Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python

I've been programming for 40 years and playing music for 50. My original background was classical and I play jazz today. I'm a fluent reader.

I think that historically, people were already familiar with "standard" notation and terminology before they learned theory, so it wasn't a major hurdle. Not only do theory students (i.e., at the college level) know how to read, but they are also required to learn keyboard. I've heard people say: Don't try to learn theory without a keyboard in front of you.

Music instrumentation and notation are technologies and as such they are replete with historical baggage. I have an unorthodox view, which is that if someone is not already usefully reading standard music notation by adulthood, then they have no reason to learn it. Explanation of theory for non readers would be better served by using an invented notation that sidesteps the historical naming problems.

One such notation is the Nashville number system. It's not nearly universal, but for the purposes of just enjoying a wide swath of popular and folk music, it actually works. It's fun to see how many different songs boil down to a few basic patterns.

A computerized tutorial could show both notations. There is a lot of instructional material for guitar, that shows conventional notation in parallel with a notation based on a diagram of the fingerboard.

Programming would be just as bad if we were stuck with a 400 year old language. Fortunately we develop new languages, but that's because old programs just get thrown away, and it's easy to teach a computer to read a new language. We also teach programmers not only how to read, but how to create better notation themselves.

You basically can look up just intonation versus equal temperament for the basics. https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html gives the mathematical answer but doesn't get into the history.

A clause that says "assuming twelve-tone equal temperament" would be sufficient here, but you can really go down the rabbit hole if you start digging into scales (see microtonal), and your page is meant to be more basic.

True, but that does not mean you can just space notes in a scale randomly.

I love this!

I've been working on a fixed chromatic solfege system (MaNePu) for a while as well. It uses a repeating vowel pattern which I find produces some really interesting effects. In MaNePu, the chromatic scale is ma - ne - pu - qa - re - su - ta - ve - wu - xa - ye - zu. In other words, consonants starting with M til the end of the alphabet, and rotating through the vowel sounds "ah", "ee", and "ooh". What's neat about this is that the pattern repeats every minor third, so that means every diminished scale internally rhymes! Similarly, transposing any melody by a minor third will also result in a melody that rhymes with the former. Likewise, either whole tone scale will result in a reversal of the vowel pattern. There are other fixed chromatic solfege systems that use an alternating vowel pattern, but MaNePu is the only one that uses a minor third rotation (the others I've seen typically alternate by whole tone), and I think it opens up some interesting avenues for music education.

I like your shortened chord quality convention, though MaNePu takes a different tack. Instead, it favors what I call "descriptive chord naming". Instead of being prescriptive about the quality, a chord is simply described by appending the notes contained within it. This is great because it also removes ambiguity in the cases where a chord might include certain notes or exclude certain notes implicitly. So Dmaj7 would be PuTaXaNe ("Xa" is pronounced like a "j"/"sh" sound sort of like in Pinyin). It also typically reduces the number of syllables spoken, like your system.

The superimposition of 7 on 12 as you put it, is indeed a problem, but there's also an issue with intervallic favoritism (of half and whole tones). After all, there are 7 note scales with minor third intervals, and so on—imagine a world where one of those scales was the basis for diatonicism. Representing that on a keyboard, and the subsequent accidentals would be a nightmare.

Notation is the big unsolved problem, I think, but I'm aware of some work being done in the area if you're interested. As far as the public facing projects I'm aware of, Dodeka is likely the most promising.