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

361–370 of 390 posts

Re: Music theory for nerds

#361

Post by midgetjones »

lohankin wrote: post #40

The explanation of the origin of major scale in the article is pure voodoo. Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? How do you explain minor scale then? Maybe it should be excluded, too? Here're my thoughts on the subject. For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament, This system emerged as a result of long evo…

I think you're being unfair on the whole tone there, it's the intro to 'Take the A Train', and people will often substitute it in a dominant chord when improvising.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#362

Post by theOnliest »

komponisto wrote: post #355
theOnliest wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (sometimes) a legitimate gripe about the standard notation system, which is that it's optimized for music in a key. Sometimes there is a difference between E-F and C-C#. In the key of F major, E-F is the leading tone moving to tonic, which is a diatonic interval (a diatonic half-step). C-C#, on the other hand, is a chromatic half-step: in F major, it represents an alteration of scale degree 5 (sol). If you se…

>This is one reason that the music of the 2nd Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) is so impossible to look at: the structure of the music is obfuscated by the structure of the notation Wrong. First of all, it's not "impossible" to look at by any means; I think it's beautiful to look at (as great music usually is). There is a good reason why Schoenberg abandoned his (briefly-held) ideas about new forms of notat…

I was being a bit hyperbolic; certainly it's not impossible to look at, and I quite like a lot of it. My experiences showing it to students is that people often find it foreboding on first glance, and part of that has to do with all of the accidentals used. It doesn't look like music they're familiar with, even though, as you point out, it comes from the same tradition.

> The idea that their music is not in a key is widespread, but incorrect. Inferential distance (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance) precludes me from being able to explain this concisely in a non-misleading way, unfortunately.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. (I have a PhD in music theory, so the distance may not be as great as you'd imagined.)

Re: Music theory for nerds

#363

Post by andrepd »

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…

That completely misses the point. Without wanting to sound brash, you know jack about music and you should act accordingly, that is, don't spout ill informed suggestions when you clearly don't play an instrument or studied this mater well enough to give an informed opinion.

Scales have 7 notes, not 12. A musician plays music in a scale, they aren't a computer outputting pitches, they are a person playing notes. Music notation has a reason to be this way: notes in the scale don't have flats or sharps next to them, accidentals do. Reducing everything to a number describing absolute pitches is the right thing to do for a computer to play (see midi). It's not the way to go for a person that actually has to understand the logic and patterns in the music.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#364

Post by arnarbi »

Angostura wrote: post #197
skrebbel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this at the top of HN? What the ..? Because it's a cool blog post of course! It carefully and clearly explains things the author understands about music (in a much better way than I've seen before), and then clearly and carefully goes on to describe and comment on some things the authors doesn't understand as well. Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming. I've ne…

I don't think the commentor is suggesting that music is an unworthy topic to be on the top, rather that the post is insufficiently insightful to be on the top.

Yes, this.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#365

Post by arnarbi »

abannin wrote: post #256
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even just that. They are only "the same" with equal temperament. If you use proper intervals then they are quite different.

I'm not sure this applies here. Equal temperament explains how an interval is in tune and does not determine what key a song is in.

Torrent-of-ions is correct. Equal temperament is a compromise in tuning (assigning pitches to notes) which makes the most keys sound ok. The intervals aren't perfect, but close enough. If you tuned a piano for perfect intervals in one key, those pitches would be too much off for another key.

See e.g. http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html

Re: Music theory for nerds

#366

Post by acjohnson55 »

ktRolster wrote: post #351
acjohnson55 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not :(. Although the average person could probably get a lot of good high-level info by browsing it. I haven't yet come across anything that is a good gentle intro. Most resources that approach music and math make the mistake of treating music theory like the law, without any rationale for it provided. Music history textbooks typically give a lot more context of how our music theories emerged, but they don't tal…

Does that book provide anything helpful to someone who already understand music theory?

Oh most definitely! I'd describe it as an extension of what's taught in the standard music theory curriculum. It makes the very ambitious claim of developing a framework that can be used to analyze all tonal music, from the renaissance to the present.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#367

Post by ektimo »

pjdorrell wrote: post #110
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…

You are looking for a "theory of music", as opposed to "music theory", ie an explanatory or scientific theory. I offer my own efforts in this direction at http://whatismusic.info/ .

Thanks! This sounds like good terminology and your writing attempts to answer the question in ways I haven't seen elsewhere.

Also I think the fact that songs can get stuck in your head suggests some kind of mental reinforcement exercise for patterns over time.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#368

Post by arnarbi »

coldtea wrote: post #214
arnarbi wrote: post #145

Why is this at the top of HN? While the author is right that western music notation has shortcomings, almost none of the (admittedly poorly understood) reasons they list are a factor in that. > [Key signatures] completely obscure the relationship between the pitches, though. Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be ve…

> Why is this at the top of HN? Because it was voted to the top after being deemed interesting by HN users. Social boormarking website et al. > Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be very confusing as the regular scale notes would be marked with accidentals. That's assuming otherwise keeping the same notation, which is totally against the point of the author.

> Because it was voted to the top after being deemed interesting by HN users.

Maybe I worded my actual thought poorly: Why do HN users deem this interesting? It's an honest question, not rhetorical.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#369

Post by arnarbi »

fab13n wrote: post #208
arnarbi wrote: post #145

Why is this at the top of HN? While the author is right that western music notation has shortcomings, almost none of the (admittedly poorly understood) reasons they list are a factor in that. > [Key signatures] completely obscure the relationship between the pitches, though. Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be ve…

As a geek and a formerly classically trained musician, I found it interesting to see how a geek discovers musical conventions. I think his post raises interesting questions about western music's discoverability, something developers should be interested about. And I believe, having spent a lot of time with many western classical musicians, that this poor discoverability is in part appreciated and encouraged by many p…

This is a great point. Hiding behind "mumbo-jumbo" is certainly a big problem with many art forms, and actively prevents a lot of people from entering or even enjoying it. Classical music is sadly especially plagued by this.

It's somewhat natural for humans to create exclusivity, especially for areas they have spent a lot of effort or resources on entering themselves. In the case of art and other humanities, I think this is detrimental.

I think the shortcomings of notation and representation (and the pedagogy) of music theory is more the case of managing complexity. It's an evolved system, not a designed one, so it meets its goals in some sort of a local minima, and it'd take a large effort to move out of that minima. But the issues are different from what the blog post author points at. Most of those "features" are there for a very good reason, as most commenters here seem to support.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#370

Post by arnarbi »

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…

This is the case for many complex topics. One recent example for me is aviation: Textbooks for pilots are woefully inaccurate, contradictory, and plain confusing. But they get you flying.

This happens naturally when you can practice an art/craft/skill without deep understanding of the complex system that underlies it. Since that understanding isn't interesting to many, the system survives by teaching an incomplete or inaccurate model that works most of the time. The full understanding only comes with actual practice, and is [implicit knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge) rather than an explicit one. This is sufficient for most people to master the art/craft/skill.

Post reply on HN