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A study of musical scales (2017)

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Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#21

Post by tsegratis »

exporectomy wrote: post #3

A bit of a tangent, but what I always found confusing about music theory is which parts are arbitrary historical legacy and which are fundamental to human enjoyment of music. 12 notes in a scale? Their particular frequencies? That whole multiplying and dividing business? Why the letters are in the wrong order. Why have sharps and flats instead of just more letters? I always get stuck wondering how much of this is jus…

I think @votingNNN answered you well. The sharps and flats are because the majority of music stays within the scale -- particularly for the singing monks not in front of a piano. So they hear and consider the scale and notes falling outside of that sound wrong i.e. they sound sharp or flat

Sharp and flat are only needed when moving outside or between scales, or using "fixed do", like modern western sheet music does with sharps and flats. Here is a discussion of the benefits

https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/41764/solfege-fixe...

For the record i prefer and use a numbered tin kay method like the article (but starting from zero rather than one), because it lets me abstractly consider what im playing, in much the same way as the above article

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#22

Post by VortexDream »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #12

We get a post like this every couple of weeks, it seems. Given the audience here, I understand the impulse - it's very fun to see the structure, and it really helps you understand the framework upon which a lot of western music is built. But beware that this is not a way to actually understand what is interesting or compelling about "music", because you'll notice that the first step in all these articles is to reduce…

I don't understand the complaint here. The author writes music. He made this analysis out of curiosity and because he loves music. Isn't this perfect HN content?

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#23

Post by tsegratis »

tsegratis wrote: post #21
exporectomy wrote: post #3

A bit of a tangent, but what I always found confusing about music theory is which parts are arbitrary historical legacy and which are fundamental to human enjoyment of music. 12 notes in a scale? Their particular frequencies? That whole multiplying and dividing business? Why the letters are in the wrong order. Why have sharps and flats instead of just more letters? I always get stuck wondering how much of this is jus…

I think @votingNNN answered you well. The sharps and flats are because the majority of music stays within the scale -- particularly for the singing monks not in front of a piano. So they hear and consider the scale and notes falling outside of that sound wrong i.e. they sound sharp or flat Sharp and flat are only needed when moving outside or between scales, or using "fixed do", like modern western sheet music does w…

Interestingly the underground Chinese church uses a method called tin kay for teaching worship piano. For instance all major chords are represented as 047

And if a beginner counts their piano keys, just with those three numbers, they can now play all major chords. Add 037 and they can now play all minor chords

This vastly beats memorizing each key combo for each scale

This method came from asking God for a revelation on how to teach piano, and they attribute it to Him

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#24

Post by tsegratis »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timbres of almost all (pleasant) physical instruments, including the human voice, make octaves and fifths (1/2 and 1/3 frequency ratios) important (and pleasant) intervals (the clarinet is a rare exception where the twelfth is the important interval, but even then that's an octave plus a fifth - music intervals use 1-based indexing which is definitely historical legacy). The circle of fifths and equal-temperament…

> with microtone tuning you reach a point where people will hear beats instead of distinct tones) That's a fantastic notion. Music consists of rhythm melody and harmony. Harmony is created by relations of frequencies. But Rhythm itself IS a frequency, and there can be several overlapping rhythms in a piece of music. Melodic steps are also ratios between frequencies, but pieces of melody also repeat in a piece of musi…

True. Much of the above article's analysis of scales applies equally well to an analysis of rhythm, and the circle-bead diagrams for scales he uses are still the best pictograph method ive seen to get a visual impression of a beat over a single bar

-- bar a.k.a. scale

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#25

Post by rollcat »

exporectomy wrote: post #3

A bit of a tangent, but what I always found confusing about music theory is which parts are arbitrary historical legacy and which are fundamental to human enjoyment of music. 12 notes in a scale? Their particular frequencies? That whole multiplying and dividing business? Why the letters are in the wrong order. Why have sharps and flats instead of just more letters? I always get stuck wondering how much of this is jus…

If you feel like the other commenters clarified anything for you, I'd like to throw a new bit of confusion back into the mix ;) https://strandbergguitars.com/eu/boden-true-temperament/ this guitar actually sounds more "in tune" than a standard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-penQWPHJzI

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#26

Post by kian »

tsegratis wrote: post #23
tsegratis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think @votingNNN answered you well. The sharps and flats are because the majority of music stays within the scale -- particularly for the singing monks not in front of a piano. So they hear and consider the scale and notes falling outside of that sound wrong i.e. they sound sharp or flat Sharp and flat are only needed when moving outside or between scales, or using "fixed do", like modern western sheet music does w…

Interestingly the underground Chinese church uses a method called tin kay for teaching worship piano. For instance all major chords are represented as 047 And if a beginner counts their piano keys, just with those three numbers, they can now play all major chords. Add 037 and they can now play all minor chords This vastly beats memorizing each key combo for each scale This method came from asking God for a revelation…

It is also possible that they read just about anything on mathematical music theory, where representing chords as sets of integers modulo twelve is standard.

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#27

Post by kian »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #12

We get a post like this every couple of weeks, it seems. Given the audience here, I understand the impulse - it's very fun to see the structure, and it really helps you understand the framework upon which a lot of western music is built. But beware that this is not a way to actually understand what is interesting or compelling about "music", because you'll notice that the first step in all these articles is to reduce…

So far, these posts are fluff, but this does not mean that just because humanity did not succeed in mathematically understanding harmony in the early twentieth century that it must be impossible.

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#28

Post by tsimionescu »

codeulike wrote: post #20
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #12

We get a post like this every couple of weeks, it seems. Given the audience here, I understand the impulse - it's very fun to see the structure, and it really helps you understand the framework upon which a lot of western music is built. But beware that this is not a way to actually understand what is interesting or compelling about "music", because you'll notice that the first step in all these articles is to reduce…

Cmon this is hacker news not 'art is ineffable news'. Yes the point of things like this is to help understand the framework that underlies (edit: most western) music. There's actually a lot of structure to western music that is obfuscated by the completely bonkers terminology. I find articles like this very intersting and useful, and there's no way you'll catch me listeneing to stockhausen. For example the explanatio…

I thing the point of the GP is to remind us that this is not 'the framework that underlies music', it is 'a framework that is used to structure much European/American-inspired music'.

That is, there are cultures that formalize or structure their music differently, and there are properties of music that are outside of these models. There are even many popular or niche songs that work against some aspects of this structure.

And all this is not about the ineffability of art, it is simply about not confusing the map for the territory. Many people who wax poetic about the mathematical properties of music, and start deep theories about the human brain and our enjoyment of music from there, tend to forget that the mathematics are describing a particular formal system that some choose to use when making music; they are not mathematical properties of anything that a human being would recognize as pleasant music.

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#29

Post by goto11 »

exporectomy wrote: post #3

A bit of a tangent, but what I always found confusing about music theory is which parts are arbitrary historical legacy and which are fundamental to human enjoyment of music. 12 notes in a scale? Their particular frequencies? That whole multiplying and dividing business? Why the letters are in the wrong order. Why have sharps and flats instead of just more letters? I always get stuck wondering how much of this is jus…

A bunch of different scales is used in different cultures and traditions around the world.

The choice of a scale is an interesting combination of universal math and tradition. Scales are built from intervals which a are basic ratios - 1/2, 2/3, 3/4 etc., but the choice of how many and which steps to include differs. But you cant just make up arbitrary scales, they still have to be based on intervals.

Western music traditionally uses a 7-note scale. The 12-note scale is really a clever hack, because it allows some instruments to play a whole range of different 7-note scales by using different subsets if the 12-note scale. But the music is still based on a 7-note scale, which is indicated by the letters and music notation.

Your question assume the historical and culture specific parts of music are "ugly" and only the universal and fundamental properties "matter". I fundamentally disagree - much of our enjoyment of music is due the cultural context and tradition.

Re: A study of musical scales (2017)

#30

Post by Rochus »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #12

We get a post like this every couple of weeks, it seems. Given the audience here, I understand the impulse - it's very fun to see the structure, and it really helps you understand the framework upon which a lot of western music is built. But beware that this is not a way to actually understand what is interesting or compelling about "music", because you'll notice that the first step in all these articles is to reduce…

Representing music in all of its relevant dimensions (scale, time, polyphony, melodic patterns, dynamics, etc.) is a very interesting and still not optimally solved problem. It is e.g. relevant for machine learning based systems for musical composition or improvisation; with transformers there was a big progress made compared to nearly thirty years of stagnation. And this is not about "exotic" compositions associated with the composers you mentioned, but about any kind of popular or classic music. The "necklace" representation of scales (also used in the referenced site) is an interesting one since it allows to e.g. represent modulation by rotation and/or mirroring. You rarely meet it in traditional music education. Such representations lead to useful insights about music if one wants to deal with it algorithmically. And there are many people here (including me) who do.
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