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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#241

Post by shiro »

ccozan wrote: post #172
lohankin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not the same. Current music notation is a result of long evolution, unlike QWERTY. Try to invent usable alternative - then you will appreciate the convenience of current notation.

What are you talking there? Qwerty is indeed not that old as the musical notation but it is ~150 years old, and it was invented for the typing machines in order to avoid jams, so it does have some history and evolution [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY

"In order to avoid jams" is a popular story but it's credibility has been challenged [1]. It may be worth noted that Qwerty was made before people used all fingers and touch-typed---they were likely to use just two fingers and typing speed might be quite slow in today's standard.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/qwertys-origin-story-is-a-big-fat-lie-493... (This is just a first one I found in English, but Prof. Yasuoka referred in the article publishes quite a few articles about early typewriters in Japanese, in which he lists several evidences that "jamming" wasn't the reason.)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#243

Post by monort »

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…

Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory of Music

https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1/

Re: Music theory for nerds

#244

Post by torrent-of-ions »

He says the intervals are arbitrary, but they are not, or at least not as arbitrary as that. An octave is 2x the pitch, a fifth is exactly 3/2x the pitch, a major third is exactly 5/4x the pitch etc.

This is fine for instruments which can play an arbitrary pitch like a violin or trombone. But for fretted instruments like guitar, or ones which use a different oscillator per note like piano, xylophone or harmonica, one has to make a decision. Either you tune it to play perfect intervals and can therefore play in only one key, or you tune it to a compromise which can play in any key and sound OK, but no key "perfectly". Equal temperament is one such compromise and is described in the article.

For instruments which play often play long chords like strings, the difference between a perfect interval (as an orchestra would play) and an equal temperament imperfect interval (as a general purpose synthesiser will play) is stunning. Some synthesisers like those from Access have modes to automatically correct the tuning of the third, fifth and maybe seventh harmonics to make them perfect.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#245

Post by shiro »

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,…

I started music with classical piano and only recently started transposing instrument (bamboo flute), and am trying to get used to movable do solfege. I'm still easily confused when key change occurs or borrowed chord appears. (For the latter there are limited patterns so I should remember them, I guess.)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#246

Post by meggar »

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…

You can almost guess what instrument the composer played because of that bias. If you see a violin piece with 6 flats, it's a pretty good guess that the composer didn't play violin.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#247

Post by torrent-of-ions »

andrepd wrote: post #8

TLDR: a person who knows nothing about music or music theory gripes about music and music theory. Admittedly knows nothing, right off the bat and several times throughout the text. How can you declare something to be "terrible", "the worst notation for anything ever", and so forth if you admittedly know nothing of the subject? I know nothing about databases, would reading the Wikipedia page on NoSQL entitle me to dec…

Yeah. The author should learn to sight read music. Oh, and do it with every instrument in the orchestra too, not just piano. Then maybe you'd be qualified to suggest improvements to notation.

When you actually learn to read music you quickly discover that you don't "see" the notes but instead see the intervals. You simply can't see intervals between characters from the Latin alphabet.

There are no spaces for sharps and flats because those are accidentals. If your melody contains a ton of accidentals then it's not in the key you think it's in.

I'm a geek, and I understand where the author is coming from. But music is played by musicians. This is all useful information if you want to program a synthesiser. But it's pretty much useless if you want to actually play music. Music is read by people who actually play music.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#248

Post by shiro »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #140
asmdb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, did you immediately grasp the syntax of every programming language you've ever learned?

Well, in our programming world new languages seem to come out every week, trying to find better ways to write programs. By this standard a new way to encode music is long overdue.

Maybe not as many as programming languages, but new notations do appear time to time. It's just that none has ever got as popular as the traditional notation, I guess.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#249

Post by entropy_ »

ajuc wrote: post #227
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,…

I'm not a good musician by any means, never had music education apart from the primary school which was abysmal. I can't recognise pure tones (just the intervals). I still can play any song I hear on guitar or keyboard "good enough" so that people have fun singing to it. The huge reveal to me was the same - notes doesn't matter - the intervals make the song recognizable. People change notes all the time when singing…

Some notation systems do exactly that. For example, the notation used for byzantine chanting: http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation/Table%20of%20Byzantin...

Re: Music theory for nerds

#250

Post by throw7 »

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…

Check out:

http://www.truetemperament.com/

I can't say I understand any of this, but it's fascinating.

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