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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#101

Post by jlebar »

BurningFrog wrote: post #84
bhrgunatha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading ... It's moer than just that though. The inertia to overcome also includes pretty much all sheet music ever printed, all the schools that have adopted the current system, all the educational materials... etc. etc. the list goes on. In addition to all of that, the new system needs to convey most of (if not all) the info…

Once we get off printed paper, computerized notes should solve much of the inertia. problem Displaying a song in whatever notation the musician/reader prefers should be as simple as setting a preference on your hyperPad. That still leaves the difficult task of figuring out better notations, but it can be done incrementally. You don't need to convert the whole world or the entire notation at once.

> Once we get off printed paper, computerized notes should solve much of the inertia. problem

I don't know...ebooks still look a lot like treebooks.

The one example I've seen of what you're describing is I've seen jazz musicians play off ipads. This give them access to very large catalogs without lugging around giant binders, and also they can transpose their sheets into any key.

(That's more important than it might sound at first, because different instruments "play" in different keys -- if a pianist thinks the piece is in C major, the clarinetist thinks the piece is in Bb major. So now you don't have to have separate books for the different instruments in the band.)

But the music as written down in these electronic fakebooks is a lot less complex than your average classical piece, so it's a much more tractable problem.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#102

Post by lohankin »

ektimo wrote: post #29

I've skimmed a lot of articles on music "theory" but none of them provide anything like what I'm looking for. A music theory should explain: 1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted? 2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions? 3. How could you write a program to pick out music that people find especially good (versus music that has surface similarities)? In other words, why does…

Answer to question 1 is simple: good resolution is a semitone up, but scale step down (normally, whole tone). No symmetry here. If you play backwards, you won't get resolutions - it will sound as nonsense.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#103

Post by andy_ppp »

byproxy wrote: post #65
andy_ppp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grand parent is saying he wants an article that covers the "why does music sound good" part of music theory, something I want too. I think most people have a basic grasp of notes, scales and that a middle C is air oscillating at 440 cycles per second. How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!

middle C isn't 440hz. that's generally an A.

Good point, not sure where I got that from then. Record updated.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#104

Post by pdkl95 »

sverige wrote: post #93
pdkl95 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted? Why do we like text when read forward, but not backward or inverted? There are, of course, works that are palindromic or otherwise written to be read/heard backwards, but most of the time that kind of global transformation tends to ruin the "spelling"/"narrative". > 2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions? Just like text, evoking emo…

Actually, great composers such as Beethoven and Bach and Chopin had very definite ideas about what emotions are evoked by certain keys. They even argued about it with their peers. Music is not something that is reducible to mere quanta and waves and frequency. You all are missing the human part. Sorry, but it's true.

> what emotions are evoked by certain keys

Yes, choice of key is one of the tropes that is useful when composing a song's "plot".

> Music is not something that is reducible to mere quanta and waves and frequency.

That's my point; interesting aspects of a song are not derived from specific sounds (and their frequency/etc). Those are the atoms that can be used to create the larger plot.

While it is possible to reduce music to the frequency and timing of its atomic structure, it's similar to analyzing the phonetics of speech or the glyphs of text in isolation. A low level perspective may be useful, but misses the larger structure we call a "song" or "essay".

Re: Music theory for nerds

#105

Post by autarch »

andy_ppp wrote: post #48
ketralnis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music theory is an accepted and used term of art for the category of things that this article talks about. There are courses, books, university departments, and degree programmes that use the term. Nobody is going to stop using it because you skimmed it but it doesn't describe some other thing that you think it should. Some examples: * http://www.music.msu.edu/areas-studios/music-theory * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Grand parent is saying he wants an article that covers the "why does music sound good" part of music theory, something I want too. I think most people have a basic grasp of notes, scales and that a middle C is air oscillating at 440 cycles per second. How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!

> How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!

As someone who majored in music composition, I have a very simple answer. I'd have some sort of idea in my head of what I wanted the music to sound like (or the emotion to evoke). Then I'd fiddly around for quite some time, discarding the things that didn't meet my criteria.

That's sort of a glib answer, but the fact is that no one really knows exactly why certain things evoke certain emotions, even though most composers understand various building block ideas like "odd meters like 5/8 and 7/8 generally evoke intensity and tension" or "brass chorale in a major key sounds triumphant" or "gong crescendo roll is scary". And of course, even then, we could find counter-examples for every one of those things.

Also, all music theory will tell you is why something in some piece of historical music sounded the way people expected it to sound at the time. It will definitely not tell you how to write good original music (though it may be a good guide on how to imitate past composers if that's useful for what you're trying to do).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#106

Post by MrManatee »

sirtaj wrote: post #73
MrManatee wrote: post #64

The article says that the "human ear loves ratios", but doesn't dig deeper into why. Here's my two cents. First of all, let's focus on harmony (notes played at the same time) as opposed to melody (notes played one after another). What sounds good in a melody is quite culture-dependent, but there are reasons why harmony is more universal. Second, let's focus on sounds that are produced by something long and narrow. In…

Melody in the form of the pentatonic scale is much more universal across cultures, though. Use of non-trivial harmony is significantly less widespread, it's usually no more than a melody played over a single root tone or chord. South-Asian classical and folk music is one example in which Western-style harmony is not used at all.

You're right, of course. My wording is was bit poor.

What I should have said that harmony is less ad hoc; it has less "degrees of freedom".

With regards to melody, there are tons of tuning systems that are quite close to the usual twelve-tone equal temperament. It would be hard to give a convincing argument that one of these sounds better than all others.

Contrast this to the system of harmony where the basic principle is that ratios of small integers sound good together. This is not the only possible system of harmony, but it does seem to represent some kind of local optimum. And this makes it more amenable to the kind of purely theoretical reasoning that the article is trying to do.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#107

Post by ksml »

theseoafs wrote: post #60
theseoafs wrote: post #46

> It completely obscures the relationship between the pitches, though. It doesn't actually obscure the relationship between the notes -- it makes them clearer. For example, I see the notes C, E, and G on some sheet music, maybe with some accidentals on some of those notes. I know that I'm therefore supposed to play a C triad. Now, there are multiple kinds of triads, but once I know I'm supposed to play a triad, it's…

Reading this over again, it seems like the author's not yet fully wrapped their mind around "big picture" stuff like keys, chords, basic compositional structure, etc. It's an... interesting choice to write a piece proclaiming that musical notation is absurd when you're only a beginner.

I don't think the author was necessarily proclaiming that it's absurd, only that it seems absurd from his/her beginner perspective. He/she was very up front about not having much experience, so I think this is totally reasonable (and expected)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#108

Post by rspeer »

lohankin wrote: post #99
rspeer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, please read something like "Musimathics", it'll be better than trying to learn music theory from Wikipedia.

I'm not learning it from wikipedia. I'm playing for 50+ years. Best resource is Jazz Piano Book by M.Levine. (I read lots of others, but... everything I learned, I learned from this one).

Okay, yeah. I bristled at your suggestion that I should go learn temperament from Wikipedia, when I was making an effort to not bring up temperament to keep my reply focused.

I thought you didn't understand harmony, you thought I didn't understand temperament, I was talking from a historical point of view, you were talking from a jazz point of view.

We might disagree on two kind of minor points:

* How this blog post should have been written

* I'm uncomfortable with describing fundamentals of music from a jazz point of view, because that seems to me to be putting the effect before the cause.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#109

Post by dietrichepp »

gnaritas wrote: post #52
robbrown451 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If C was called A, that wouldn't be particularly arbitrary. It would certainly make more sense for people learning music. The C major scale is universally agreed to be the simplest, most basic scale, so wouldn't it make more sense for it to be ABCDEFG, rather than CDEFGAB?

No, because that's the A minor scale, which is the same notes as the C major scale but starting at A. A scale should logically always start with its root note.

That's not really what the comment is saying. If we relabeled the notes CDEFGAB to ABCDEFG, then ABCDEFG would be the "A major" scale under our new system. The question is, "Wouldn't that make more sense?" My answer is, "It would make a tiny bit more sense to the most absolute beginner students, who would then have to learn other scales anyway."

Re: Music theory for nerds

#110

Post by pjdorrell »

ektimo wrote: post #29

I've skimmed a lot of articles on music "theory" but none of them provide anything like what I'm looking for. A music theory should explain: 1. Why do we like pieces when played forward but not backward or inverted? 2. Why do certain sounds evoke certain emotions? 3. How could you write a program to pick out music that people find especially good (versus music that has surface similarities)? In other words, why does…

You are looking for a "theory of music", as opposed to "music theory", ie an explanatory or scientific theory.

I offer my own efforts in this direction at http://whatismusic.info/.

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