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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#381

Post by tjl »

coldtea wrote: post #216
Desustorm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people with experience in the field are just annoyed with her poorly-conceived assertions at the end, e.g. "This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever." rather than pedantry.

Only a lot of experience could just be cargo cult and busy work, as is in most fields. I.e the music world's analogue to: "but of course you need to make XML configuration files for everything and FactoryFactorySingletons etc, that's how we do things in J2EE".

There's been other proposed notations, but they all have their own shortcomings. Any alternative would have to be much better than the standard one, otherwise nobody would bother to retrain to use it.

The problem with this blog post is that it's clear that there's a lot they don't understand but they still criticize without finding out the why (which many commenters here have provided those answers).

I think the blog post could be much better written without the uniformed commentary as there's some things that are good about it. It's just that the other parts puts some people off from recommending it.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#382

Post by abannin »

arnarbi wrote: post #365
abannin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, equal temperament is basically a compromise of tuning methods. While it can help ensure that a piece which modulates into different keys is in tune (as close as possible), equal temperament cannot tell the key that is being played.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#383

Post by komponisto »

theOnliest wrote: post #362
komponisto wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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

But, of course, other late-Romantic and early-modern music has almost as many accidentals. (Try the music of Max Reger, to take my favorite example du jour.)

I personally think accidentals ought to be retrospectively regarded as implicitly or explicitly attached to every note, with a convention of omitting them for brevity in passages that stay in a single diatonic area for long stretches. This 'retconning' of notational convention makes them seem much less forbidding to me.

>I have a PhD in music theory, so the distance may not be as great as you'd imagined

(Indeed, I wasn't expecting that!) That does cut down on it significantly, though it still needs more exposition than can be given in a comment.

Very briefly, the idea is that if (following Schenker and Westergaard, and for that matter the implications of staff notation itself) you take a line-based view rather than a chord-based view, tonality doesn't depend on "classified chords". And if, furthermore, you discard the peculiar non-Bayesian notion of tonality characteristic of German theory at turn of the twentieth century (where a key must be "established" or "confirmed" by a cadential ritual in order to be said to exist), you find that you can always read local keys if you zoom in enough; and out of these local keys grow the global ones.

There's a pernicious confusion that persists in music theory between tonal function and the chord-based view (to the point where the former is most commonly referred to as "harmonic function", as if the two were conceptually inseparable). But a tone has a scale-degree value independently of its participation in vertical "chords". This should have been clear ever since Schenker ; yet it is so poorly understood that, for example, Daniel Harrison could write a whole book advocating this view, all the while under the impression that he is doing something new and non-Schenkerian, when in fact this is part of the core of Schenkerian theory (as the origin of the circumflex notation testifies).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#384

Post by spurgu »

midgetjones wrote: post #360
abruzzi wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've never quite understood why you learn a melodic minor as being different depending on if it's ascending or descending. Are there examples of this in music? Or is it just something invented to test young pianists in exams?

That's only in classical music. Jazzers play "pure" melodic minor both up and down.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#385

Post by mkd1964 »

abannin wrote: post #251
perlgeek wrote: post #237

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…

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…

Yes, I was trying to explain some theory to my sister and she had it in her head that "black notes" on the piano - or anything we call a sharp or flat - were "minor". It took a lot of explaining to get her to realize that a single note on it's own is in no particular key and no particular mode (scale).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#386

Post by mkd1964 »

soundwave106 wrote: post #281
dfabulich wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I almost mentioned this point about A# and Bb on his blog but didn't. He gives an example of an A# major scale and it becomes immediately obvious that something's wrong. In order to write such a scale you either have to skip named notes (A#, C, D.. what happened to B?) or have a key signature that contains double sharps. That would be the "theoretically correct" way to do it but there are no key signatures with double sharps. So the correct name for the scale is B flat, which follows the diatonic major scale pattern of "wwhwwwh" and does not skip named notes.

But from his point of view (as any beginner) this is very confusing. They sound the same and they use the same physical keys on the keyboard, so what's the difference? There is no good answer to that except it satisfies the theory (the musical "rules") of western music.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#387

Post by mkd1964 »

bitwize wrote: post #302
blake8086 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

HA! This made my day.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#388

Post by mkd1964 »

nicksellen wrote: post #254
jsackmann wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadly speaking, major chords sound bright and happy. Minor chords sound dark and sad. The C major scale consists of C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The A-minor scale consists of A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. Those are the same notes, but if you play each of those patterns on a keyboard, the first one sounds happy, the second one sounds sad. A C-major chord (technically, triad) is made up of C-E-G, the first, third, and fifth notes of the scal…

> the final chord tells you the key That makes it sound like a definitive rule, but it's just a common convention.

It is just a convention, not a rule. It is very common in classical music for a piece in a minor key to end on a major chord (called a Picardy 3rd) or in some cases to end on the dominate 5th - which is a major chord. The latter though, isn't usually the absolute end of a piece because it leaves you hanging (rather like ending "Happy Birthday" on the word "to" - and leaving off the "you").

Re: Music theory for nerds

#389

Post by mkd1964 »

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,…

I'm a very good musician and have never thought about it exactly that way before but I have to say, that's a very good explanation and way of thinking about it. I think it's a bit abstract for someone trying to learn to read music, but it's absolutely correct.
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