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

281–290 of 390 posts

Re: Music theory for nerds

#281

Post by soundwave106 »

dfabulich wrote: post #139
theseoafs wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there an article/book/video anyone can recommend that explains the advantages of modern staff notation in terms that beginners can understand? In particular, I think everyone would agree that it's it's much harder for beginners to hunt and peck sheet music in modern staff notation than it is for a novice typist to type words on a QWERTY keyboard. (At least when the sheet music is written in any key except C major,…

The way to learn the logic behind the scales in my opinion is to learn the theory of the early Western music, up to the Baroque era, that was around while the staff was being developed. That is: learn the seven modes of Western music (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music)).

Each mode is a diatonic scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale). Each mode has a particular combination of whole steps and half steps. Each mode has a "natural" key which can be represented in modern staff notation by all white keys.

In Gregorian chant, there are rarely any accidentals. Even by the Baroque era, while there are more accidentals, I would say the music is still very diatonic in nature.

Early music was more oriented towards just intonation (the whole integer ratio harmony mentioned in the article, which is what I would consider the more "natural" way of harmony). With just intonation, however, you can't just shift to any random key on the fly. Some keys sound nice and related. Some keys sound awful and horrible.

The article author made a statement: "If your music mostly relies on the seven notes from a particular scale, then it’s more compact to only have room for seven notes in your sheet music, and adjust the meaning of those notes when necessary… right?" I think that's an absolutely a correct way of framing early Western classical music, yes.

What makes staff notation harder probably is the corresponding rise in chromatic music.

The rise of 12TET instruments (equal temperament) like the piano, and the corresponding development of chromatic instruments (compare: the natural horn used in the Baroque era vs. the modern valved horn) allows for this sort of modulation at the cost of some chords being slightly out of tune. Modulating key signature all over the place is now possible. Yes, the author should realize that some composers do change the key in the middle of a song to change the mood. (For a nice pop example, here's the Temptations' "My Girl", which changes keys midway through -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IUG-9jZD-g)

Incidentally, the diatonic nature of pre-19th century classical music is the answer to the author's sharp / flat question as well. (http://jtauber.com/blog/2006/11/17/why_a-sharp_is_not_b-flat...)

This shift to chromaticism really isn't reflected in staff notation. In fact, I'm aware that some 20th century composers abandoned the use of key notation, ledger lines, etc. altogether, perhaps in part for this sort of reason.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#282

Post by meggar »

ajuc wrote: post #257
andrepd wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

C is 0. Each half-tone up is +1. If you really want to keep it concise you can write it as base-12 numbers. C1 C1# D1 D1# E1 F1 F1# G1 G1# A1 A1# B1 C2 C2# D2 D2# E2 F2 F2# G2 G2# A2 A2# B2 ... 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0a 0b 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b ... First number is octave. Second number is half-tone in that octave. Translating is just mechanical addition. EDIT: on second thought making it base-12…

What would D Flat be, 0.5? what about D Double flat?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#283

Post by theOnliest »

SwellJoe wrote: post #280
theOnliest wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all aural skills classes (learning to hear/sing music) for music majors use solfege or something like it. Some people use scale degree numbers instead (so a IV chord in a major key is "4-6-1" rather than "fa-la-do"), but the concept is still very useful.

What I'm questioning is the popularity of Solfege vs numeric interval names. My music classes of ~20 years ago treated Solfege as being of historic interest, but not particularly common. While numeric intervals were used daily. It came up somewhat more in sight singing and vocal training than in any of the instrument or theory oriented classes. But, I think it was mostly students who were used to it using it rather t…

Fair enough. It's still pretty common...it's hard to pin down any numbers exactly, but I'd guess it's probably half and half for solfege vs. other systems. We teach solfege at my school (although I prefer numbers myself). And you're right that it's used mostly in sight-singing/aural-skills classes; I mention solfege much less often in my written theory classes.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#284

Post by MereKatMoves »

hammock wrote: post #259
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,…

Many (but not all, or even the majority) music classrooms around the world teach students fluency in solfege (do-re-mi), and everyone I've spoken to about it agrees it helps out a lot in the way you describe.

That's interesting from a personal perspective. I was taught music in the UK where that is specifically not used (or at least wasn't when I learnt).

I took a year out of my Music degree to attend the Sorbonne. French music education places a heavy emphasis on solfege. When I started going to their undergraduate classes it was immediately apparent that the level was several years behind that of the UK (in classes for composition and orchestration most noticeably). To attend classes dealing with similar material to what I was used to as a UK undergraduate, I was attending Post-grad courses. Having just completed my first year on a UK BMus course it was quite an eye opener to see 19yr olds learning material I had been taught at 16.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#285

Post by eric_bullington »

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/solfège is still used prominently in France, or at least it was ~25 years ago. I took music lessons when I lived in France as a teenager. My piano instructor was very confused by the fact that I spoke good French, was at a solid intermediate level at the piano, and yet I could not at all follow his solfège commands (like you say, I had only used numeric intervals back home, although teachers usually called the note by its alphabetic name, like most here I think).

I tried reviewing in my head each week before class what I remembered from the Sound of Music, but made the mistake of thinking that Do-Re-Mi etc. was a static C-D-E instead of realizing that my music instructor was simply describing intervals depending on the key we were in.

In the present day, I would just look it up online, but back in 1991, in a small city in northern France, I didn't have that privilege. It took me several months of twice-weekly instruction before I finally figured out that he was using solfège for intervals, I'm embarrassed to say (to my instructor's frustration and confusion). I'm wincing even now when I think of it.

I asked around at the time and was told it was pretty universal to use solfège there.

I do think using solfège to indicate notes is a much better system for students, since it emphasizes the importance of intervals and keys. It's probably harder at the beginning that just learning static A-B-etc., but worth it.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#286

Post by soundwave106 »

ajuc wrote: post #272
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.…

Have you played with trackers? 2d grid, time is down, instruments(channels) are right, each cell can have a note or "stop this channel". There also can be modifiers in each cell (louder, start tremolo, slide this note into the next, etc). It's most applicable to keyboard music, I think. Sight-reading this without rehaersal would be trivial, right? https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/images/3/3a/ScreenShot004.gif

The main problem I can see with that sort of system is that it probably would get quite unwieldy for decently complex chord patterns (try scoring a chord pattern up the keyboard, say, like what's at the beginning of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto 1 for a start -- http://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP02744-Tchaikovsky-Op23v1FSmuz...).

For other styles I think it would be pretty good; although the score won't be as compact, it might be easier to understand a "fake book" scored piece (ala what's used a lot in jazz) written this way, let alone pop (which often can be represented with a melody line and Roman numeral chords).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#287

Post by hiddenkrypt »

meggar wrote: post #282
ajuc wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is 0. Each half-tone up is +1. If you really want to keep it concise you can write it as base-12 numbers. C1 C1# D1 D1# E1 F1 F1# G1 G1# A1 A1# B1 C2 C2# D2 D2# E2 F2 F2# G2 G2# A2 A2# B2 ... 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0a 0b 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b ... First number is octave. Second number is half-tone in that octave. Translating is just mechanical addition. EDIT: on second thought making it base-12…

What would D Flat be, 0.5? what about D Double flat?

Db would be 01. Dbb would be 00. (or 11 and 10 for the octave)

The point ajuc is making is that the flat-sharp accidentals aren't used or needed at all if you just assign numbers to each tone. There's no concept of flat or sharp, unless you want to deal with microtones.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#288

Post by SwellJoe »

lmm wrote: post #279
SwellJoe wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do you need to do math like that with intervals? As a computer nerd myself, I can understand the argument for 0-based indexing in this case, but I don't recall ever being stumped by it being 1-based. When would you need to add a 3rd and a 4th to get a 6th? Harmonic theory doesn't use addition like that. e.g., playing a 6th is not the same as playing a third and a fourth. So, why do that kind of math with interva…

Whenever you play three notes in sequence, no? I'll read a passage and think "tonic, up a third, up a fifth so that puts me up to the tonic again... nope."

Huh. That's interesting. In a "people's brains think surprisingly differently sometimes and we rarely think about those differences when the resulting behaviors look the same" kinda way.

I mean, I guess that's not so foreign...But, I tend to think of it as pulling out the notes I need from the scale, and not actually counting up to them. e.g. in my brain I'm grabbing the third and the octave (well 7th, if you've got a third and then the fifth of that third, which I guess is why you're preferring 0-based) that are already there...not climbing up them to find there's the tonic there. I mean, I can see that it's a fifth interval if I go from E to B (in C), but unless I'm building a chord on E, I don't care..it's either the 7 in C, and I'm not so much thinking of its relation to E as I play it, and it's a phrase in C, with maybe an Em chord (either implicit or explicit) underneath; or I'm playing jazz, or some other very chord-based music, and I want my phrase to be relative to the chord we're currently playing (so we're inside that Em, and the key is less relevant).

Sight reading is different, as well, in my brain, but, I think it even bypasses the intervals to some degree and is just distances and shapes and an awareness of the key I'm in. I don't read much these days, but I recall it working best (or at least fastest and most accurately) when most of the theory was turned off in my brain and I just let the shape of the notes (their distance from each other) guide me. But, I feel like it's only in improvising and composition where one would be doing any sort of interval math. But, maybe I'm wrong.

When are you doing this kind of math? When reading, improvising, playing memorized pieces, or composing?

Re: Music theory for nerds

#289

Post by chillingeffect »

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.…

This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever.

I'd like to argue that as inefficient as it seems, it's really a reflection of how broad and complex music actually is. This notation and organization system is all a perspective or reference to take when actually trying to comprehend/play music. It's not a fixed set of rules and there are exceptions everywhere.

It's one of those systems where you learn the rules only to know when you're breaking them. So by all means learn to do this, but don't get hung up on real-life deviations.

It actually works well for people performing together, especially when led by a conductor.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#290

Post by tim333 »

perlgeek wrote: post #237
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…

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

No it isn't. If you put any piece of music that is harmonious through a device that analyses the frequencies you'll find three main notes and those give you the key. In C-major for example the main notes are C, E and G. The section will be in C even if the first note is E for example.

You can do this with software. There's a nice video of this here https://youtu.be/xVmkIznjUPE?t=24s

or you can upload a recording to get the chords https://chordify.net/

You can indeed fourier transform the music. I imagine the above software does so.

Post reply on HN