261–263 of 263 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I really wish I had studied piano for that reason. I put many years into flute and almost went to conservatory for it, so I can play pretty much any melody by ear after hearing it, but I have zero ability to do the same for harmonies/chord progressions. I've tried to learn some piano (and like the parent said, was forced to as part of music curriculum at college) but it's incredibly difficult to learn a new instrumen…
> 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…
And even saying the 12 notes must have specific frequencies is wrong. It's very common when creating synths for example to detune them to create richer sounds, or play on dissonance to some extent.
There are lots of tuning systems. Equal temperament is just 12 (logarithmic) equal steps. But other tuning systems use different priorities.
The basis is physical, though. It's always about trying to get the frequency ratios as simple as possible (or as close as possible to a simple ratio). Based on the fact that natural overtones are always (more or less) integer multiples of the base frequency so that's what sounds pleasing to us. Using only integer ratios is impossible though, so we have to deviate from those. And on top of that we want to deviate because people get bored ;-)