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Music Theory for Programmers

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Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#131

Post by strenholme »

ludston wrote: post #120
strenholme wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has.

The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#132

Post by dyzone »

ludston wrote: post #124
seba_dos1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's a bit more circular than that. The music you were raised with sounds good to you, which means you want to understand how to make music like that hence the dominance of 12 tones and major and minor scales in Western music. 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…

> The music you were raised with sounds good to you

Speaking for myself, the music I was raised with doesn't sound that good to me.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#133

Post by chrisjj »

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…

> Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.

That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it.

Me, I agree with WP:

"Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#134

Post by bob1029 »

> The problem was never the practice.

Extreme doubt.

The theory of music is about as useless as it gets if you aren't in some kind of academic program or collaborating with other musicians on a shared composition. It helps with dead reckoning over things you cannot audition, but that's pretty damn rare.

You'll get better a lot faster if you just try to follow along with a YouTube video in the style of Guitar Hero scrolling down your screen.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#135

Post by brookst »

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…

That’s like saying no programmer relies on computer science.

Sure, at some level of expertise you’re not sitting there saying “oh, I should name variables sensibly and encapsulate functionality because computer science says to”; they are doing those things because with training and experience that becomes innate and accessible in flow state.

But the fact that theory can become ingrained does not mean one isn’t using theory.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#136

Post by Crabber »

I think music is a good "test" for logically thinking people because it requires you to put away your logical brain and just accept that music sounds good because "it just does" and music theory is the way it is because "it just is".

I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time. The fact that the author admits straight off the bat that he's never managed to learn an instrument kind of attests to this in my opinion.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#137

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

iainctduncan wrote: post #126
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…

PhD Candidate in music and computer science and gigging jazz musicain here. It is not too harsh. Articles like this confuse people who interested in learning a topic more than they help. 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?"

How does it confuse people?

There is "western music theory" ala Schenker, voice leading, serialism etc (to mention a couple of names that some people might have heard of) but that describes things to do once you've got a scale and chord system.

This is "12T music theory", describing how you might get to a scale and chord system.

I don't see how it is confusing. You can spend a lot of time doing "western music theory" without ever understanding most of what is in this article, that is certainly true. But the fact this this outlines a bunch of stuff that undergirds what a composing (or improvising) musician might consider "music theory" doesn't invalidate it, or make it confusing, IMO.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#138

Post by mpalmer »

strenholme wrote: post #109
alew1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Articles don't "try". Models don't "try". And if one prompts an LLM to write one's educational blog, one is not "trying".

You are giving an LLM entirely too much credit.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#139

Post by mpalmer »

rcxdude wrote: post #61
alew1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a very idiosyncratic (and often irritating) style, but I don't find it particularly difficult to understand. It's not meaningless, just weirdly phrased.

You might consider how much of your reading deals with topics that are already familiar to you. Or how closely you're reading things.

If you're trying to learn new information, you will trip over low-quality content like this more often.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#140

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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 am missing the part where TFA said that the goal was to help with "basic song writing".

And what is "distracting level of nerdery" to someone can be the key that helps unlock a deeper level of understanding to someone else. I thought we understood neurodivergence a little better these days.

The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures. The contents of TFA, while not strictly comprehensive when considering other musical cultures, is still pretty on point. Even though Carnatic and Hindustani music theoretically uses 22 tones per octave, the most common ones are still drawn from the same set of 12 used in western music, and the most common scales are remarkably similar.

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