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Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

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Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#101

Post by sublinear »

antonyt wrote: post #5
atoav wrote: post #3

A good overview on the topic. My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and n…

Do you have any examples of "a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing"? I'm finding this difficult to imagine. A lead voice doing this while some accompaniment is changing chords underneath makes sense to me, but then you're back to harmonic relationships.

I'm pretty sure you've heard plenty of ambient music and just never thought about it. Timbre and rhythm have been the focus of modern music for at least 40 years.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#102

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

foobarian wrote: post #34
klik99 wrote: post #23

I read through a lot of this article and it does a good job explaining the ratios and math behind harmonics and how that makes chords, but ideas like lower ratios are more pleasant and minor chords feel like something is missing (from the article "I do not hear the Harmonic Series itself -- something is missing") is just wrong - if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves. Though it's built on…

I find the major/minor thing so fascinating. I remember it having the "happy"/"sad" vibes from my earliest memories and have a really hard time with the idea that it could be cultural. But if it's not cultural, then why? Also is the fact that major 9ths have a beach/island vibe cultural due to Brazilian jazz? :-)

Metal music is mostly minor.

Does metal sound "sad"? Opinions differ. :)

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#103

Post by simonreiff »

bollu wrote: post #53
simonreiff wrote: post #26

I studied harmony and music analysis many years ago as a piano performance major in school. One thing I will say is that harmony really is not an abstract set of symbols on a page representing chords, but rather is a taxonomy of common specific sequences of simultaneously sounding pitches, abstracting away instruments or larger structural considerations and providing a dictionary that defines the most common patterns…

where would I learn a taxonomy of such motifs? I trained for classical piano as a kid, and I'm slowly trying to learn jazz piano as I ease back into it! I'd love to learn more about these types of harmonic ideas and motifs as I get back to playing

Can't go wrong with Alfred's Essentials of Music Theory

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#104

Post by acjohnson55 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

There are much better overviews of this from Sethares and Tymoczko. Consonance is somewhat frequency-dependent. For more, Google Critical Band and ERB. The happy/sad idea is pretty much a high-school oversimplification. It's true for beginners, not at all true beyond that.\ It's quite rare to find music with straight major and/or minor triads with no other colours.

I also jumped straight to the bibliography to look for those two. Not seeing any reference to their work is disappointing and makes me a little pessimistic that digesting the entire piece will be worthwhile, as a scientific piece. He references Helmholtz, but his theories have been surpassed for more than a century.

But hopefully I'll get around to reading this at some point. It's one of my favorite topics. I wrote up my own attempt to explain the Western music system here: https://fakestoryofmusic.com

I've also been working on something smaller that focuses on major/minor tonality, specifically. But it's further from being in a place where I want to share it.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#105

Post by acjohnson55 »

calf wrote: post #75
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

There are much better overviews of this from Sethares and Tymoczko. Consonance is somewhat frequency-dependent. For more, Google Critical Band and ERB. The happy/sad idea is pretty much a high-school oversimplification. It's true for beginners, not at all true beyond that.\ It's quite rare to find music with straight major and/or minor triads with no other colours.

Are there any readings would you recommend to read if I play classical piano, and especially for Romantic and post-Romantic music ranging from Chopin/Liszt to Debussy/Ravel?

If you want to go way deep, check out Tymoczko's first book: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html

It's a challenging read, but extremely thorough and enlightening. Tymoczko wrote a follow up that extends and reformulates his theories, but I haven't gotten through it yet.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#106

Post by acjohnson55 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #16

I personally consider this to be a better intro, albeit in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl6ZcY9ag This is a more recent paper (2019) that I think is better constructed and more aware of the in-field work than TFA: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7006947/

Yes, not having had the time to read TFA or the paper you shared yet, it immediately stands out to me that the bibliography of the latter paper is far more comprehensive.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#107

Post by acjohnson55 »

brudgers wrote: post #71
dhosek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was being sloppy and should have said diatonic scale.

Sloppiness is why music theory is not scientific. You can’t get to a scientific rationalization of the primacy of the major scale without it.

The primacy of the major scale happened many centuries after the diatonic scale came to be predominant in Western music. The primary development that led to major tonality was the acceptance of thirds as stable consonances. As that happened, the Ionian mode (previously little used) began to stand out because it happens to have a tritone (B and F) surrounding its tonic major third (C and E). This is the core feature of the authentic cadence which gives us the tension resolution progression that characterizes tonal music. Tonal music practice and theory develop in all sorts of interesting ways, spilling out from that basis.

The transitional period where this happened is roughly in the 1600s.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#108

Post by acjohnson55 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #24
atoav wrote: post #3

A good overview on the topic. My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and n…

Also a lifelong musician here, and I think you're completely wrong about harmony. Western music (assuming that's what we're talking about here) IS directly derived from harmonic progression. It is truly the core of the music. The underlying chords are the obvious harmonic progression. Melody is just an expression of underlying harmonic structure. Rhythm is meant to emphasize the changes and movement of harmonic struc…

I would actually invert that and say that melody and rhythm are the most fundamental aspects of music. A harmonic progression with no sense of melody or rhythm is quite boring.

Harmony is derived from composing music with multiple melodic parts. This is most obvious with counterpoint, but even pop/rock music can be seen this way. The essence of pop/rock is a melody and bass line as the two primary parts, and the rest of the instrumentation often plays harmonies that imply inner voices.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#109

Post by Nekorosu »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #80

I don't think I want a scientific theory of music. That would take the fun out of it. I like music that matches my tastes while still managing to surprise me. What else do I need to know about music? And what about the discovery that happens when you make your own music? If this was replaced by the perfect scientific theory and a computer program cranking out perfect songs, our incentive for being creative would be g…

No worries. This one is based on so many untested assumptions that you can easily ignore it.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#110

Post by acjohnson55 »

dswilkerson wrote: post #93

This seems to be the 9th time that my paper on harmony has been on Hacker News. I wonder if it has been on HN more than any other paper on arxiv: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I have one request: if you are going to comment on the paper, please actually read it first. Here is a little test to check that you read it: did you notice the points below? (1) This is a paper in the field of…

I don't think a redundant recognizer algorithm is required to explain minor.

Centuries before we had major and minor tonality, we had the diatonic scale.

Through the Renaissance, thirds began to be accepted as stable consonances, and from that, you get tertian chords (triads and seventh chords from stacked thirds, and their inversions). In the diatonic scale, you only have 3 types of tertian triad: 3 major, 3 minor, and 1 diminished. The diminished triad was not accepted as a stable consonance.

In another post, I summarize the history of the development of major tonality out of the convention of the authentic cadence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095594

I have come to believe that minor tonality is quite simply a result of "what if we used a minor chord as the tonic, instead?" Note that the minor chord already existed and had been in use for quite some time. The conventions of minor tonality (the tonal use of Aeolian and Dorian modes, minor key signature, the raised seventh degree, relative and paralellel key conventions, etc), however, developed as a contrast to major tonality.

I'm not discounting your neurological explanation, I haven't read your whole paper yet, but just pointing towards historical contingency as another way to see it.

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