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Music Theory for Programmers

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Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#111

Post by oplav »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106
chrisjj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 classic…

I agree. As a (hobbyist) musician and a (professional) programmer, I would not classify this web page as “music theory” given its widely accepted definition.

At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.

https://ece.illinois.edu/academics/courses/ece402

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#112

Post by strenholme »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106
chrisjj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 classic…

For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a chromatic scale”) allows a programmer to understand not just the how but the why for the basics of western music.

For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#114

Post by gjvc »

xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #77
pprotas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing. The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels m…

I would not call it harsh. The author don't even bother to assemble sentences themselves. And a title "Music Theory for Programmers" imply it is comprehensive even at an elementary scale.

"implies"

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#115

Post by intrikate »

bluGill wrote: post #107
simonask wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions.

Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.

Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#116

Post by mcluck »

xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #77
pprotas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing. The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels m…

I would not call it harsh. The author don't even bother to assemble sentences themselves. And a title "Music Theory for Programmers" imply it is comprehensive even at an elementary scale.

The title does not imply it's comprehensive. If anything, a title like that suggests that it's only scratching the surface. If I read an article like "Haskell for C# Developers" I would not expect to be an expert in Haskell at the end. I would expect to have enough intuition to begin actually learning the language properly

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#117

Post by polotics »

chrisjj wrote: post #83
polotics wrote: post #16

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. 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?

Haha well it's easy then please send us the MIDI, Openscore, Lylipond, MP3... anything really, of a composition of yours that will be as appealing as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

What else do I see: congruence between melody and lyrics, harmonic depth, dominant half-cadence in the tonic arrival. Also the versions by Mozart add a lot and explain a lot of the endurance of the tune I guess. That has chromatic passing, secondary dominants, even a parallel minor (in the 8th variation)

If I may plug here the Berklee College online courses as a satisfied customer I can say if you are ready to put in the effort they are great.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#118

Post by IAmGraydon »

>I can't play an instrument. I have tried more than once, and each time I got as far as being able to make roughly the right noises without ever understanding why they were the right noises. 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.

You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.

That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#119

Post by bluGill »

intrikate wrote: post #115
bluGill wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.…

You have it backward. The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Music's theory describes what we already know works, not how to make things work.

No composer I know thinks in the terms of music theory. They often use a chord progression that music theory describes why it works, but they're not thinking of it in terms of music theory. They're thinking in terms of chord progression, just like the composers of thousands years ago were thinking of their chord progressions the exact style changes and so a thousand years ago they went to thought in terms of modern chord progressions but they were still thinking in similar terms.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#120

Post by ludston »

strenholme wrote: post #98
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-musician non-Western programmer, the only music book that is making sense to me (still reading) is Robert Snyder's Music and Memory[1]. It's the first book that doesn't trick me by trying to pass cultural artefacts (notes, scales, raga, etc.) as some universal truth, or douse me in medieval pseudo-science (Pythagorean small ratios, etc.) I am not an expert, so maybe this book has its own shortcomings which I…

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 are intervals which sound pleasant to the human ear. [1] Once that is established, as per the linked article, 12-tone equal temperament makes a lot of sense (but isn’t universal, obviously) because it’s resulting tuning gives us a really close 3/2 and 4/3, and having a simple 12-tone scale reasonably in tune everyone can agree on makes sense. We can t…

> we tolerate them being slightly out of tune

And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.

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