Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Music theory for nerds

eev.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 390 posts

Re: Music theory for nerds

#231

Post by ajuc »

andrepd wrote: post #215
karlb wrote: post #176

Many musicians much better than me are surprised at how I can play a song just by hearing it on the radio. My breakthrough came from understanding music was realizing that the real “meaning” of a note lies in its position relative to the tonic note (e,g, I-II-II, etc, also written do-re-mi). Suddenly, almost all of the clutter was removed, and the problem became manageable. Let's consider the three-note tune “do, re,…

The gist is correct, but it's worth noting that, for example, if you played do-re-mi in E it would do E-F#-G#, not E-F-G, to preserve tone/semitone order. That's where the key signature comes in.

And that shows how WTF the musical notation is.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#232

Post by pdkl95 »

redial wrote: post #188
sverige wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Music is waves and frequency. Music appreciation is what you are describing. And appreciation is very dependant on culture . That is why Bach is not (as) appreciated in certain cultures . Just like photography. Why is one photograph more meaningful than another? it has nothing to do with photography, per se, it has everything to do with the culture of the person doing the appreciation. There is a link between the two…

> Music is waves and frequency.

Sound is waves and frequency. Music is a collection of sounds arranged in a specific sequence.

> Music appreciation is what you are describing. And appreciation is very dependant on culture.

Music relies on various "tropes" to construct a narrative. This includes the choice of key/scale (or none at all), ideas about timing and harmony, etc. These "standard parts" of music are usually from the local culture, just like how a play or movie will use standard character archetypes ("tropes") that are culturally derived.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#233

Post by aczerepinski »

tehwalrus wrote: post #203

> I suppose it’s possible to change the sound of an entire piece of music just by changing the key signature, but does anyone actually do that? Much more interestingly, this touches on the reason why different pieces were given keys at all by their composers (think "foo in B flat minor by Chopin"). Musical instruments have to be tuned to a particular key. This is because of the frequency ratios: the circle of fifths…

Instruments haven't been tuned to a particular key in a very long time. Pretty much all instruments are built with equal temperament, meaning the pitches are a compromise between what would be otherwise be perfect ratios in different keys.

When an instrument is said to be in B-flat (or any other key), this only means that written music is notated in an alternate key so that it is likely to fit on the treble or bass clef without too many ledger lines. It has nothing to do with ratios between pitches or sounding better/worse in that key.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#234

Post by andrepd »

ajuc wrote: post #231
andrepd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gist is correct, but it's worth noting that, for example, if you played do-re-mi in E it would do E-F#-G#, not E-F-G, to preserve tone/semitone order. That's where the key signature comes in.

And that shows how WTF the musical notation is.

o.O why so? And what on earth do you propose?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#235

Post by Ericson2314 »

ktRolster wrote: post #66
Ericson2314 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I most want to change is how time signatures are notated: I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.

I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree. I'm not really sure what this means, but it sounds interesting.

By default the next note is half as long as the previous. But sometimes that's inconvenient. For example 9/8 is usually 3-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2... A bar is devided into 3 dotted quarters and a dotted quarter into 3 8ths, and anything further down is split in half as is normal.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#236

Post by analog31 »

jlebar wrote: post #101
BurningFrog wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have those electronic materials. They come in two varieties. There's something called iRealB, which contains thousands of tunes, but is just chord changes due to a quirk of copyright law -- the melody and lyrics are copyrighted but not the harmony. That's the one where you can transpose tunes. But you don't get the melody.

Then there are large PDFs where somebody ran the old paper fake books through a scanner, but they are just images and are not in an actual computer readable format, so they can't be transposed.

So the computer has not solved the notation problem, yet.

Myself, I've memorized most of the standard jazz repertoire.

In fact I suspect that most of the written music repertoire that exists today will never be translated into computer readable form, because it's just too much work. And not enough new music is being composed to form a critical mass around some new notation system or computer format. When somebody composes a tune (I play in one band that does original jazz compositions), they send out a PDF.

Maybe software will eventually automate the process reliably enough to be useful.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#237

Post by perlgeek »

skrebbel wrote: post #174

I'd like to elaborate a bit, in the same "for nerds" manner, on where Eevee seems to get lost a bit with scales and notation. He (she? not sure) calls the A minor and C major scales the same, because they contain the same notes. That's not an odd thought, but it's like calling sine and cosine the same because both functions contain the same set of values, in the same order. The difference is phase. Basically, scales…

Thanks, that's an explanation I haven't heard that way before, but that makes sense to me.

Follow-up question: how are phase of the scale and the piece of music synchronized? When I think in terms of a wave, I could Fourier-Transform it into sines or in cosines, or any other phase-shifted variant (a * sin(nx + const.))?

Is it always the first note of the piece of music that "anchors" the piece in its scale?

Does that question even make sense? :-)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#238

Post by analog31 »

vintermann wrote: post #194
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.…

I did learn to sight-sing in high-school with a lot of effort (but I sucked at sight-reading on my main instrument, the piano) and I agree with the article writer. When you read these sentences, you can very easily speak them out loud, you don't have to mouth each and every vowel to hear it in your head. This is not the case for music notation, even for very experienced musicians. The clue is that they associate note…

This is true for me. I can go from notation to my fingers, faster than I can go from notation to singing a tune. It's a hyper specialized skill. I can sight-read treble clef on flute, and bass clef on the double bass, but it's hard for me to sight-read treble clef music on the double bass, even though the transposition of a couple octaves is no problem at all.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#239

Post by lmm »

jacobolus wrote: post #199
lmm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a computery person, what bothers me the most is the 1-based indexing of intervals. I get that music theory predates zero, but it makes it incredibly frustrating to work with (e.g. add a third to a fourth and you get a... sixth).

> (e.g. add a third to a fourth and you get a... sixth) Better: In equal temperament, log base two: add 4/12 to 5/12 and you get 9/12. In ratios (depending on tuning, these could be loose approximations): multiply 5/4 by 4/3 and you get 5/3.

Yes, I know. But having the log base 2^(1/7)-ish built in is useful. If we could just subtract 1 from all the numbers (i.e. what we call a fifth should be 4) then we would have a measure that actually made sense.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#240

Post by torrent-of-ions »

skrebbel wrote: post #174

I'd like to elaborate a bit, in the same "for nerds" manner, on where Eevee seems to get lost a bit with scales and notation. He (she? not sure) calls the A minor and C major scales the same, because they contain the same notes. That's not an odd thought, but it's like calling sine and cosine the same because both functions contain the same set of values, in the same order. The difference is phase. Basically, scales…

It's not even just that. They are only "the same" with equal temperament. If you use proper intervals then they are quite different.
Post reply on HN