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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#121

Post by djaychela »

dietrichepp wrote: post #109
gnaritas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Yes, exactly. I teach Music Technology, and that's one of the questions I get nearly every year, and one I've not found a concrete answer for, so I always preempt it by saying that the C is arbitrary as far as my research has gone.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#122

Post by coreyp_1 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #118
zeta0134 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sight read for winds and voice, but not for Piano, despite being able to play Piano relatively well. Thus, this explanation will probably apply mostly to single-voice musicians. 1. Find Do. This is the first note of the Major scale in the key which you are playing. Find it on the page, and burn it into your mind; everything you're about to do centers on the location of Do. In the key of C (white keys on a piano…

"2. Learn your intervals, and learn Solfege. If you're a musician, you already know these things in principal, even if you don't know the words or the terminology. In particular, you should be able to "hear" the distance between Do-Mi-Sol without too much difficulty, because you hear those distances in music a lot." I believe the Solfege named intervals (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do) are only taught as a historical oddity…

Solfege is definitely still in strong use, especially in public school choirs. They are convinced that it helps in sight-reading competitions (yes, sight reading is one of several areas in which a choir can compete).

Having said that, I absolutely hate solfege. But my bachelor's was in piano performance, not vocal.

Interesting note: quite a few countries use a "fixed Do" system rather than "A-B-C". It is quite confusing (and humorous to observe) when a solfege disciple tries to sing with a fixed Do native.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#123

Post by djaychela »

dietrichepp wrote: post #20

> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like t…

I think it's because a lot of people saying that don't really know (and I mean really well) their scales; if you do then it's "obvious" that (say) an F is a semitone above an E, despite that gap on the stave looking the same as F to G. All the musicians I know who can read well know their scales inside out. I'm a bad reader, but my reading has improved considerably over the last couple of years as the scales have become something that I know really well (in simpler keys). Then it turns into a "how could you -not- know that?" kind of deal, internally. I think that's the missing piece from most people's ability to read well; not the actual reading, but grokking the key that you're in so it just becomes 'obvious'.

I'm not there yet!

Re: Music theory for nerds

#125

Post by coreyp_1 »

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.

That, and they didn't all necessarily use a pure Equal Temperament, either. Different temperaments can give more distinct feelings to certain keys more so than the modern equal temperament. (Note: I used to tune pianos.)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#126

Post by Manishearth »

lohankin wrote: post #55
haberman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree very much with your post's thesis (you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.) Just noticed one thing: > For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament It doesn't seems surprising to me. If you start from a pitch and go upwards in both octaves and perfect fifths (2:1 and 3:2, the two most fundamental intervals)…

Interesting idea indeed. I need to think about it. Edit after thinking: still, it doesn't explain the number 12 IMO. It could be 17 or something else. Probably, it's a long chain of coincidences at play: Western music settled on 7-note scales long time ago (long before equal temperament was invented), and we should start looking for explanations from here. Another edit: one of the important coincidences is that numbe…

If you start off from assuming that the Do-Sol (fifth, 3:2) harmony is a "pleasing" one, and also the Do-Mi (third, 5:4) one, you can create new "mostly pleasing" harmonies by for example taking the fifth of a fifth (9:4, which can be transposed an octave to get 9:8, which is Re or a second), and doing similar things (you can also do things like finding the note whose fifth is Do, which is 2:3, or 4:3, a fourth or Fa).

Repeat this process and you start getting a bunch of notes which fall on the 7-note scale. In the blog post the major seventh is listed as 17:9, but by this method you get a 16:9. Basically the same thing.

At this stage, you may notice that the notes are roughly equidistant, except for Mi-Fa and Ti-Do, which are at ~half the distance. This is the first hint of the 12-note scale. We could have stopped earlier in the notemaking process and had a 6-note or a 5-note scale or whatever, but it wouldn't be so equidistant.

Now pick each note, and build an octave from it. The new notes created will invariably be very close to existing notes, or very close to the midpoint between existing notes. This gets us the 12 note scale (5 midpoints + 7 notes, the aforementioned half-step notes don't have midpoints), if you choose a canonical note for each part. The number 12 just happens to be the number where simple harmonic ratios can get you a mostly-equidistant scale.

At this stage, different music systems do different things.

One kind of Chinese scale uses a 2:3 ratio and generates ratios involving these numbers that form a 12-note (roughly equidistant) division.

Indian music does something similar, though it instead generates a 22-note scale, where many of the 12-note scale notes have two forms. It is rare that a given piece of music will use both forms of the same note.

Western music goes ahead and invents the piano, realizes that the piano is hard to tune/transpose, and settles on the twelfth-root-of-two stuff so that transposing becomes dead easy.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#127

Post by coreyp_1 »

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.

Yes, it's like some of my students who wonder why I won't let them use a GOTO in their programming assignments.

I tell them that, if they are using assembly, then it is fair game.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#128

Post by metaxy2 »

robbrown451 wrote: post #15

One thing that is particularly arbitrary is that C is named "C" rather than "A", which would make far more sense (given that it is the root note of the only major scale that has no sharps or flats).

Like a lot of the seemingly random and arbitrary stuff in music, there's a good historical explanation. Western church music used a variety of rotations of the scale (a.k.a. modes, though that word also has a broader meaning) and it took a long time for C to become the "main" mode; for a long time it didn't even exist. See this StackExchange answer for more: http://music.stackexchange.com/a/895

Re: Music theory for nerds

#129

Post by stephenboyd »

andrepd wrote: post #10
analog31 wrote: post #4

This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. Indeed. I'm a musician, and something non-musicians often ask (especially techies, it seems) is why we use such an archaic notation system. The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading which is the ability to perform a composition directly from a written sheet, with little or no rehearsal.…

>why we use such an archaic notation system. The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.

And then most musicians will have to learn both notation systems.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#130

Post by blake8086 »

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.

If a beginner can't immediately grasp musical notation, isn't that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd?
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