121–130 of 261 posts
'Intro to audio for programmers' would keep them away and let us have a party in the comments telling the author how interesting the tutorial was. Never use the word 'Music' again and you'll be safe
Kudos, every work of creation is a joy on its own, I was fascinated clicking every button
Sorry man, if you approach things from that angle then no wonder music is a mystery to you.
The issue with "deriving from first principles" is that it very much depends on what you consider "principles" and which you pick. Take two people who want to derive sth "from first principles" and they will arrive at wildly different things. Because they start very differently. That's why this "ignore everything that came before" approach (different name for "from first principles) is so flawed and limited. There is so much insight to gain from the wisdom that came before you that ignoring it isn't going to help.
> the simpler the fraction, the better it sounds
That's comically wrong. If everything was just an octave, you wouldn't even have music.
Sorry, I stopped reading there. It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix.
This 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…
The only thing I'd add to your recommendations is: Listen! When you hear a song, some melody, a rhythm, listen carefully, try to deconstruct the components, how they interplay, and try to figure out what is it that you like. Was it a feature of the harmony? The melody? Pacing? Whatever it is, keep listening. Theory is just a way to try to explain what we hear and why we might like it. The more you listen, the more you have that you can base the theory on.
> Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason. There is of course a lot of physics involved. But there is at least as much convention at play. So imho this is a very one sided way of looking at it. There is a physical reason the 12 notes are those 12 notes (though the exact frequencies assigned are influenced by culture as well), b…
It took me a while to realize that "because that is the convention" was the answer to a big chunk of my confusion about music notation. A weirdly helpful answer, but so often nobody bothers to even tell you that, so you just assume you must be missing something when you can't see where these things are coming from!
But also, nobody bothers to talk about this because for beginners without sufficient focus on mastery by copying other people, they're generally not going to be able to do anything notable with music anyway, so this kind of meta-theory is an unnecessary distraction. (And by the time you are actually decent with music literally years have passed and you've probably stumbled upon this idea by then)
Earlier 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.
Earlier 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…
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…
Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"
It's a decent enough intro to acoustics and digital synthesis, but saying it's music theory is just redefining terms with accepted meanings in their fields.
This 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…
1. runjs promoting itself using music REPL as an example
2. author used LLM to fit a few music related ideas into the web audio API
3. they tried it with math two years ago: https://runjs.app/blog/equations-that-changed-the-world-rewr... They are clearly targeting js developers, which is one of the largest coding community
4. "The naming is not arbitrary, and the harmonic series explains why.", stop wasting tokens. Just say what it is please.