Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a scientific backing to music, there are also cultural conventions on top that you just have to accept. And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music.
Music Theory for Programmers
51–60 of 262 posts
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I see my friends who are into music play and talk about different instruments, it actually feels like magic to me. I tried to learn Violin some years ago but I could never understand why the note was correct. I do know that if I had learnt Keyboard instead, I would know where the correct notes are but I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is. Any pointer as to what I can do? Beca…
> I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is That is called "perfect pitch" and it is not necessary to play music. It's very rare to have perfect pitch, and it seems to be innate, not something you learn. Contextual note recognition (relative pitch) is what musicians normally use to jam. It comes with practice and contextual clues that you pick up over tens of years (including familiari…
> Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.
I used to think I was pitch blind until one day it just clicked. It just takes practice in my opinion.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#53This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books. If you…
What is your opinion of open music theory v2? People on reddit think very highly of it.
https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#54I enjoyed the programmer's approach to build it up from first principles. I chuckled at rythm being the binary encoding of the duration's mantissa.
Now dispell the "this is just the western tradition": do Klingon music theory https://youtu.be/1LjcBv-OWtQ
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#55https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376704 - 17 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346025 - 19 days ago
and there's one more 15 days ago, but really - it seems a link needs to be posted several times to take off.
@dang
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#56This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books. If you…
You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.
It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.
Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.
To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.
And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.
[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac
[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#57This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books. If you…
You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.
[deleted]
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#58If this is the sort of thing that interests you, I highly recommend setting aside 90 minutes and strapping yourself in for a listen to https://malwebb.com/notnoi.html .
The gigs page points to "file:///Users/malwebb/Documents/Mal%20Webb%20Site/gigs.html" haha.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#59This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books. If you…
What is your opinion of open music theory v2? People on reddit think very highly of it. https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/
I don't know it personally but skimming it looks pretty good.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.
It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say…
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