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Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

academic.udayton.edu

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Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#11

Post by nandemo »

jtheory wrote: post #7

Teaching music theory is damned hard . You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual. This is probably the…

Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets attempt to do.

It's pretty easy to teach what a tuplet is, even without written notation: play all eighth notes over a regular ♩♩♩♩ (that's 4 quarter notes) rhythm, then sixteenth notes, then play triplets.

> a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster.

That's why I like the Suzuki method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#12

Post by mertd »

This is truly a great effort. At the same time I am frustrated by the choice of the medium. We are well past the age of disseminating information through print. I would love to "hear" the concepts described. Why not make an interactive web page? Maybe sprinkle some audio samples here and there? It seems convoluted to not use sense of hearing to describe music.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#13

Post by dizzystar »

jtheory wrote: post #7

Teaching music theory is damned hard . You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual. This is probably the…

The way this teaches it is very difficult. They make the same mistake as all music theory lessons, which is to dive right into the Circle of Fifths without ever mentioning how the Circle of Fifths is derived.

I've been thinking about writing a music theory lesson for programmers and "normal" people. I swear it is a conspiracy theory of music teachers to make music theory seem hard. Once you see the logic of how it all comes together, it is head-slapping easy. Music theory is all created from a few easy-to-remember patterns.

I already wrote a bit of music theory code in Python. Maybe this will be my Thanksgiving project.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#14

Post by jws »

Issuu wins for most annoying way to break my web experience. I have a perfectly serviceable PDF renderer, but instead I have to let Flash have a shot at my security to get a slowly loading page that has navigation obscuring the content and ignores my scrolling input, requiring me to use their invented elements and watch their slow, jerky, scroll animation. Going to the next page requires closing a tab, searching for which page I was on last in a grid of similar thumbnails, clicking the next one, clicking again to really go to the page, and one more click to approve Flash (ok, that one is self inflicted).

That was a lot of effort on their part to make an interface annoying enough for me to ignore this work.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#15

Post by msluyter »

mertd wrote: post #12

This is truly a great effort. At the same time I am frustrated by the choice of the medium. We are well past the age of disseminating information through print. I would love to "hear" the concepts described. Why not make an interactive web page? Maybe sprinkle some audio samples here and there? It seems convoluted to not use sense of hearing to describe music.

Indeed. The ability to click on an interval and immediately hear it -- and/or simultaneously see it played on the piano -- would be quite nice. (Or, conversely, the ability to see piano notes instantly rendered on a staff and have the intervals identified.) Combining two learning pathways -- visual and aural = win.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#16

Post by sigsergv »

jws wrote: post #14

Issuu wins for most annoying way to break my web experience. I have a perfectly serviceable PDF renderer, but instead I have to let Flash have a shot at my security to get a slowly loading page that has navigation obscuring the content and ignores my scrolling input, requiring me to use their invented elements and watch their slow, jerky, scroll animation. Going to the next page requires closing a tab, searching for…

Luckily you can (after stupid registration) download these pages and read them offline.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#17

Post by yolesaber »

dizzystar wrote: post #13
jtheory wrote: post #7

Teaching music theory is damned hard . You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual. This is probably the…

The way this teaches it is very difficult. They make the same mistake as all music theory lessons, which is to dive right into the Circle of Fifths without ever mentioning how the Circle of Fifths is derived. I've been thinking about writing a music theory lesson for programmers and "normal" people. I swear it is a conspiracy theory of music teachers to make music theory seem hard. Once you see the logic of how it al…

As a bit of encouragement for you, a primer on "music theory from the ground up" is exactly what I have been looking for. I have tried to learn proper notation as well as scales and chord structures, but I seem to hit a brick wall because it all seems so arbitrary to me. I'd love to know how the system was derived.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#18

Post by jtheory »

sigsergv wrote: post #16
jws wrote: post #14

Issuu wins for most annoying way to break my web experience. I have a perfectly serviceable PDF renderer, but instead I have to let Flash have a shot at my security to get a slowly loading page that has navigation obscuring the content and ignores my scrolling input, requiring me to use their invented elements and watch their slow, jerky, scroll animation. Going to the next page requires closing a tab, searching for…

Luckily you can (after stupid registration) download these pages and read them offline.

Yes, one page at a time.

After providing your age (I just turned 99 today!) among other required fields.

Re: Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

#20

Post by jtheory »

nandemo wrote: post #11
jtheory wrote: post #7

Teaching music theory is damned hard . You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual. This is probably the…

Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets attempt to do. It's pretty easy to teach what a tuplet is, even without written notation: play all eighth notes over a regular ♩♩♩♩ (that's 4 quarter notes) rhythm, then sixteenth notes, then play triplets. > a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for…

I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting.

Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.

I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.

I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.

The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).

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