its space so rich.

Re: Music theory for nerds

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Post by acjohnson55 » Tue, Sep 20, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #340

acjohnson55 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in my reading, it never seems that there was a compelling reason to chose Aeolian vs. Dorian as the definitive "minor". I think it's largely because common practice evolved to much more frequently approach the tonic from below instead of above. That would favor harmonic minor over Dorian. I suspect that this is because it allows for very similar cadences as major keys.

I think a lot of the time (in a jazz context) the chords are approached as almost individual elements or as part of a small "local" progression instead of in the context of the global key of the song, since the key could be changing as often as every couple bars. In the case of a common minor progression: B-E7alt-Am7 the major third of the dominant chord is the same note as the major 7 in the harmonic minor scale of…

That's wild. Jazz blows my mind!

I've heard it said that it's fundamentally actually very tonal, in the sense that the underlying progressions are typically 2-5-1. Which has always been hard for me to imagine :), but I guess it simply dispenses with the slavish dedication to a particular scale of the tonic. "A Geometry of Music", which I've linked to elsewhere in this thread, digs into jazz practice a lot.