[HN Gopher] Basic Music Theory
___________________________________________________________________
Basic Music Theory
Author : jacquesm
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-02-14 06:47 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iconcollective.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (iconcollective.edu)
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| For those who like workbook-style exercises and using pencils and
| staff paper, I highly recommend "Practical Theory" by Sandy
| Feldstein:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0882842250
|
| I've been teaching myself classical piano from scratch (with a
| very good human teacher and weekly lessons) throughout the
| pandemic and this book has been a huge help for supplemental
| information and just getting me in the habit of marking up staff
| paper.
| analog31 wrote:
| I think it's worthwhile perhaps asking some random musicians what
| they think music "theory" consists of. They will probably be the
| first to agree that it's not the same as "theory" in the sciences
| or "theory" in the humanities.
|
| I'm a jazz musician, and have learned very little theory myself
| beyond basic notation, scales, and chords. I can hold my own on
| the bandstand.
|
| But without exception, the musicians who are capable of composing
| and arranging new material of any quality have all studied
| theory. I think it expands your creative vocabulary in ways that
| I can't really explain.
| meowkit wrote:
| In my opinion, it expands your creative vocabulary via analysis
| and synthesis.
|
| If you can analyze a riff or a progression, take it apart and
| identify its melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and tonal components,
| then you can use the combos you like to synthesis new stuff
| later with improv and audia-tion. Theory just gives you a
| catalog and process for naming things.
|
| I think many musicians learn a lot of this implicitly through
| their ears, never learning the names and patterns. It works,
| but its probably slower.
| analog31 wrote:
| It's certainly been slower for me. Thanks to being a bassist,
| I was able to function in ensembles long before learning to
| improvise melodic solos. Today, soloing is a major part of my
| playing, but I struggle with difficult, modern changes.
|
| It amazes me that Chick Corea had limited formal education,
| given his wizardry at both composition and improvisation.
| Nobody could thread a melodic line through complex changes,
| with such grace.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| They really could have done with having someone with no knowledge
| read it and ask questions. Nowhere does it explain what a flat or
| a sharp note is, for instance.
| chobobro wrote:
| https://tobyrush.com/theorypages/
|
| Here's a very useful collection of infographics on music theory.
| codeulike wrote:
| This is useful but sometimes whats called 'Music Theory' is
| actually more like 'Music Notation' or 'Music Naming Conventions'
| and thats what most of this site is. IMHO for historical reasons
| the western naming conventions we've come up with for the 12
| semitones (A, A#/B, B, C, C#/D, D, D#/E, E, F, F#/G, G, G#/A)
| actually obscure the underlying relationships between the notes
| rather then elucidating them. The same conventions get carried
| across to sheet music, where the overriding concern historically
| seemed to be saving ink rather than clarity.
|
| The real 'theory' boils down to why the pattern of the major and
| minor scales is the pattern that it is (which is the same
| question as 'why are the black/white keys on the piano arranged
| that way?'). And the related question of why are there 12 of them
| in the octave.
|
| And that underlying theory is much better explained in this page
| that was posted to HN some years ago:
|
| 'How Music Works'
|
| https://www.lightnote.co/
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792063 (2016)
|
| Also see 'Music Theory for Nerds'
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 (2016)
| mhh__ wrote:
| Realistically all music theory is a joke - an incredibly useful
| joke if you want to make music, but it's not a theory in any
| sense of the word: all music theory is, is a group of notations
| and conventions for characterising sound and how to get a
| certain sound.
|
| You could regard the period and origin of a given theory as a
| set of axioms, e.g. African classical music has almost nothing
| to do with Bach, but you'd be missing the point.
|
| 20th century and Levine's books are a good introduction to
| applying music theory to do bizarre and twisted things when
| improvising.
| coldtea wrote:
| I'm not sure what kind of theory you have in mind, but music
| theory is very much a theory (let's stick to traditional
| western music theory for now).
|
| Perhaps you compare it with something like Physic's theory.
| That it is not.
|
| But it's more like a mathematical theory, a set of axioms,
| and an algebra of relationships and properties that derive
| from them.
|
| And of course it's a theory as opposed to the actual practice
| (applying it to playing an instrument).
| benrbray wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. It's nothing like a
| mathematical theorem, since you can't really _prove_
| anything about the subjective human experience of listening
| to music.
|
| Physics on the other hand, though it relies on mathematical
| models, can't really explain _why_ the universe exists in
| the particular way that it does. The best we can do is use
| the scientific method to make very educated guesses at an
| accurate mathematical model that might help us accurately
| explain the behavior of some physical system we 're
| interested in. Physics is full of inconsistencies and
| unexplained phenomena, but we're slowly getting better at
| making predictions.
|
| Music theory is the same way. Music sounds good to humans,
| and there doesn't really need to be a deeper reason than
| that for me to listen to a song over and over. Music
| theorists will study the music that people tend to like /
| dislike, and do their best to come up with an explanation
| for why -- often by pulling it apart into its core
| components, comparing it to other works, analyzing chord
| structure, voicing, instrumentation, etc.. In the end, just
| as with physics, composers have slowly built up a reliable
| foundation of knowledge to help them compose music that
| will reliably sound "good". But every so often someone
| comes along with an earworm that can't fully be explained.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think you have it backwards. It 's nothing like a
| mathematical theorem, since you can't really prove
| anything about the subjective human experience of
| listening to music._
|
| That's exactly what makes it like a mathematical theorem.
|
| Mathematical theorems are not about proving anything
| about "subjective human experience".
|
| The axioms of western music theory just prove that X
| chord is the dominant under these conditions, or Y plays
| this role in that context, or Z scale/mode/whatever
| should be constructed as such, or M and Y form a K
| together, and so on.
|
| Similar to how a (quite simple) algebra would work.
| mhh__ wrote:
| > But it's more like a mathematical theory, a set of
| axioms, and an algebra of relationships and properties that
| derive from them.
|
| That's what I take issue with. I vaguely agree with the
| notion that music theory does have some kind of axiomatic
| form hidden deep within, but what can you prove? There is
| no fundamental theorem of Counterpoint, or that 12-tone
| rows are the work of the devil etc.
| coldtea wrote:
| The axioms are more high level: what is the major/minor
| form, how one derives the modes, etc.
|
| It's not about reductionistically (?) deriving even those
| from first principles.
| mhh__ wrote:
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Twentieth-Century-Harmony-
| Creative-... is the book (can't edit)
| guerrilla wrote:
| Adam Neely has an entertaining video essay ranting about that
| in some detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
| djaychela wrote:
| I'd disagree with it being entertaining. I like a lot of
| his videos, but saying that it equates to white supremacy
| is an unhelpful and simplistic viewpoint which perpetuates
| a rather tiring rhetoric of self - loathing against western
| society. Music theory was simply codified by people using
| Western classical music as a yardstick, and taking the
| common ideas expressed in it as the music to analyse using
| it.
|
| Is definitely somewhat out of date, and in need of
| improvement to encompass not only the music created in
| other cultures but also textural and sonic expression which
| makes up interesting music which could otherwise be under -
| analysed using WCM as the baseline, but equating this to
| white supremacy is to me incorrect, and missing the point
| of what's actually needed - an update.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Did you watch it? He's not calling music theory itself
| white supremacist but the current culture that refers to
| it as "music theory" per se as in "the" music theory
| opposed to "a" music theory/theory of music. That it is
| seen as the yard stick and the only thing that taught is
| the problem, as that's clearly exclusionary, not the
| existence of the theory which can be no more racist than
| any other. I see nothing self-loathing about that. It's a
| useful criticism that might help get music education to
| broaden its horizons, which it already has started to do
| it seems.
| djaychela wrote:
| I did watch it when it originally came out - on the day
| it came out, I think. It has White Supremacy in the
| title, and that means that the vast majority won't spend
| 45 minutes watching a video, they'll just take a headline
| and go with it. I have seen a number of people say that
| music theory is white supremacist (both before the
| release of the video and after it), and I think that
| someone who has as many subscribers as Adam Neely should
| be a little more careful and a little less clickbaity
| with video titles. I felt at the time he was trying to
| ride on the wave of a movement to decry music theory as
| something that was explicitly White Supremacist, and I
| don't agree with that sentiment. I appreciate that there
| are plenty of people who will say that I've been
| brainwashed by the establishment, or that I'm a White
| Supremacist for holding that view, but I'd say that's not
| the case.
|
| Saying that it doesn't encompass some traditions of music
| is one thing (and broadly correct, as I already said),
| but that's not the same as saying that it's white
| supremacist. Saying 'music theory is incomplete', or that
| 'music theory ignores other cultures', etc. would be fair
| enough, although again I think it would be one-sided. I'd
| be interested to see if the teaching in other cultures
| (such as, for instance Indian) encompasses Western
| Classical tradition (i.e. based around a 12-note octave
| instead of a 22 note one) in a similar manner - I would
| imagine that it doesn't, as it concentrates on the idiom
| that it describes. And I'm certainly not a music theory
| specialist, but I believe that attempts have been made to
| make a standard method of incorporating microtonality
| into western music notation.
|
| For the record, I spent nearly 20 years teaching in UK
| schools, and the music curriculum is most definitely not
| exclusionary - a wide range of traditions are covered in
| detail, and the roots of popular music in 'The West' are
| traced back to their origins, often leading pupils to
| make some interesting wider discoveries about culture and
| history. Music is _not_ taught in a way that the Western
| Classical tradition is an exclusionary yardstick
| (although at A-level some elements of it are covered in
| some detail) And this has been the case since I was at
| school in the 80s, so this isn 't down to any current
| changes.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Did you watch it? He 's not calling music theory
| itself white supremacist but the current culture that
| refers to it as "music theory" per se as in "the" music
| theory opposed to "a" music theory/theory of music_
|
| And he is still wrong. Every culture refers to its own
| music theory (or most any other kind of theory) as THE
| theory, not "A" theory. That's not because of supermacist
| tendencies, it's just familiarity and closeness.
|
| It's usually not useful, nor are we get any special
| benefit from, to take into account 2000 other traditions
| (even our own past ones, or some niche traditions in our
| midst) when we talk of the kind of music we do 95% of the
| time.
|
| It would be like saying "I am hungry - and this is my
| personal feeling", "This artist is fire - and I say this
| speaking on behalf of myself alone", "Macaroni and cheese
| is the best comfort food, for me that is".
|
| A useless and tiresome clarification.
|
| Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other
| culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its
| own stuff as THE stuff.
|
| So, yeah, this is just a fad, and a very US-centric
| 2010-20x0 at that. No Italian would give two fucks if
| they refer to regular western music theory as THE music
| theory.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think it's pretty blind to teach people that "this is
| music" rather than "this is how we've done music here and
| other people over there do it differently." We live in a
| global civilization now and there's no reason not to reap
| the benefits or to be exclusionary. Ignoring Indian and
| Chinese theories today is just sticking your head in the
| sand and promoting some weird type of conservatism. It'd
| be like ignoring the non-Western parts of math just
| because. That's completely irrational.
|
| > Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other
| culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its
| own stuff as THE stuff.
|
| I've never seen this to be true in Indian music
| discussion. They know Western music too. I can only
| assume the same is true in China being that America and
| Europe export so much.
| djaychela wrote:
| >Ignoring Indian and Chinese theories today is just
| sticking your head in the sand and promoting some weird
| type of conservatism.
|
| That is true, but I don't see that happening in music
| education in the UK. I can't speak for anywhere else.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Ignoring Indian and Chinese theories today is just
| sticking your head in the sand and promoting some weird
| type of conservatism._
|
| Well, Indian and Chinese theories you're never gonna use
| in 99% of the music you play in the US, so you might as
| well ignore it.
|
| The same way Indians are not taught Bluegrass and the
| Chinese don't study ragas.
|
| Indians and Chinese in India and China do study western
| music theory, but that's because it has become a global
| francize and thus they need it (e.g. to play a pop gig).
| They don't do it in order to merely be inclusive.
|
| I'd reverse the charge, that only westerners (at least
| some modern ones) think of themselves as some engligtened
| all-inclusive superset of humanity, that they feel like
| they should be studying western + Indian + Chinese +
| whatever music theory, and not just the theories they
| need as working musicians (plus a la cart study if
| someone is interested in particular ethnic styles).
|
| Chinese musicians don't feel any great urge to study
| Indian classical music, and Indian musicians don't
| particularly care/call for studing Chinese music...
|
| Worse, if western musicians are made to study
| Indian/Chinese music, and start producing works in said
| formats, the end result will be the watering down of said
| musical traditions.
|
| There is Indian and Chinese music, because it's tied to
| those peoples' history, tradition, artistic development,
| sentiments, and so on.
|
| Without that, it's just "ethnic fusion" BS - which we
| shouldn't be encouraging more of...
|
| If a westerner wants to learn that music, they shall go
| to a special Indian/Chinese music school (preferably in
| the respective countries), study it with reverance,
| understand it, live like the peoples who made it do, and
| so on, until they can actually feel it. Not have someone
| teach it to them at Berklee and then start producing
| works based on them....
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think it 's pretty blind to teach people that "this
| is music" rather than "this is how we've done music here
| and other people over there do it differently." We live
| in a global civilization now and there's no reason not to
| reap the benefits or to be exclusionary._
|
| Maybe start american people actually listening to music
| outside of the US and UK? (And I'm not referring to latin
| americans listening to latin music).
|
| They're some of the most chauvinistic peoples when it
| comes to consumption of music, movies, tv series, books,
| etc.
|
| Then we can worry about some jazz player at Berklee or
| some high schooler at a school band learning western
| music theory as "this is music" vs learning about the
| gamelan or classical indian ragas...
|
| > _I 've never seen this to be true in Indian music
| discussion. They know Western music too. I can only
| assume the same is true in China being that America and
| Europe export so much._
|
| That's only because they have to play this too, as it has
| become popular in the 20th century.
|
| Historically however there was no mention or need to
| mention western music theory though.
| codeulike wrote:
| Ideas about ratios between note frequencies, overtones of
| different notes co-inciding, and how those overtones affect
| the cilia in the inner ear and hence our perception of sound
| could perhaps be called a theory proper. e.g. Octaves are
| fairly universal in world music, so there might be a
| physiological basis for that.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Octaves have a very straightforward mathematical basis.
| Double the pitch, you get an octave.
|
| What is pitch? It is defined in hertz, the number of times
| the underlying vibration repeats per second.
|
| If you have an octave, you take one pitch like 220, then
| you double it to 440. That is the next octave. It's clear
| that if you define the "underlying vibration" as a sound
| that oscillates twice (2hz) then the 440hz sound is also in
| a way a 220hz sound. Thus the octave is really just a
| recognition of that mathematical relationship between the
| two pitches.
| jeofken wrote:
| The 5th too is very simple. It is 1.5x the root. So the
| the 8th of 440Hz is 880Hz, and the 5th is 660Hz. Western
| musical theory is amazingly fractional
| benrbray wrote:
| Actually, most music produced on physical instruments in
| the west doesn't have such nice ratios. I suggest reading
| about equal temperament (or watching some Adam Neely
| videos) if you're interested in learning more about how
| our tuning system diverges from the Pythagorean ideal.
| codeulike wrote:
| I know that. The interesting bit is _why does it sound
| right?_. Probably something to do with overtones and
| cilia.
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| I would disagree that "it's not a theory in any sense of the
| word". There is an established sense of the word "theory" in
| which its meaning is derived from how it contrasts with
| "practice". Theory vs Practice is a fairly common dichotomy.
| In music of course, the practice part is just playing. The
| fact that this sense of the word has less precise boundaries
| than the notion of theory in math/logic/science doesn't
| render it totally useless IMO.
| 86J8oyZv wrote:
| When you get into how music editing works these two things are
| actually very much related. I've built a multi platform Flutter
| app that basically uses the "music theory" concepts of keys and
| chords to automate solving the "what note names should we pick
| for these notes (ie, Db or C#): https://beatscratch.io
| contingo wrote:
| Were you implying that a different kind of everyday notation
| exists that could be a significant improvement on the
| traditional system? I understand that various alternative
| notations can give a clearer presentation of single aspects of
| music, and I know of some in use for specific instruments and
| genres/styles, but overall, as a general purpose encoding,
| standard notation seems to be a well-optimized compromise
| arrived at by real working musicians over the centuries.
| Notation has to convey a lot of musical information beyond
| pitch specifications and relationships. Speaking as someone
| with good sight reading ability at the piano, and who's heard
| better pianists sight-reducing orchestral scores even, sheet
| music doesn't lack clarity, and saving just the right amount of
| ink also means having a readable format.
| codeulike wrote:
| I find the 'piano roll' visualisation, as used by most major
| sequencers/DAWs is a much more intuitive way of showing how
| chords and intervals work, precisely because it is
| proportionally spaced.
|
| I'm not saying traditional notation isn't useful, I'm saying
| it's unhelpful if you're trying to understand how music
| actually works.
| contingo wrote:
| A piano roll visualization gives a somewhat more immediate
| depiction of intervallic information. But it isn't
| absolutely proportionately spaced, it's mapped to keyboard
| topology. Two neighboring white keys could be a major or
| minor second apart, etc. (And if real piano topology is
| shown, asymmetric positioning of black keys mean that
| identical intervals with one white key and one black key
| are different in span.)
|
| In relation to the staff, pitches in standard notation are
| just as "proportionally spaced". Instead of squeezing in
| black keys, you have to squeeze in accidentals, but then
| accidentals are an extremely useful way of "showing how
| chords work", especially in the context of progressions in
| tonal harmony, which a piano roll gives you no meta-
| information about. It's less intuitive only in that you
| need some study to parse it fluently, at which point you
| gain the advantage of being untied to the layout of a
| particular physical instrument.
|
| In any quest to "understand how music actually works", as
| soon as you take some baby steps beyond the basic alphabet
| of intervals, a piano roll visualization is going to hold
| you back.
| codeulike wrote:
| In all the software I've used, it is proportionally
| spaced. You're just used to thinking the old way. Trust
| me, the whole thing is a lot simpler if you just accept
| 12 equally spaced semitones, with 7 of them in play for
| any particular key.
| contingo wrote:
| I don't trust you. You're just used to thinking in terms
| of the piano keyboard. As I said before, the distance
| between two adjacent white keys on a piano roll could be
| a major second, or it could be a minor second. In other
| words the same distance encodes different intervals. You
| don't know which it is until you also examine the
| position of the black keys. A keyboard where the twelve
| semitones were actually equally spaced would not have
| groupings of two vs. three black keys. Looking at the
| adjacency of the keys trivial to do, but so is reading an
| accidental, which gives you additional information about
| the functional role of the pitch it alters.
| codeulike wrote:
| You need to actually look at how piano rolls work in a
| DAW. The twelve semitones are all equally spaced.
| contingo wrote:
| OK, I looked at some piano roll layouts in DAWs, and
| found examples with equal spacing between semitones,
| you're right.
|
| I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The
| layout allowed for speedy recognition of lone intervals
| and simple chords, but no more so than standard notation,
| and it was far worse than standard notation at showing
| any higher level musical content (the harmonic function
| of those intervals and chords in the context of the whole
| piece or local progression, polyphony and independent
| voices in general, counterpoint, organization of rhythms
| and cross rhythms, phrasing, larger compositional
| structures...). Also, because it's just a homogenous
| field of repeating piano octaves there is much less to
| positionally anchor the eye on as it reads through, like
| a staff with ledger and bar lines and key signature would
| provide to a fluent sight reader. All this musical
| meaning is stripped away and to reinstate it would be a
| case of painstakingly decoding the piano roll rather than
| just fluently reading the music.
|
| I can see how this layout is really useful in a DAW for
| MIDI input and editing. As for learning the absolute
| basics of harmony, yeah it's accessible, if you can't be
| bothered to learn the basics of standard notation. After
| which point it's a dead end.
| [deleted]
| mb7733 wrote:
| On a piano roll the black and white keys are equally
| spaced. Two adjacent rows are always a semitone apart.
| contingo wrote:
| OK, I looked at some piano roll layouts in DAWs, and
| found examples with equal spacing between semitones,
| you're right.
|
| I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The
| layout allowed for speedy recognition of lone intervals
| and simple chords, but no more so than standard notation,
| and it was far worse than standard notation at showing
| any higher level musical content (the harmonic function
| of those intervals and chords in the context of the piece
| or a progression, polyphony and independent voices in
| general, counterpoint, organization of rhythms and cross
| rhythms, phrasing, larger compositional structures...).
| Also, because it's just a homogenous field of repeating
| piano octaves there is much less to positionally anchor
| the eye on as it reads through, like a staff with ledger
| and bar lines would provide to a fluent sight reader. All
| this musical meaning is stripped away and to reinstate it
| would be a case of painstakingly decoding the piano roll
| rather than just fluently reading the music.
|
| I can see how this layout is really useful in a DAW for
| MIDI input and editing. As for learning the absolute
| basics of harmony, yeah it's accessible, if you can't be
| bothered to learn the basics of standard notation. After
| which point it's a dead end.
| irscott wrote:
| Those same relationships are apparent when reading a
| traditional score. Once you reach a certain level of
| proficiency reading music it's easy to spot the intervals
| which make up a chord as written. I don't think the same
| amount of proficiency isn't needed to interpret a piano
| roll, it's just proficiency in seeing the same
| relationships notated differently.
|
| All that to say I think they're both conveying similar
| pitch information and take a similar amount of effort to
| ready correctly. Piano roll doesn't convey rhythmic
| information and that's where I think piano roll falls short
| as a method of straight notation.
| codeulike wrote:
| Imagine you are composing a piece of music that will move
| through a series of key changes (as most pieces of music
| do). On a piano roll you can see exactly which semitones
| are shared in common by the different major and minor
| keys. You can map your way through the transitions
| visually. A major triad uses 4 and 7 semitone gap, a
| minor triad uses 3 and 7. It's all so much simpler and
| clearer if you are starting from scratch.
|
| Traditional notations are obsessed with pretending there
| are only 7 notes when there are in fact 12. Accidentals
| and key changes are obfuscated.
| mb7733 wrote:
| How are accidentals obfuscated on a traditional score?
| They are explicitly marked. It's on a piano roll that
| they would be easy to miss -- they appear the same as any
| other note.
|
| Similarly, key changes are explicit in sheet music but
| hard to see on a piano roll without careful inspection.
| codeulike wrote:
| What's obfuscated is the _actual_ semitone interval
| between the accidental and the other notes around it. And
| the actual semitone interval is the most important bit of
| information - it's what our ears hear.
| mb7733 wrote:
| I think what you're missing is that a big part of the
| design of traditional music notation is that it is
| intended to be read easily and efficiently, even sight-
| read. The musician reading the score knows the intervals
| that apply in the given key, down to muscle memory. The
| fact that a note lies outside the key is important, and
| that is why an accidental is marked explicitly.
|
| Likewise, when a musician sees a run of adjacent notes
| without accidentals, they immediately know what to play.
| They don't need to inspect each one in turn to determine
| how many semitones it lies from the previous note.
| Likewise, when a composer wants to write such a run, they
| can just draw some black dots in a row. They don't need
| to squint at a grid and select the correct rows each
| time.
|
| To sum up, traditional notation is uses a form of
| compression that makes reading and writing diatonic music
| easier.
|
| Taking this even farther, some systems of music notation
| compress things even further and don't explicitly list
| all of the notes to be played. For example: figured bass,
| basso continuo, or even just chords that accompany
| lyrics. In fact, even regular sheet music doesn't usually
| precisely represent of duration of all of the notes. Some
| notes are sustained and bleed into others, some are meant
| to be played strictly in time. Human interpretation is an
| important part of the process.
|
| On the other hand, the piano roll is a MIDI editor. It is
| a great way to tell a computer exactly what to play, but
| it is not easy to read quickly and it is impractical to
| print or write by hand. Both forms of notation have
| advantages and disadvantages but it seems to me you
| haven't spent enough time with the standard notation to
| fully appreciate its advantages. In other words, the
| piano roll notation might be your blub language for
| music. [1]
|
| [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox
| codeulike wrote:
| Fine. But I'm saying if you want to actually understand
| how music works (rather than play an instrument) the
| standard notation IMHO actually gets in the way.
|
| Because the most important thing is the actual semitone
| intervals, and the standard notation hides them and gives
| them weird names like augmented fourth (it's just six
| semitones, just call it that). And it names the 12
| semitones based on the c major mode even though that's
| only one of about 50 modes/scales/keys you might want to
| use.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a double bassist, and even as an amateur, my ability to
| function in ensembles and get hired by bands over the past
| decades owes a lot fluent sight reading ability.
|
| Musical notation provides a kind of symbiosis between
| composers / arrangers, and players. If you want to work, you
| have to read standard notation. If you want your material to
| get played, you have to write it in standard notation. And
| learning any notation to the point of sight-reading it is
| prohibitively difficult for most people, including good
| musicians who learned without reading.
|
| Experiments with developing new notation tend to involve a
| cooperation between the composer and willing players, often
| in an academic setting. It's also a wide open field for
| electronic and computer aided music, where sight-reading
| might not be an issue at all.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| I agree regarding most 'music theory' in actuality being 'music
| notation', but disagree that 'real theory' is about the
| construction of major and minor scales and the relationship
| between notes.
|
| I'd argue that one is only doing music theory if they're using
| the notation to analyze a piece of music.
|
| E.g. taking apart a Bach Fugue to understand - or hypothesize -
| about a larger structure, uncover motivic developments, etc. Or
| analyzing a Bird solo to get at how he's interpreting the chord
| changes, how certain changes work together to form larger
| structures, where/how he's using enclosures, where and whether
| or not he's quoting other players, etc.
| codeulike wrote:
| Yeah I'd agree with that. I think of 'Music Theory' as being
| that which distinguishes between 'music' as commonly
| understood vs random plinky plonk notes with random
| percussion. Which can also be stated as 'why does music sound
| good?'. So that starts with the stuff about frequency ratios
| which then leads to chords and keys and scales, and then at a
| deeper level yes you start looking at song structure and the
| balance between repetition and progression, the different
| types of progression like key changes and the overall art of
| the balance between meeting expectations and subverting them.
| megameter wrote:
| One of the deepest issues I see with music theory as it
| stands is simply that harmony is "overworked". It has a lot
| of baggage that is of some use conversationally to discuss
| different eras and genres and to play polyphonically, but
| also not really needed to write interesting music or make
| sense of an existing piece.
|
| Most harmonic structure can be described very well just in
| terms of scale degree emphasis, and overlapping scales
| where the structure is complex. And it's quite easy to
| stumble into "spicy" yet listenable results by setting
| yourself up with two scales, playing monophonic
| arpeggiations that interchange them, and then condensing
| those into chord progressions. It's much harder to reach
| those chords by starting with a list of block chords,
| because that medium works in one scale at a time, so the
| notation quickly gets unwieldy.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I'd like to highlight Adam Neely's video on the subject [1] (also
| pointed out by user guerilla), where he argues quite convincingly
| that 'music theory' is not the theory behind music but theory
| behind the particular subset of Western music.
|
| That doesn't make it any less useful for creating this type of
| music, but it's in no way a universal theory, or arguably, a
| theory at all. More a collection of rules and conventions used in
| Western music.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
| powersnail wrote:
| I agree. Music theory is a bit like calling English Grammar
| book "language theory". Not really a theory, and far from broad
| enough to cover all music.
| jberryman wrote:
| I also came to post this. It's great.
|
| I've got a degree in classical performance (and deeply love and
| respect that tradition), but more often collaborate musically
| with people who don't come from that background. Most will say
| with a little embarrassment that they wish they knew more
| "music theory". It's difficult to communicate to, say, and
| indie songwriter how I think theory might help them (to
| communicate, or analyze their own or others' music), and ways
| it's probably totally irrelevant (depending on genre,
| functional harmony is really not very useful).
|
| And that's still just western music traditions. Study
| Indonesian music and you can see how many ideas about music are
| encoded even into the _notation_ of western art music.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| My biggest issue with music theory is how the numbers used in
| names make no sense:
|
| "octave" sounds like 8, however it doubles frequency (x2) and is
| divided in 12 semitones.
|
| "major third" sounds like 3, but involves 4 semitones and a ratio
| of 5:4
|
| etc...
| contingo wrote:
| It makes sense in the context of tonal harmony. An octave is
| the interval between the 1st and 8th notes of a major or minor
| scale. I.e. a major or minor scale repeats itself (at double
| the frequency) every eight notes. A major third is the interval
| between the first and third notes of a major scale, and so on.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Put your right hand fingers on a piano, on C-D-E-F-G, thumb on
| C. Now your 2nd finger is on the 2nd, 3rd is on the 3rd, 4th is
| on the 4th, 5th is on the 5th. I wouldn't say that makes "no
| sense" exactly.
| jb1991 wrote:
| There is not much here, I would say it isn't really basic theory
| but rather a list of topics without much detail about those
| topics.
| irscott wrote:
| This is great stuff. Accurate, succinct, well thought out. Nice
| job.
| thibaultj wrote:
| This is the least useful way to explain music theory IMO: listing
| a set of rules and conventions that are used in music theory. If
| you know nothing about music, you won't be able to make music
| after learning all of this.
|
| It does not actually EXPLAIN anything. Where do these rules come
| from, and how to use them? Why are there white and black keys?
| Why does some notes have several names? What are modes for and
| how to use them?
|
| When I started learning music a few years ago, stumbling upon
| this kind of content made me so frustrated it inspired me to
| start https://www.mamie-note.fr, a website to actually explain
| music theory.
|
| It's in french but I'm considering releasing an english
| translation. Shoot me a message if you'r curious or interested.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| A very no nonsense guide. I wish I had had this 25 years ago..
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-14 23:02 UTC)