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Music Theory for Programmers

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201–210 of 259 posts

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#201

Post by jancsika »

> I V vi IV is the four chords that an alarming share of pop music is built from.

This is in line with hundreds of years of authors "explaining" music by starting with Pythagoras for their bona fides, then using that credibility to rationalize whatever opinions they hold about musical aesthetics.

To counter: these guys[1] play I-IV-V-I for nearly the whole song. They don't even change it between the verse and chorus. Someone here tell me the one important exception and the term from music theory that describes that exception.

Primers should start with the music excerpt that the author loves, and work backwards to the theory that helps explain what's going on. Otherwise it gets pretentious fast.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#202

Post by SwtCyber »

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…

I don't think the article needs to get you all the way from A to S to be useful. A Fourier transform doesn't tell you why a song is good either, but understanding harmonics can still improve your mental model of sound. Same with temperament, intervals or why a keyboard is laid out the way it is.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#203

Post by SwtCyber »

amingilani wrote: post #29
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…

> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear). Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice. > This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”. > mistakin…

For a programmer, deriving intervals and chords and then hearing the code produce them is a pretty effective bridge

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#204

Post by nuxi »

seanhunter wrote: post #31

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…

Do you have any opinions on Everyday Tonality II?

https://www.tagg.org/mmmsp/EverydayTonalityInfo.htm

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#205

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

iainctduncan wrote: post #196
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books. And this is correct because ... ? There are whole subsectors of "music theory" that cover precisely this sort of thing, even though they are fairly arcane. I'm thinking of things like pitch set theory. My own take is that western musical pedagogy, at least historically, is one of the worst examples of pedagogy that ex…

It seems you arguing how things should be, not what they are . I don't disagree that in music we have lots of inconsistent nomenclature that could have better names. But writing an intro to a topic and using non-standard nomenclature (without explaining that that's what you're doing) is still a source of confusion to learners. Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to th…

What would you call the topic of "why are there 12 notes to the octave?" "why is the perfect fifth the most consonant chord?" "why do we use equal temperament?"

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#206

Post by rynn »

The most amazing thing about HN comments is watching engineers demand that their expertise be taken seriously completely disregard the expertise of people in other domains because .

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#209

Post by nine_k »

ergonaught wrote: post #8

I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet. https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...

I mostly did not read it, but skimmed the words, and played with the code. That's much more instructive.

It's not "music theory" proper, it's rather about the underpinnings of the "music language", the basics you need to know to even be able to speak about music theory, and in this regard it's quite useful.

Re: Music Theory for Programmers

#210

Post by iainctduncan »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #205
iainctduncan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you arguing how things should be, not what they are . I don't disagree that in music we have lots of inconsistent nomenclature that could have better names. But writing an intro to a topic and using non-standard nomenclature (without explaining that that's what you're doing) is still a source of confusion to learners. Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to th…

What would you call the topic of "why are there 12 notes to the octave?" "why is the perfect fifth the most consonant chord?" "why do we use equal temperament?"

In the all the textbooks I have or have seen, those are called "acoustics" (and more specifically "tuning and temperament"). They are covered in the text book I had for acoustics, and not covered in any of the textbooks I used for theory (jazz or classical). For example, in Rossings "The Science of Sound", it's in a chapter called "Musical Scales and Temperament".

Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.

My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.

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