Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why 13th Chords

jtauber.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 95 posts

Re: Why 13th Chords

#31

Post by jtheory »

fredsanford wrote: post #21
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

Piss poor black kids that never went to school can still have good ears. It's all about the ears.

Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though.

It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it.

If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange".

That's obviously ridiculously imprecise, right? And aren't you curious to know what "strange" means in this context? Suppose you want to write a piece of music that sounds "strange" like the piece you liked, but more so? So even piss-poor black kids end up with a thirst for a subject that looks pretty dry to the unmotivated.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#32

Post by jtheory »

autarch wrote: post #28
mirkules wrote: post #22

"gives the chord a very different direction it wants to go" I struggle with this every time I write songs. How exactly do you know which direction you should go, and how to transition from verse to chorus (i.e. how to pick good transition chords/notes). Currently, I do this by ear, whatever sounds good, but I know there is a better way.

No, there really isn't a better way. All the rules behind music theory are based on what sounds good, not the other way around. What you can do, however, is push yourself to try out new harmonic structures. You can make your chords more complex, you can delay resolution much longer, you can shift keys. There are also other musical idioms like polytonality, alternate scales, etc. that you can use to expand you horizon…

Definitely agreed that theory follows practice, not the other way around.

BUT it's still good to work on a better grasp of the theory -- if you try chord progressions at random until you hit something that sounds good... yes, there's a better way.

The whole point of documenting lots of rules around "what sounds good" is that you can refer to the rules and save a hell of a lot of time in your experimentation.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#33

Post by radiowave »

mml wrote: post #9
dextorious wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it. In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world. The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of…

I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it. "I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

Music education is in general great at telling people what notes to play, but rather worse at supplying much intuition for why certain patterns of notes work together.

You can look at a diagram that will tell you what notes go together to make a particular 11th chord, say, but it tells you nothing about why that's a useful way to combine notes.

The blog post is aimed at people who know some of the "what", but who could use a clue as to some of the "why".

Re: Why 13th Chords

#34

Post by agumonkey »

kabdib wrote: post #10
diN0bot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the situation is very similar to math. It's relatively easy to read music theory notation, so that the Gibberish and Goobeltygookus make sense, similar to learning mathematical notation. (I personally believe this is easier than learning the alphabet, but that's a different story) However, understanding what the abstractions mean is difficult. The difference between memorizing formulas and intuiting patte…

The problem I always had with math (when it came to integrals, anyway) was the whole 'dx' notation, where you apparently just had to "go with the flow" and understand what was being expressed. It ain't "d times x", it's this other thing that's syntactically similar to saying "ab" which means "a times b". Someone on HN is going to hammer me. I just muddled through the ambiguity. Then again, what I used to think was th…

About that, one author of SICP build a new physics class based around functions for every physical operator, no more syntactic craze, just functions ( higher order though ). Check SICM on google.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#36

Post by the_cat_kittles »

mirkules wrote: post #22

"gives the chord a very different direction it wants to go" I struggle with this every time I write songs. How exactly do you know which direction you should go, and how to transition from verse to chorus (i.e. how to pick good transition chords/notes). Currently, I do this by ear, whatever sounds good, but I know there is a better way.

voice leading is always a good thing to think about

Re: Why 13th Chords

#37

Post by guscost »

That counter-intuitive, 1-based, Ionian-biased indexing still causes a lot of problems...

People usually measure things with natural numbers when the things to be measured share some of the properties of natural numbers, like equidistance.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#38

Post by gruseom »

jtheory wrote: post #31
fredsanford wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piss poor black kids that never went to school can still have good ears. It's all about the ears.

Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though. It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it. If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange". That'…

It's more diverse than that. Some do end up learning theory but many great musicians don't.

Here's a delightful example:

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/1090345--video-...

Re: Why 13th Chords

#39

Post by Jgrubb »

...And this is what I love about Hacker News. As a 33 year old musician who got the programming/entrepreneurial bug only more recently, it brings me great hope to see things like this on this board. It brings me hope because a lot of times I feel like such a late comer to the party, surrounded by folks younger than me with many more years of experience in the programming realm having conversations about others' technology articles that are, sometimes, stratospherically over my head.

Yet occasionally another programmer/musician type, who maybe got into the game the other way round, writes a post like this that expounds with mystery and wonder upon a topic that I know inside and out. And it gives me hope that the years that I spent in the musical woodshed learning those things inside and out were not wasted in the context of the startup world, but giving me a massive amount of (what I now know as) domain expertise.

So thank you HN, and happy new year. May this be your year, as I'm feeling pretty good that it will be mine and my family's.

Re: Why 13th Chords

#40

Post by jtauber »

splat wrote: post #26
baddox wrote: post #23

So, why is it called a 13th chord? Am I missing something obvious, or is it just arbitrary convention that "13th" means "with the 6th and 7th added"?

These chords progress in units of 2. So you start with your triad (1st, 3rd, 5th). For the 7th chord you add the 7th, naturally enough. The next chord is then a 9th chord, so you add a 9th interval, but it wraps around modulo 8, so it's really a 2nd interval (since intervals are 1-indexed). Next it's an 11th chord, but the interval is really a 4th, and so on. The idea is to think of them spread out though, as success…

but the idea of my post is to point out why it isn't just the module 8 wrapped version. C13 means C + 6th + 7th not just C + 13th = C + 6th
Post reply on HN