291–300 of 390 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not merely sight reading that relies on the existing notation, jargon, and theory. Every element of Western music builds on the same building blocks. Western harmony, as taught, relies on understanding chromatic and diatonic harmony; the author did a nice job figuring out and explaining the compromises inherent in equal temperament (without knowing about how ratios and tuning worked before equal temperament; peo…
Very important historical details that are missing completely from all music theory textbooks I have had the misfortune to read. They only give the rules, without explaining the reasons. Also, imagine using notation to write down, say, electonic music. Drums? Maybe, but which notation? Filters, effects? ugh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 confus…
So, I may have to somewhat rethink my dismissal of the solfege, at least for singing intervals. Unless there's a secret system for singing with intervals by number that accommodates accidentals.
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…
It seems like his questions were serious (not rhetorical), so I'll answer them for real. The answers pretend that the 20th century hasn't happened yet—there's no point explaining the interesting things people like Schoenberg did if you don't understand the mainstream tradition in place before them. 1) Why does notation allow for seven pitches, not 12? Because music is at most built out of 7-note scales, not 12. If so…
> Why does notation allow for seven pitches, not 12? Because music is at most built out of 7-note scales, not 12. This answer is good, but I wanted to pick one tiny nit, which is that not all music is built out of 7-note scales. A lot of music is, but music that isn't doesn't often lie well on the staff. That's true, incidentally, whether there are more than 7 notes in the scale (12-tone music, lots of octatonic musi…
Another way would be to say, "most music historically has been built out of 7-note scales", because from my perspective, that would be correct... the vast majority of music systems in the world are either heptatonic or pentatonic. There are obviously exceptions (Gamelan scales for a start -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slendro), but to be honest I can't think of any historical octatonic or higher scales at the moment. I'm sure they exist, but they seem pretty rare (until the late 19th / early 20th century classical era that is).
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
So it's virtually impossible to try out a new notation system.
But my impression is that this would be phenomenally hard to read, especially in a live performance situation where your attention is divided between the sheet music and other stuff. If I were staring at a solid grid of text, and were to glance away for a split second, I'd be lost. Part of sight-reading for me is being able to read ahead by a few notes or even a few bars.
It may also be that conventional notation displays a lot more density on a single page, because a 16th note takes up no more space than a whole note.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Notation would tend to be one of the easiest things for which to develop automatic recognition / parsing?
Also, a lot of the written stuff is handwritten, not typeset. So it's a subset of the handwriting recognition problem.
It's pretty bad for the bassist, since the bass part is usually the second to last part to be copied, meaning that the copyist was probably drunk. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The phase of a sound wave doesn't play a role in the context of compositions or scales. It does of course play a role in audio in general though - in recording, and analog and digital signal processing etc.