41–50 of 192 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what you are describing is a graph. The laplacian spectrum of a graph is arbitrary.
Every rigid object has a fundamental frequency, regardless of whether you put it on a graph.
This is great but if we could go back in time and influence the naming conventions so that the 12 semitones were called A-L or just numbered 1 to 12, and if the intervals were named after the actual semitone distance (a 'fifth' is actually seven semitones) the whole thing would be soooo much less jargonny. With all that bumf removed, the patterns of the 'scales' and 'chords' would be foregrounded and thats the actual…
Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder.
If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable.
I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not.
Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1]. Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only havin…
I find the paino-roll notation on DAWs to be a lot more intuitive. Not much good for perfomers of course, but it helped me understand things better. Each semitone is given the same amount of space.
Come on, that is not for "historical reasons", that is because those notes are only one semitone apart!
There are maybe three aspects to music theory: (1) Theory of how things sound like: Tones, melodies, scales, chords, based on the frequencies of individual sounds. (2) How to name things. (3) How to handle the mess of naming things in Western music theory, where things have 12 different names, depending on which note you choose as the base. This post seems to focus on 3.
I once listened to a podcast where fourier transforms were used to generate sounds that otherwise don't exist.
hmmm
There are maybe three aspects to music theory: (1) Theory of how things sound like: Tones, melodies, scales, chords, based on the frequencies of individual sounds. (2) How to name things. (3) How to handle the mess of naming things in Western music theory, where things have 12 different names, depending on which note you choose as the base. This post seems to focus on 3.
I once listened to a podcast where fourier transforms were used to generate sounds that otherwise don't exist.
> For historical reasons, there are no sharps or flats between the notes B/C, and E/F. Come on, that is not for "historical reasons", that is because those notes are only one semitone apart!
"For historical reasons the notes B/C and E/F are one semitone apart."
Plenty of music around that is recorded using actual perfect intervals, so why muddy the waters?
> For historical reasons, there are no sharps or flats between the notes B/C, and E/F. Come on, that is not for "historical reasons", that is because those notes are only one semitone apart!
It would be awesome to add short audio clips. I mean, the examples are correct and all, but it's like discussing painting or photography without a single picture.