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Music theory for nerds

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Re: Music theory for nerds

#61

Post by Ericson2314 »

ludston wrote: post #28
hardmath123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which in durations are represented spacially, which in my opinion has two negative effects. The first is that spacial recognition takes more effort than symbol recognition, because it's comparative. The second, and more important being that complex sequences of notes will be very dense on the page, and simple sequences of notes will take up a lot of space on the page, so suddenly there is a tradeoff between having sh…

Yeah wtf. Like I don't think current notation is perfect by any means (and I am a PLer, I love new representations) but this and every other replacement I've seen blatantly sucks. ....As with so many things, know what your disrupting!

[In this case, I'd like to say go apprentice engraving if you are 100% serious.]

Re: Music theory for nerds

#62

Post by Ericson2314 »

andrepd wrote: post #10
analog31 wrote: post #4

This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. Indeed. I'm a musician, and something non-musicians often ask (especially techies, it seems) is why we use such an archaic notation system. The reason is simply that a certain number of musicians have developed the skill of sight reading which is the ability to perform a composition directly from a written sheet, with little or no rehearsal.…

>why we use such an archaic notation system. The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.

The thing I most want to change is how time signatures are notated: I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#63

Post by ktRolster »

ngneer wrote: post #59

The interested reader is referred to "Mathematics and Music" by David Wright, published by the American Mathematical Society. The realization that the circle of fifths is really there because 5 and 7 (aka -5) are co-prime to 12 was worth the entire thing! Together with 1 and 11 (aka -1) they generate the group Z_{n} for n = 12...

That explains why the circle of fifths is a circle that goes through all keys, but the really interesting thing about the circle of fifths is that a fifth sounds relatively close to the key next to it, and it doesn't really explain that, I guess.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#64

Post by MrManatee »

The article says that the "human ear loves ratios", but doesn't dig deeper into why. Here's my two cents.

First of all, let's focus on harmony (notes played at the same time) as opposed to melody (notes played one after another). What sounds good in a melody is quite culture-dependent, but there are reasons why harmony is more universal.

Second, let's focus on sounds that are produced by something long and narrow. In a guitar, violin, or piano it's a string, and in a flute it's a column of air. The physics of vibrations goes so that in such a case the sound is composed of harmonics: sine waves of frequencies f, 2f, 3f, 4f, ... If the shape is different (say, a circular membrane of a drum), then this may not apply.

Suppose we add a second sound, whose fundamental frequency is, say, 3/2 f. This means that its harmonics are 1.5f, 3f, 4.5f, 6f, 7.5f, 9f, ... Half of these (3f, 6f, ...) coincide with the harmonics of the first sound, so the sounds "reinforce" each other. More generally, if the ratio of the frequencies is p/q for some integers p and q, then there will be overlap in the harmonics. And the smaller p and q are, the more overlap there will be.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#65

Post by byproxy »

andy_ppp wrote: post #48
ketralnis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music theory is an accepted and used term of art for the category of things that this article talks about. There are courses, books, university departments, and degree programmes that use the term. Nobody is going to stop using it because you skimmed it but it doesn't describe some other thing that you think it should. Some examples: * http://www.music.msu.edu/areas-studios/music-theory * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Grand parent is saying he wants an article that covers the "why does music sound good" part of music theory, something I want too. I think most people have a basic grasp of notes, scales and that a middle C is air oscillating at 440 cycles per second. How can you make something sound good is the interesting part of music theory for me and I still haven't found a good intro to it!

middle C isn't 440hz. that's generally an A.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#66

Post by ktRolster »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #62
andrepd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why we use such an archaic notation system. The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.

The thing I most want to change is how time signatures are notated: I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.

I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.

I'm not really sure what this means, but it sounds interesting.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#67

Post by ktRolster »

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…

3. How could you write a program to pick out music that people find especially good (versus music that has surface similarities)?

Be an artist.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#68

Post by lohankin »

rspeer wrote: post #50
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…

> Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? The minor third is a 6:5 ratio. Does that change your mind? Where do your tones and semitones come from? You've just rejected the explanation for why we have a 12-tone scale (it is a local optimum of tuning, closed under the operation of transposition, that satisfies lots of nice ratios), so what do you propose instead? Saying "…

Please read wikipedia article on temperament. 7-note scales were "discovered" long before equal temperament was introduced. Equal temperament is a relatively recent invention, initially was very controversial, and remained so for a long time. In other cultures, there's still a variety of scales and temperaments that have nothing to do with 7-note scales at all. (Jazz uses variety of scales, too - some even with 2 semitones in a row). There's only one thing people seem to agree on: the role of fifth (3/2).

Re: Music theory for nerds

#69

Post by hajiurtr12 »

MrManatee wrote: post #64

The article says that the "human ear loves ratios", but doesn't dig deeper into why. Here's my two cents. First of all, let's focus on harmony (notes played at the same time) as opposed to melody (notes played one after another). What sounds good in a melody is quite culture-dependent, but there are reasons why harmony is more universal. Second, let's focus on sounds that are produced by something long and narrow. In…

An entire class of music, Carnatic music, has existed for thousands of years with millions of listeners that is based on melody alone.

For a drum, interestingly, the fundamental vibration modes are all Bessel functions.

Re: Music theory for nerds

#70

Post by rspeer »

If you want a series of books that constitute "music theory for nerds" -- building up music theory from a solid foundation of acoustics, and math -- try "Musimathics" by Gareth Loy. It is a great read.

It takes very little for granted. Now, sometimes you have to say "this is just the way it turned out" to explain Western music, but the best way to do so is to show some other ways it could have turned out, and show their role in non-Western music. Musimathics does that often.

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