111–120 of 128 posts
To those of you claiming either that "this is not a theory of music" or "yes, this is exactly what people mean when they say music theory," you are both right and both wrong. The content of these cheat sheets describes what a music major learns in the first semester or two of music theory classes. But there are people who get PhD's in music theory. What do you think they study for all those years? It's not this. Sayi…
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You're wrong about categories of analogy, but I don't blame you - analogies are a pretty slippery slopes. In particular, you're most likely conflating these because of the implementation detail - you write HTML, so writing music is an analogy. Not really - writing HTML is closer to performing music. You can teach almost everyone to perform "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on piano or "Smoke on the Water" on guitar withi…
I disagree. The rendering engine of the browser is the performer who looks at my script(HTML/CSS/JS) and produce the final result for the visitors to the web page. Writing HTML is not closer to performing music, but actually closer to composing music, if you will. Also, I think although knowing theory would help you play a song with an instrument, it's not required, is it? More likely knowing music theory is for unde…
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I understand it's important to have plenty of intuition, but as an adult I do want to speed up the learning process. That's one of reasons I set out to learn the theories. My main goal is to be able write songs of quality at least slightly above total crap. Maybe I have not found the right learning materials or correct way, or maybe because I am the type of persons who need to have lots of hands-on exercises to be ab…
> As an adult I do want to speed up the learning process I understand the desire but it's also very important to realize that these things take a LONG time to develop. You can't really expect yourself to grasp chord progressions until you have a firm understanding in scales and you can't just gloss over it and be familiar with it, you have to internalize it. You have to get scales under your fingers... you have to fe…
> Since music is subjective there's no way to say, "you're song is correct, move on to the next song".
Are there some kind of music "compiler" or "linter" for educational purpose out there, which check for a song's obvious and blatant violations of fundamental composing principles? This might helps beginners to hone in on the basics. I know the rules are meant to be broken later, but at the beginning, the 'compiler/linter' is efficient and cost effective in guiding the student and checking their practice work.
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One of the most enlightening things I learned while studying music in college was discovering why classical harmony ended up the way it did. What makes a V7 chord work? Where did augmented 6th chords come from? How did the Neapolitan chord fit into these systems? By looking at the progression of music history from one-voice chants to counterpoint to harmony and then to the explosion of ideas in the Romantic era and b…
>Where is the counterpoint? Where are the modulations? In the sound design, the rhythms, and the production, where they never trouble the hearing of anyone who has been trained to believe that musical structures are defined almost entirely by pitch patterns. Even the idea that music exists to 'express rhetorical ideas' is... actually quite odd, outside of classical training, anyway. I happen to like fugues very, very…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the most enlightening things I learned while studying music in college was discovering why classical harmony ended up the way it did. What makes a V7 chord work? Where did augmented 6th chords come from? How did the Neapolitan chord fit into these systems? By looking at the progression of music history from one-voice chants to counterpoint to harmony and then to the explosion of ideas in the Romantic era and b…
>Where is the counterpoint? Where are the modulations? In the sound design, the rhythms, and the production, where they never trouble the hearing of anyone who has been trained to believe that musical structures are defined almost entirely by pitch patterns. Even the idea that music exists to 'express rhetorical ideas' is... actually quite odd, outside of classical training, anyway. I happen to like fugues very, very…
To those of you claiming either that "this is not a theory of music" or "yes, this is exactly what people mean when they say music theory," you are both right and both wrong. The content of these cheat sheets describes what a music major learns in the first semester or two of music theory classes. But there are people who get PhD's in music theory. What do you think they study for all those years? It's not this. Sayi…
This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). This is "music jargon and notation systems". A theory is something that explains an observed phenomenon. This jargon and notation stuff doesn't explain music, it just guides you through the jargon and notation. I have a music degree and learned all this stuff and a lot more. This presentation is an excellent , high-quality overview of this non-theory…
>This isn't "music theory" (although almost everyone thinks it is). Isn't that how language works though? If everyone calls this music theory aside from a small minority of people, then it is music theory. "Music Theory" as a term is a study on it's own, it's not "the theory of music" and you can't really use the terms interchangeably like that.
That's not really how language works in specialist fields though. For example "theory" and "proof" mean different things in science than they do to the general public (which is part of the reason why the general public misunderstand science so much). Or, for a more relevant example, the problems with how the term "hacker" is misunderstood.
To those of you claiming either that "this is not a theory of music" or "yes, this is exactly what people mean when they say music theory," you are both right and both wrong. The content of these cheat sheets describes what a music major learns in the first semester or two of music theory classes. But there are people who get PhD's in music theory. What do you think they study for all those years? It's not this. Sayi…
I'm curious, what do people who get PhDs in music theory study for all those years?
When I was in school it seemed like most of the theory PhDs would pick a composer to focus on, but there are other ways to go than just that. Certainly, the sorts of questions I listed (asked in much more specific ways) are part of analytical inquiry, but a lot of theory papers are descriptive rather than explanatory.
Edit: I was performance major, but took classes from some pretty great music theorists. A few examples of graduate-level classes I took: the string quartets of Bartok; the music of Stravinsky; the symphony in the 19th Century. They tended to be focused on an individual composer or repertoire. Obviously scholarship is done on a much more granular level than that.
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Guitar professional here. It's good to keep the limitations of tabs in mind. The're really useful, but they don't represent music nearly half as much as conventional music notation. They represent finger movements instead.
The funny thing is that standard notation is quite poor for the guitar because it has no notion of finger movements- all sorts of annotations are dumped into scores - numbers for fingers, circled numbers for strings, roman numerals for frets, empty noteheads for natural harmonics, and who knows what for artificial harmonics and friends. I don't think its possible to reproduce a piece from only tabs (without having he…
Based on my own experience, I find the No. 1 obstacle in learning music theory is the difficulty, _in the early stage of learning_, to practice the knowledge to gain a real sense of how the stuff is used and why. Take computer programming as an example. After 15 minutes of HTML lesson, a newbie can already look at her creation in a browser and the html file on hard disk, and have fun tweaking it ( My home page , reme…
As a couple of commenters have said, your HTML analogy just doesn't seem to fit here, music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. The best way to learn it is through playing music, a lot, and then using concepts from music theory to go back and gain more insight into why certain things sound the way they do, why certain progressions work well, why an F natural sounds ethereal and sublime on top of a B∆9 chord while an E natural sounds awful, and so on.
Again, I believe the optimal way to learn music concepts is to play (not study) music.
If jazz doesn't interest you, I would ask you what your musical goals are, and what genres do interest you, and just encourage you to play, and then play some more. Ideally, play with musicians who are better than you - you'll learn more, faster, just like anything else. It takes thousands of hours to get good at this stuff.