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Music theory for nerds

eev.ee

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#321

Post by y04nn »

lohankin wrote: post #55
haberman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree very much with your post's thesis (you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.) Just noticed one thing: > For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament It doesn't seems surprising to me. If you start from a pitch and go upwards in both octaves and perfect fifths (2:1 and 3:2, the two most fundamental intervals)…

Interesting idea indeed. I need to think about it. Edit after thinking: still, it doesn't explain the number 12 IMO. It could be 17 or something else. Probably, it's a long chain of coincidences at play: Western music settled on 7-note scales long time ago (long before equal temperament was invented), and we should start looking for explanations from here. Another edit: one of the important coincidences is that numbe…

I think that there are several thing that brought us to 12. First it is very easy to divide, this is why we use 12 hours clocks and between 2 octave the ear is able to distinguish 1/12 of an octave as 2 different sounds, it might be possible to do better but it would be unpractical because it would be more difficult to found chords that sound good. Arabic music use quater tones (24 quater tones per octave).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#322

Post by zhemao »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #157
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?

Can't speak for the parent, but as far as I can recall, I did. Well, maybe not literally immediately, but to me, the syntax was generally the easiest part of learning a programming language. (It probably helps that they are often very similar to each other.) The only things that were hard were forgetting to write semicolons after statements in C (I have previously mostly written Pascal), and C declarators — but even…

Yes, but did you learn your first programming language immediately? Because that's closer to the author's situation.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#324

Post by zhemao »

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…

Just a nitpick, but the transposition is the other way around. Concert B flat is C for B flat instruments.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#325

Post by e7c6ht6iad »

RileyKyeden wrote: post #278
fao_ wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He (she? not sure) FTR the pronoun where gender is ambiguous is 'they' (It's also sometimes explicitly requested by nonbinary people).

From eevee's Twitter: > she/they/he I have a similar relationship with pronouns. My own perception of my gender jumps around so much that I don't even bother trying to figure it out. It usually leans in one direction, but I don't have many strong feelings about it.

According to the literature [0], Eevee is 87.5% male, 12.5% female.

[0] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Eevee_(Pokémon)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#326

Post by cicero »

abruzzi wrote: post #313
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…

Even though the key signature for a major and its relative minor are the same, that is only part of the story. When you see that A Minor has the same key signature as C Major, what you are seeing is the "natural minor" scale. This is simply the notes implied by the key signature, and so is identical (but down a third) from the relative major. If you play purely in the natural minor, you are really closer to the Aeoli…

Thank you for this. I learned to write natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales when I was a kid, but I never knew this explanation. It makes perfect sense!

Re: Music theory for nerds

#327

Post by jlebar »

zhemao wrote: post #324
jlebar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Just a nitpick, but the transposition is the other way around. Concert B flat is C for B flat instruments.

Argh. In my defense, I play a C instrument. :)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#328

Post by skrebbel »

SamBam wrote: post #316
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…

> they also have a starting point Indeed. For anyone that is not sure about that, take a piano (like this virtual one[1]) and play a scale of all the white notes starting with C. The play a scale of all those same white notes, but starting with A. You should immediately notice that the second version is in a minor key (sounds "sadder"). 1: http://virtualpianos.info/

Awesome example! Folks, do this if this stuff is new to you, it's beautifully enlightening.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#329

Post by zhemao »

tgb wrote: post #219
andrepd wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Why would you write a blog post about something with you -- admittedly! -- know nothing about, and to rant and gripe, no less! Boggles the mind.

There's a good reason this is popular. I wanted to understand key signatures and stuff, so I bought a music theory book. Oh boy, that was a mistake. It just listed scales and chords and told me what a staff was. There was no theory there! Then I read a mathematics of music book and finally the scales were explained. That's why this exists. There's a lot of cruft out there when you look for music theory that isn't wha…

That's because music theory books are written for musicians, not mathematicians. It is a theory, just an empirical one and not a mathematical one.

The circle of fifths is not magic. Every step you take on the circle of fifths moves one note in the key by a semitone.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#330

Post by dietrichepp »

gnaritas wrote: post #304
dietrichepp wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original question is frequently misinterpreted, so I can understand the confusion. I've seen the same question asked on forums a few times and someone always comes out of the woodwork saying that, "Well, ABCDEFG is a minor scale, not a major scale, what are you even going on about?" Let's ignore the part about why the scales we call C major / A minor being taught first, because we all agree that it makes sense to teach those scales first.

The question is, "Why are the notes labeled the way they are, instead of some different labeling (which would change their relationships between each other)?" This has nothing at all to do with "calling a clearly minor scale major". Let's suppose we relabel the notes, so that C is now named "A", D is now named "B", E is now named "C", et cetera. In this alternate universe, Ab is enharmonically equivalent to G, and the scale "ABCDEFGA" is a major scale, and "FGABCDEF" is the corresponding minor scale.

Part of the question is, "Why did we name the notes the way we do, instead of that other way?" That's actually an interesting question, once you get down to it.

Another part of the question is, "Isn't our system kind of arbitrary, and doesn't this alternative universe make more sense?" The answer is "No, the alternative universe isn't inherently better or less arbitrary, for the various reasons we talked about in this thread."

The main two reasons why we wouldn't prefer one universe over the other are because (1) both the Ionian and the Aeolian modes are important in western music, and it's difficult to claim that one is more important than the other, and (2) you have to learn a bunch of other scales anyway, and if you have a hard time with CDEFGABC then you're never going to make it through other basic scales like G major or F major.

(Bug... the "flat" symbol seems to be getting stripped out of my post... so forgive me for using "b" instead U+266D)

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