31–40 of 51 posts
Oddly enough, I just finished watching this video which explains all the scales succinctly. I was struck by all the permutations that are possible. Simple method to organize ALL MUSICAL SCALES of harmonies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq2xt2D3e3E
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 can help with a couple of these. 12 notes is a kludge, because powers of 2^(1/12) well approximate simple ratios. These simple ratios (such as 3:2) sound good. I like this video for explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4 Also, the reason that the letters are in the wrong order is that we're playing the wrong scale. The monks who invented the scale usually sang in A-minor (so we use the first lette…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 struc…
I dont think thats true, especially on HN. We're perfectly capable of being interested in the mathy bits without losing sight of the arty bits
e.g. the OP who wrote that very analytical piece about every possible scale composes music like this https://ianring.bandcamp.com
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…
https://github.com/abetusk/scratch/blob/release/notes/Music-...
voting749227383 has a good response but to elaborate on the 12 note choice more, there's some justification of why 12 as opposed to some other number [0]. 12 notes gives a good compromise of the ability to combine notes in the scale while still not being too large to be unwieldy. In other words, some large ratio of note pairs have frequency ratios with small numerators and denominators when chosen to be from 12 notes as opposed to 11, 13 etc.
I hadn't heard about the C vs. A issue, so it's interesting to learn that it's from the monks. I assume the sharp and flat notes are because they're trying to differentiate, as much as possible, the discordant neighboring notes and maybe trying to promote some base mode/scale (like C-major).
[0] Measures of Consonances in a Goodness-of-fit Model for Equal-tempered Scales by Aline Honingh
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…
> You can't play a song in C minor, because that would require three flats. So instead you play the song with A as the root (A B C D E F G). That scale is a mode of the major scale, called the Aeolian Mode. This paragraph confused me until I realized it's supposed to say "That scale is a mode of the MINOR scale". Other than that I thoroughly enjoyed this. Never thought of a scale as a bitmask before.
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…
> 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? The number of notes and the ratios between their frequencies are fundamental. The rest are historical accidents. A good place to start is David Benson's 'Music: a Mathematical Offering'. Available free online here: https://ho…
Playing music, and especially improvising, is more much hung on the intervals—those ratios—rather than concerns about fixed notes. Give or take, emotional colouring of tones and harmonics is another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can help with a couple of these. 12 notes is a kludge, because powers of 2^(1/12) well approximate simple ratios. These simple ratios (such as 3:2) sound good. I like this video for explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4 Also, the reason that the letters are in the wrong order is that we're playing the wrong scale. The monks who invented the scale usually sang in A-minor (so we use the first lette…
Thanks. Those are very enlightening. The fraction names are really nothing like what you'd expect them to mean! Now I realize why when someone was trying to explain a circle of fifths to me and how it was like a clock, it wasn't a 5-numbered clock!