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Music theory for nerds

eev.ee

301–310 of 390 posts

Re: Music theory for nerds

#301
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets pretty complicated and subjective. Strictly speaking, a "note" cannot define a key. To determine a key, you really need at least 2 intervals, wherein interval a somehow resolves to interval b. Keys are just a mapping of relationships; how does each of the 12 notes relate to each other? If you just play a C major chord, you aren't really playing in the key of CMaj, you're just playing a CMaj chord. For examp…

That's funny because B+G, C+G to me says G major: a major third, then a fourth. Is the ear guided to keys by inversion, some inversions more natural or root-y than others? I've been composing pop music for a long time without knowing stuff like this.

B+G is a minor sixth, not a major third. If you invert it, it's a major third.

B+G followed by C+G is most likely going to sound like a cadence in C Major. You could claim it is G major only if you considered it unresolved transition to the subdominant.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#302

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.

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

Ah, the hipster programmer attitude to learning, based on the idea that because something is:

a) hard (it takes more than a day to understand the complexities)

b) incredibly old

the community should declare it obsolete and immediately begin work on a replacement (preferably based on JavaScript).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#303

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…

Nice question, I think I can answer (although you'll soon notice that my understanding of this subject is limited as well) First of all, this is a mathematically undecidable problem, as in that there exist tunes that could be in multiple scales. The extreme example is a melody that consists of only a single note. Ridiculous, but as a fellow nerd I'm sure you can see how I could call a single note a melody. So we have…

> The extreme example is a melody that consists of only a single note. Ridiculous, but as a fellow nerd I'm sure you can see how I could call a single note a melody.

I got your single note melody right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQfKFwa-jEY

Re: Music theory for nerds

#304

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."

How does that make any sense at all? I don't see it making any more sense at all, not even a little bit. There's nothing arbitrary about C major/A minor being taught first as it's just the simplest scale with no sharps and flats. And calling a clearly minor scale major under a new system doesn't clear anything up for anyone.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if the UK system is better at sieving natural talent whereas the French system is better at teaching? Personally I hated music (in the UK) because we never seemed to get taught anything, we we largely expected to just know things or magically learn through awkward repetition.

Knowing what I know now, I think there are a lot of ways we could have practised music early on that would have helped those of us not born with perfect absolute pitch. Most people have perfect relative pitch (afaik I fall into this group). Perfect absolute pitch and tone-deafness are both quite rare.

It sounds like the French system is optimised for the majority, forcing everyone to practise interval differentiation, including those who don't need it (and the small minority who will never be able to do it).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#306

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…

My teacher always said "music is about tension and the resolution of tension". So in A minor if you play tense chords and then resolve them to A minor, you're in A minor. If you resolve them to C, you're in C major.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#307

In case anyone is searching for a really smart, modern method for learning music theory, this is it: https://www.hooktheory.com The author devised his own system for visually representing notes, it makes it much easier to understand things like scale degrees and relative notation (and thus the theory around famous harmonies, melodies, etc). I think music tools are in desperate need for improvement... Starting with no…

No, instruments really don't. The point of conventional instruments is that once you learn them - which takes years - you can instantly express almost any musical idea using all the possible degrees of freedom available on that instrument. With something like Ableton Push, you're one step removed from the sound generation, because you're triggering automata with a very limited expressive repertoire. (With Push, it's…

"The point of conventional instruments is that once you learn them - which takes years - you can instantly express almost any musical idea using all the possible degrees of freedom available on that instrument."

But the degrees of freedom of conventional instruments are severely limited compared to what is possible.

Let us also recall that every "conventional instrument" was at one time not only unconventional, but even radically new. The piano, is itself only a few hundred years old. I'm sure when it was invented there were some people who argued against its use and that one should instead stay with "conventional instruments", which then did not then include the piano.

I strongly recommend a talk[1] by Jordan Rudess, who is widely considered to be one of the greatest living keyboard players.

In this talk, Rudess discusses and vividly demonstrates the greatly expanded possibilities that innovative keyboards bring to the table.

Novel instruments that somewhat resemble conventional instruments like the keyboard are only the tip of the iceberg of music interface possibility, however. There are plenty of novel music expression technologies that don't have even the remotest resemblance to conventional instruments, and allow ways of expression that were hardly imaginable a hundred years ago. Things like whole body position tracking, which allows you to make music through dance.

Of course, mature musicians like Rudess who've spent their entire lives learning and practicing on traditional instruments will be unlikely to switch to something radically different, as they'll be starting from ground zero on those instruments. But others with less to lose will be more open to learning something completely new.

It's impossible to tell which novel instrument will become the conventional instrument of tomorrow, but it's very likely some will, because that's how we got all of the conventional instruments of today.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h-TsqoSWgo

Re: Music theory for nerds

#308
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The letters and flats/sharps give you key/value over frequencies, which is better than just a numeric index over a chromatic scale. Working with the keys allows for the same abstractions to be used with all 12 keys at the same time, on the same staff.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#309
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One attempt was Hummingbird. http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com

Try writing hummingbird notation by hand though!

Their pages claims: "It’s quick and easy enough to write with an unsharpened pencil. You can scrawl it on a napkin in a pinch."

I don't know if it's true or not, as I view Hummingbird to be fixing things that aren't broken (is the difference between a whole note and a half that hard to suss?) and doesn't fix the things that are.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, it doesn't involve playing notes together the same way it's done in Western music. I guess I misinterpreted what you were saying -- the Indian notes are still derived by looking at notes which sound harmonious when played together, roughly the same way Western notes are derived. They are not usually played together on the same instrument like you would with a piano or a guitar. Harmony between vocal parts is n…

Yep! Many traditions got their notes the same way Western music did. The Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale book does a great job illuminating this.

Ooh, that sounds like a fun book to read!

I spent a lot of time studying this myself because I was fascinated with the fact that these 12 notes in particular seemed ubiquitous in many music systems, and that there wasn't any immediately obvious reason as to why these notes sounded pleasing. Ultimately learned some music theory in the process (I've studied Indian and some Western music, so a lot of it was stuff I already knew, but not in concrete form), but never in a very structured fashion -- more along the lines of asking people and reading snippets.

Put this book on my list, sounds like a structured way to learn something I've been super interested in for years.

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