Ask HN: Tools to learn music theory?

For intuitive interval training you can try this app (I built).

https://harmonyoscillators.brianfogg.com/

Essentially it’s two tunable sine wave oscillators and a simple waveform visualizer. you can manually tune the oscillators to any interval, gradually slide things in/out of tune, select intervals from from scales and see the mathematical calculations generated by various tunings. You can also run it in binaural mode (pure tone in each ear).

When I was teaching piano and music theory I used this tool to help students practice active listening for beat frequency and harmony. Maybe it can be useful to some of you.

Good luck!

I had 2 piano teachers, and neither one really had much interest in teaching music theory much at all, especially in a practical way as it applied to what you were playing.

I think it may be a weakness with some piano training/curriculum that teachers fall into because Piano has such a strong reliance on "play the sheet music that is put in front of you."

In like 3 years of lessons I don't think any of them ever talked about what scales were in a chord or what the progression was in a song I, V, vi, IV, etc.. or talked about what the melody was doing versus that.

By contrast when I started guitar... that stuff is/was talked about constantly, different tradition. I had more than one guitar teacher too and they were all pretty heavy on it.

It sticks in your head far more when you sit there and practice something and are conscious of the theory behind it than if you practice pieces and then study a book/app/website in a disconnected way.

I guess what I'm saying is if you're trying to use tools the tools should be integrated where you learn a piece with an explanation of it's theory, and you practice that for a while. Versus a tool where you just plow through theory in a disconnected way.

I don't really play piano at all anymore, but the stuff I learned in guitar still carried over to the point I can figure out what's going on in a way I couldn't when I was taking piano lessons & practicing piano every day. Back then I could not construct a chord I didn't have memorized, now I can/could.

I would add that historically, most musicians did not read music or theorize. They were practitioners who picked up the skill by listening to others, practicing, and improvising. Improvisation was what historically characterized musicianship, not theory, not sight-reading.

As the philosophical joke goes: anything you can do I can do meta. Theory is about music; it is not the practice of music. You can learn as much theory as you want, but theory is not practice. Theory can, of course, later sharpen or lead you to certain insights that can shape the music you produce, but practice is what produces facility, familiarity, and understanding, whereas theorizing produces knowledge. Learning theory too early is a pedagogic mistake. By analogy, consider speech. You don't begin to speak by learning grammar first. You begin by practicing. Only later can some knowledge of grammar help, perhaps. The way you become good at speaking is by practicing, and what is speech if not some combination of recitation and improvisation? Reading is entirely incidental and secondary.