This is more “synthesizers for programmers” than “music theory for programmers”.
Music Theory for Programmers
101–110 of 261 posts
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#102This 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…
It is presented with a tone of "music theory, the way a musician could never understand it, because they do not know what a sin wave is" which makes it so infuriating.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#103"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention." This has the signature LLM writing style.
that, and also it is very arrogant. typical superior complex of stem people, one of the worst examples, insufferable
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#104insufferable and arrogant
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#105I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet. https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
It was a really good article up and until it explained the octave, the perfect fifth, and the equal tempered scale. It didn’t do a full explanation of equal temperament—we use it because, with it, it’s easy to change keys.
Once it jumps from the chromatic scale to the diatonic scale, it doesn’t explain the theoretical basis for the major scale. To understand the major scale, we need to first explain the major third then the major chord. From the major chord, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth, we can build up the major scale.
There’s also no discussion of time signature and rhythm.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. I've always thought that's mistitled. Better would be Traditional Western Music Notation Theory. Notice what's absent, e.g. frequency and timbre which are nicely introduced by the current article. Music theory is a lot wider than the ABSRM syllabus. And the current article is a great starting point.
That's sound design theory, not music theory. They're not the same thing.
Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
Entry-level trad Western Theory gives you the concept of a basic grammar as a first introduction, but once you have that you can extend it fairly painlessly to jazz/funk/metal/pop/whatever.
Advanced classical grammar - baroque and modal counterpoint, extended harmony, and such - has some useful pointers for modern song-writing, but it's a specialised skill for experts. Movie and game score composers likely know it, but it's a degree-level skill.
Sound design theory is a subset of orchestration. The proof is that you can take most music and play it with simple sine wave bloops - no orchestration at all - and it remains completely recognisable.
Explaining equal temperament etc sounds clever and it's interesting if you like that kind of thing, but it's a distracting level of nerdery that doesn't help at all with basic song writing.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Music theory is a way of describing that cool thing you played, not the other way around
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve. More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
Music's theory is something you really need to understand at an unconscious level. All the study of how the notes relate and frequencies, that's very interesting and it may help you understand things better, but the real question is not, can you do all the math to figure out why this note and that note work together, it's can you hear it with your ears and play the correct harmony note for whatever purpose the music leads.
I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. They may occasionally have something finished, but 'it doesn't sound right'. Then go back to music theory and say, oh, this chord is wrong. I can fix that chord because I know music theory and come up with something that works. But they're not doing that at first. They're composing from their unconscious mind.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#108Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing. How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear). This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts and mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music. Maybe start by rewatching "This…
> Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing. Trying now. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. > How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear). 100%. I tried three more. Same result. How much do you see?
> Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. .... 100%
That's certainly a revealing example. TTLS is entirely melody, and the article says basically nothing about melody. At a stretch you could say "the article talks about the major scale, TTLS uses notes from a major scale" and if your conclusion is "that's why I like it", then you should feel the same way about any permutation of the notes in TTLS, or indeed anything you get from hitting the white notes on a piano one at a time.
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did read it, found it mildly informative/interesting, then saw your comment, read the link, and pasted in two paragraphs into Pangram 4... ouch! I guess I'm not LLM-weary enough? https://www.pangram.com/history/25773627-adfa-4efb-8c10-f4fd...
When you read something like this > Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number. does it make sense? Or perhaps it just seems like something easy enough to skim past without worrying about whether it makes sense? Before LMs, I would have assumed that a person intentionally wrote that sentence, and perhaps spent some time…
“Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.”
What the article is trying to explain here is that A=440 is just a convention. This is probably where the article should have had a discussion about perfect pitch vs. relative pitch. I would have written it like this:
“Since this note is 440 hertz, in Western music, because of convention, we call this note ‘A’. Now, let’s play a note that is 400hz. For most people, given enough time after hearing the 440hz note, this second note will sound like the first note. There is a minority of people with a talent called perfect pitch who would be able to tell that the 440hz note is in tune, while, with conventional Western music, 400hz is out of tune, because they are able to tell the absolute pitch of notes. Most people (including the famous composer Wagner) cannot do this: One pitch by itself sounds like another pitch by itself.”
Re: Music Theory for Programmers
#110Earlier 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…
At many western music schools, if piano isn’t your first instrument, it is compulsory to study piano as a second instrument. The reason for this is that it really helps when understanding harmony. You also do ear training, which is meant to solve the problem I think you’re describing. I expect you would find ear training resources on youtube or something now but I did it the old-fashioned way where you start by liste…
That second point is spot on. The one thing I remember vividly - and that still helps me most - from all those years of classical piano training is the ear training. I don't have perfect pitch, but I remember A440 vividly (thanks to my electronic metronome) and the training left me with a strong sense relative pitch that helps me figure out pretty much any melody and chord progression relatively quickly.