9 ms·

Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. Every note

Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. Every note is a number, e.g. 440 Herz = 69, the standard guitar tuning has strings from 40 to 64, etc. Every interval is an integer, up an octave is +12, major chord is a triple of {x, x+4, x+7}, minor seventh chord is {x, x+3, x+7, x+10} etc. Then, as a the second game-changer, learn the circle of fifths. Start with a note like C, and keep adding +7 to it. You'll get FCGDAEBF#C#G#D#A# - note how the sharped notes repeat the pattern of the nonsharped ones, easy to remember. The "keys" and "modes" stuff is just intervals of seven consecutive notes on the circle. Say you choose FCGDAEB, that's one key, then every mode is to be found by choosing one note out of those seven, and hopping over one note until you play all seven once: e.g. FGABCDE is one mode (Lydian afair), EFGABCD is another one etc. The "major" and "minor" keys are just different names for two of those seven modes. Pentatonic scales are those same modes with some notes omitted. Blues and harmonic minor scales are those same modes with some notes inserted. Overall modes, not keys or chords are the key to actually composing music intelligently, so learn them and learn to play them. This should give you a good start in practical music theory.

zozbot234 7y ago
> Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. You actually want to learn these names, because they characterize the diatonic scale. Basically, pick seven contiguous notes on the circle of fifths, you get the pitch-class set of a diatonic scale. Then put the notes in the set in pitch order, and pick a tonal center. The default, naïve choice (pick the "flattest" note as your tonal center) is called Lydian mode. It can be interesting, but it has a drawback in that it forgoes the subdominant relationship. Picking the next-to-'flattest' note gives you Ionian, which solves this (the fourth scale degree forms a "perfect fourth" with the tonic, which is the flip side of a perfect fifth. Having more notes that can be related to the tonic makes for more musical possibilities). This is one simple explanation of the diatonic scale we ordinarily use. One other quirk that also explains the "weird historic names": in traditional music theory, sharps and flats are definitely not treated equally, the way that would be implied by 12-equal temperament. The musically-relevant distinction is simple enough to explain: taking one example, F# "wants" to step up to G, whereas Gb "wants" to step down to F. This means that the "circle of fifths" turns into more of a helix of sorts that can be extended in both directions, in principle indefinitely. This difference cannot be "heard" directly; it's all about characterizing how the notes "work" in a piece of music. After learning about the diatonic scale degrees, the next sensible step would be to start learning about counterpoint, which is based on simple definitions of consonance and dissonance between scale degrees. Then move on to thoroughbass and harmony.
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  Yes, the names are important for "interop" reasons and yes, historically they mattered because the temperament was different and C# was totally different from Db. And yes, not all modern music is based on the 12-note equal temp. But for a beginner, I would advocate avoiding them and thinking in terms of semi-tones as I've described. It's simpler, and it's the way guitars and pianos and DAWs and whatnot work, so it's a good way of thinking for a beginner. I know for sure I didn't appreciate being bombarded with names like "augmented fourth" or "diminished seventh" when "+6“ or "+9" would make more sense in terms of piano keys/frets that beginners usually have in front of them.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > But for a beginner, I would advocate avoiding them and thinking in terms of semi-tones as I've described. For a total beginner, I might agree. But thinking about the scale degrees (Do, Re, Mi etc.) is also a totally viable approach (even as a starting point), and it's extremely helpful to learn about how the two relate ASAP so you aren't left holding a mess of seemingly-contradictory "theories" in your head!
  - Yajirobe 7y ago
    > C# was totally different from Db whats the difference between them?
    - CarVac 7y ago
      They're slightly different pitches in a non-equal temperament, depending on the key the temperament is based on.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        Indeed "slightly different", as opposed to "totally different", which they are not. And apparently the human ear can be train to ignore this slight difference (which everybody does because we are used to 12-TET). And this, for me, kind of throws the whole "simple integer fraction ratio == pleasing harmony" a bit into question. It's probably not wrong, but there's definitely more to it. But it's hard to explore, because you need the exposure to get used to the new microtonals if you want to experiment with it. Definitely very hard to test scientifically because it depends so much on a particular person's musical background and education.
tuesdayrain 7y ago
Also a handy way to remember the modes in order is the mnemonic "I don't particularly like modes a lot". It stands for Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.
fxtentacle 7y ago
I would agree with this approach for pop music, but strongly disagree for classical music. In the context of an electronic synth or keyboard, C# and Db are perfectly the same. In almost all traditional music, though, instruments are almost never tuned to equal temperament, so that C# and Db then mean different things. As a famous example, Bach was very fond of his well-tempered clavier, which was a tuning method that is to be found somewhere between pythagorean tunings (usable for only one scale) and equal temperament (everything sounds equally lifeless). Bach's tuning was therefore a very carefully chosen compromise between being able to play the most common scales cleanly and sacrificing some scales in exchange for more precise harmonic relationships. All famous European composers were experts at squeezing nice harmonics out of an un-equal tuning system where some key combinations just so happened to always sound horrible. It was called "Wolfsquinte" if you hit the wrong combination. If you limit yourself to only equal tuning, your are missing out on the slight harmonic differences that are the historical basic for all contemporary harmonic progressions. If you start with one fixed frequency and then derive everything else as pure harmonics, that is called "Just Intonation". Wikipedia has a table on how those perfect harmonics differ from the notes that are mapped to your 12 keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_with_Just_Intonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_w... And lastly, by only thinking about notes as the keys on your keyboard, you completely lose the concept of musical Commata, which are when the true frequencies of two notes happen to fall onto the same key on a keyboard. Others in this thread already pointed out that C# wants to go up while Db wants to go down. The reason for that is that for violins, cello, some flutes, and Organs, they are not the same notes. They just happen to be rounded onto the same key on most modern electronic keyboards. Since you asked to learn about harmonics, I would therefore advise against focusing on 12-keys, because that would hide the underlying complexities from your view. Harmonics are in my opinion best studied on analogue instruments like a violin, where you can actually play a musical comma, as opposed to pretending it doesn't exist.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Tuning is a very messy subject, though. For instance, I think you're not strictly correct in your third paragraph - pythagorean tuning does theoretically admit of modulating to a different (at least "nearby") scale, since it is based on repeatedly applying the 3:2 perfect fifth interval! The actual problem is that it has bad thirds - hence "tempering", where basically, some of the 3:2 intervals are adjusted to move some of the thirds closer to being in tune. (It's true that this possibility of modulation was not musically exploited until after other tunings became popular - but strictly speaking, it is "just intonation" that can really only work for a single scale.) For a simple introduction, I thought it would be better to skip the subject of tunings altogether and just focus on the structural implications that one would "read" in an actual piece of sheet music.
k__ 7y ago
I did some simple courses and they all started with this. Naming stuff 1-12 and I, II, IV etc. I found this much more relatable. Only keyboards seem to favor C major with their layout, which makes applying these "relatives" a bit more cumbersome, if you don't want to use that scale. At least on guitar everything looks the same.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > Only keyboards seem to favor C major with their layout Once you're familiar with the cycle of fifths, modulation becomes fairly trivial. You start to apply the appropriate corrections "sharpen this, flatten that" simply as a matter of habit. In fact, this is precisely how modulation arose historically; it used to be the case that all music was notated diatonically or nearly so (only distinguishing between B and B-flat!), but performers would implicitly "add" sharps and flats to make it sound good depending on the context - a practice known as "musica ficta". You're right though that on a plucked string instrument everything looks the same - and historical intabulations (i.e. tablatures!) meant for plucked string instruments are actually an important source that gives us info about how musica ficta was played in many cases.
  - k__ 7y ago
    I just find the black and whites puzzling. Sure, the steps are the same from the prime up, but with C major you end up on all white and with others you can end up on blacks here and there.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Learn how the black keys map to sharp and flat notes, then learn the cycle of fifths. (There are also some "tricks" you can use to understand how sharp and flat key signatures relate to their keys: in a "sharp" key signature, the last sharp sign matches the leading tone for the corresponding major key (e.g. G major only has F# as a key signature sign); in a "flat" key signature the last flat sign matches the fourth, and the next to last matches the actual key. F major has a single flat sign at Bb; Bb major has two, at Bb and Eb.) Once you have internalized how all of these relate, it really becomes trivial.
Timpy 7y ago
If you foresee any need to communicate with other musicians I strongly recommend you don't forget about the "historic names". They're not historic, I'm a band leader and I use them constantly when communicating to my band members. Every musician in the local scene knows the difference between a Cmaj7 and a C7. If you train your brain to equate "C plus 7" as a fifth you're going to damage fluency greatly. Homebrewing your own nomenclature is excluding you from hundreds of years of literature on the subject.
- billfruit 7y ago
  Yes, but often improving the notation can make the concept more accessible to new comers, and many terms is usage among musicians can be rather u nintiuitive.
  - Timpy 7y ago
    I don't agree that this is an improved notation at all. It has its advantages, it highlights the physical distance between notes in a uniform way across key signatures. But it obscures harmonic function, which is much more important. Array indexes starting at 0 is unintuitive for beginners, I would never recommend a programming student learn arrays starting at 1 just to make it easier. Proper playing technique is often unintuitive for the beginning musician, but encouraging it for accessibility will be destructive to their progress. Conceptualizing a new difficult concept in a way that makes sense to you is good, foregoing convention is bad.
    - digitalsushi 7y ago
      There are some people, maybe not many, that have a difficult time trying something new unless they have something familiar to form a relationship, even if the relationship is inaccurate and requires iterative improvement. We might say, that finding the Rosetta Stone hindered those who knew Greek trying to learn hieroglyphs. I was deathly afraid to try woodworking until someone showed me how to construct familiar angles on the machines using basic trigonometry. After I had a tiny relationship formed, I was able to experiment on my own (and then adopt woodworking vocabulary, to become entrenched in that community). I think using some arithmetic rules to entice someone who knows arithmetic, but otherwise is awkward around music theory, is an agreeable compromise to get them on the way.
mikorym 7y ago
You can also mention for interest that your scale is actually a logarithm. x + 12 = 880 Hz in your notation. The reason and importance of intervals are due to the harmonic series. Perfect 5th = 3/2 * x (or x + 7 in your notation) Perfect 4th = 4/3 * x (or x + 5 in your notation) The 12-note equal temperament is a little off from these ratios as a hack to allow multiple key signatures. You'll find that 3/2 ~= 12_sqrt(2)^7. You can go into complicated chords too, and you'll still find dualities and the hormonic series behind it. A major chord is a stacked major 3rd with a minor 3rd and together they range over a perfect 5th.
irscott 7y ago
While true this is way more complicated an explanation than using more traditional concepts. This also barely scratches the surface of useful music theory as it doesn't explain note relationships to one another. A 3rd, a 5th, a 7th, a 9th, etc are fundamentally important concepts to grasp. Also your comment about modes being the key to composing music intelligently is somewhat nonsense. Most jazz players will tell you that understanding the chord/melody relationship is far more important than worrying about what mode you're playing in, particularly in an improvisational setting. It's way more useful to understand that you're playing a ii v7 I and know what triads are available to you as well as maybe which color tones are useful to Target than to try to keep track of which mode you should/could play over a given chord. You're better off understanding the function of a chord in a key.
samirm 7y ago
To someone with 0 knowledge of music theory and the desire to learn it, this is kind of useless tbh. You're making a lot of assumptions in this post that aren't very helpful :/
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
While not incorrect, this is still a woefully limited vision of what scales / sequences of intervals can be. Start from a tuning system. 12TET (12 tones per octave, equal temperament) would be conventional if you live in a contemporary western culture, but there are others. Next step: pick a set of intervals (any number, though 4, 6, 7 are common numbers). Congratulations, you have a mode. Next step: pick a root/tonic. Congratulations, you have a scale. Next step: play it, over and over and over again till you can do so without thinking about. Next step: do the above steps again, with different choices. And again, and again, and again ... Next step: understand the differences in the "feel" of the different intervallic relationships present within the scale. Next step: understand the impact of presenting these intervallic relationships when ordered in time (i.e. melody, one note after another), or when presented all at once (i.e. harmony, chords) Then, when you're ready, tackle Music Set Theory: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales (sadly limited to 12TET tuning, but it's still a fabulous start) Bon Voyage!
tripzilch 7y ago
I kind of did this. I already had a background in writing realtime synth software and DSP, so I knew that MIDI notes (in 12TET, as I learned later) were just numbers with a frequency of the formula: 440 x (2 ^ ((n - 69) / 12)). (at least I think, I wrote that from memory). I usually asked others to produce something "musical" with my software. Realizing that every note was basically the same and all semitone intervals are the same, I asked myself the "innocent" question, then why are they labeled black and white on a piano keyboard? Trying to answer this question to my (full) satisfaction took me on a very deep google dive, several over a couple of years in fact. But it roughly led me through most areas of music theory. I'm still not entirely satisfied with the explanations I found, but some of the remaining questions are also kind of open in music theory. It comes down to the question of what's so special about the major scale? And the answer is kind of in the circle of fifths and combinatorial music theory. If you have a modulo 12 system (because octave equivalence, which seems to be a physiological property of human hearing), there are two generating primes, 5 and 7. These correspond to a fifth down or up. Generating prime means that it generates all the 12 notes if you follow it modulo 12. Also it turns out that the complementary scales of the major (7) and the pentatonic (5) are "maximally even" (IIRC), .. and now I forgot why that was important. It's complex stuff. There's also reasons why we got 12 notes instead of 10 or 16. Mainly to do with how close you can get to simple fractions of frequency ratios. You also have 19-TET, which has more notes and gets pretty close, but 12 is still superior in some ways afaik. This is the part that I found really interesting, but over time it's been nagging at me: Simple frequency ratios are special because their waves and harmonics coincide in periodic fashion. But if it's good enough to just be "close enough" to some ratio, that is actually equivalent to exactly hitting a much more complex fractional ratio. The accepted reasoning is, I guess, that human hearing is kind of fuzzy and not too fussy about these things. But that feels a little bit too hand-wavy to me. Especially cause the fuzzy can be trained, and most of us expect to hear the particular 12-TET tuning, and when they hear the exact ratios, they sound kind of "off". So I feel there's still some understanding missing from this theory, or at least more I'd like to learn (somewhere between physiological human hearing and cultural music theory of scales from all over the world and history). I kind of feel like I learned about music "in reverse" this way, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it as the way to study music theory, but it sure as hell has been interesting.

zozbot234 7y ago

> Here's how I approach it: forget about all the historic naming like "perfect fifths" and just think in terms of the modern 12-note equal temperament. You actually want to learn these names, because they characterize the diatonic scale. Basically, pick seven contiguous notes on the circle of fifths, you get the pitch-class set of a diatonic scale. Then put the notes in the set in pitch order, and pick a tonal center. The default, naïve choice (pick the "flattest" note as your tonal center) is called Lydian mode. It can be interesting, but it has a drawback in that it forgoes the subdominant relationship. Picking the next-to-'flattest' note gives you Ionian, which solves this (the fourth scale degree forms a "perfect fourth" with the tonic, which is the flip side of a perfect fifth. Having more notes that can be related to the tonic makes for more musical possibilities). This is one simple explanation of the diatonic scale we ordinarily use. One other quirk that also explains the "weird historic names": in traditional music theory, sharps and flats are definitely not treated equally, the way that would be implied by 12-equal temperament. The musically-relevant distinction is simple enough to explain: taking one example, F# "wants" to step up to G, whereas Gb "wants" to step down to F. This means that the "circle of fifths" turns into more of a helix of sorts that can be extended in both directions, in principle indefinitely. This difference cannot be "heard" directly; it's all about characterizing how the notes "work" in a piece of music. After learning about the diatonic scale degrees, the next sensible step would be to start learning about counterpoint, which is based on simple definitions of consonance and dissonance between scale degrees. Then move on to thoroughbass and harmony.

LessDmesg 7y ago
Yes, the names are important for "interop" reasons and yes, historically they mattered because the temperament was different and C# was totally different from Db. And yes, not all modern music is based on the 12-note equal temp. But for a beginner, I would advocate avoiding them and thinking in terms of semi-tones as I've described. It's simpler, and it's the way guitars and pianos and DAWs and whatnot work, so it's a good way of thinking for a beginner. I know for sure I didn't appreciate being bombarded with names like "augmented fourth" or "diminished seventh" when "+6“ or "+9" would make more sense in terms of piano keys/frets that beginners usually have in front of them.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > But for a beginner, I would advocate avoiding them and thinking in terms of semi-tones as I've described. For a total beginner, I might agree. But thinking about the scale degrees (Do, Re, Mi etc.) is also a totally viable approach (even as a starting point), and it's extremely helpful to learn about how the two relate ASAP so you aren't left holding a mess of seemingly-contradictory "theories" in your head!
- Yajirobe 7y ago
  > C# was totally different from Db whats the difference between them?
  - CarVac 7y ago
    They're slightly different pitches in a non-equal temperament, depending on the key the temperament is based on.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      Indeed "slightly different", as opposed to "totally different", which they are not. And apparently the human ear can be train to ignore this slight difference (which everybody does because we are used to 12-TET). And this, for me, kind of throws the whole "simple integer fraction ratio == pleasing harmony" a bit into question. It's probably not wrong, but there's definitely more to it. But it's hard to explore, because you need the exposure to get used to the new microtonals if you want to experiment with it. Definitely very hard to test scientifically because it depends so much on a particular person's musical background and education.

tuesdayrain 7y ago

Also a handy way to remember the modes in order is the mnemonic "I don't particularly like modes a lot". It stands for Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.

fxtentacle 7y ago

I would agree with this approach for pop music, but strongly disagree for classical music. In the context of an electronic synth or keyboard, C# and Db are perfectly the same. In almost all traditional music, though, instruments are almost never tuned to equal temperament, so that C# and Db then mean different things. As a famous example, Bach was very fond of his well-tempered clavier, which was a tuning method that is to be found somewhere between pythagorean tunings (usable for only one scale) and equal temperament (everything sounds equally lifeless). Bach's tuning was therefore a very carefully chosen compromise between being able to play the most common scales cleanly and sacrificing some scales in exchange for more precise harmonic relationships. All famous European composers were experts at squeezing nice harmonics out of an un-equal tuning system where some key combinations just so happened to always sound horrible. It was called "Wolfsquinte" if you hit the wrong combination. If you limit yourself to only equal tuning, your are missing out on the slight harmonic differences that are the historical basic for all contemporary harmonic progressions. If you start with one fixed frequency and then derive everything else as pure harmonics, that is called "Just Intonation". Wikipedia has a table on how those perfect harmonics differ from the notes that are mapped to your 12 keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_with_Just_Intonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_w... And lastly, by only thinking about notes as the keys on your keyboard, you completely lose the concept of musical Commata, which are when the true frequencies of two notes happen to fall onto the same key on a keyboard. Others in this thread already pointed out that C# wants to go up while Db wants to go down. The reason for that is that for violins, cello, some flutes, and Organs, they are not the same notes. They just happen to be rounded onto the same key on most modern electronic keyboards. Since you asked to learn about harmonics, I would therefore advise against focusing on 12-keys, because that would hide the underlying complexities from your view. Harmonics are in my opinion best studied on analogue instruments like a violin, where you can actually play a musical comma, as opposed to pretending it doesn't exist.

zozbot234 7y ago
Tuning is a very messy subject, though. For instance, I think you're not strictly correct in your third paragraph - pythagorean tuning does theoretically admit of modulating to a different (at least "nearby") scale, since it is based on repeatedly applying the 3:2 perfect fifth interval! The actual problem is that it has bad thirds - hence "tempering", where basically, some of the 3:2 intervals are adjusted to move some of the thirds closer to being in tune. (It's true that this possibility of modulation was not musically exploited until after other tunings became popular - but strictly speaking, it is "just intonation" that can really only work for a single scale.) For a simple introduction, I thought it would be better to skip the subject of tunings altogether and just focus on the structural implications that one would "read" in an actual piece of sheet music.

k__ 7y ago

I did some simple courses and they all started with this. Naming stuff 1-12 and I, II, IV etc. I found this much more relatable. Only keyboards seem to favor C major with their layout, which makes applying these "relatives" a bit more cumbersome, if you don't want to use that scale. At least on guitar everything looks the same.

zozbot234 7y ago
> Only keyboards seem to favor C major with their layout Once you're familiar with the cycle of fifths, modulation becomes fairly trivial. You start to apply the appropriate corrections "sharpen this, flatten that" simply as a matter of habit. In fact, this is precisely how modulation arose historically; it used to be the case that all music was notated diatonically or nearly so (only distinguishing between B and B-flat!), but performers would implicitly "add" sharps and flats to make it sound good depending on the context - a practice known as "musica ficta". You're right though that on a plucked string instrument everything looks the same - and historical intabulations (i.e. tablatures!) meant for plucked string instruments are actually an important source that gives us info about how musica ficta was played in many cases.
- k__ 7y ago
  I just find the black and whites puzzling. Sure, the steps are the same from the prime up, but with C major you end up on all white and with others you can end up on blacks here and there.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Learn how the black keys map to sharp and flat notes, then learn the cycle of fifths. (There are also some "tricks" you can use to understand how sharp and flat key signatures relate to their keys: in a "sharp" key signature, the last sharp sign matches the leading tone for the corresponding major key (e.g. G major only has F# as a key signature sign); in a "flat" key signature the last flat sign matches the fourth, and the next to last matches the actual key. F major has a single flat sign at Bb; Bb major has two, at Bb and Eb.) Once you have internalized how all of these relate, it really becomes trivial.

Timpy 7y ago

If you foresee any need to communicate with other musicians I strongly recommend you don't forget about the "historic names". They're not historic, I'm a band leader and I use them constantly when communicating to my band members. Every musician in the local scene knows the difference between a Cmaj7 and a C7. If you train your brain to equate "C plus 7" as a fifth you're going to damage fluency greatly. Homebrewing your own nomenclature is excluding you from hundreds of years of literature on the subject.

billfruit 7y ago
Yes, but often improving the notation can make the concept more accessible to new comers, and many terms is usage among musicians can be rather u nintiuitive.
- Timpy 7y ago
  I don't agree that this is an improved notation at all. It has its advantages, it highlights the physical distance between notes in a uniform way across key signatures. But it obscures harmonic function, which is much more important. Array indexes starting at 0 is unintuitive for beginners, I would never recommend a programming student learn arrays starting at 1 just to make it easier. Proper playing technique is often unintuitive for the beginning musician, but encouraging it for accessibility will be destructive to their progress. Conceptualizing a new difficult concept in a way that makes sense to you is good, foregoing convention is bad.
  - digitalsushi 7y ago
    There are some people, maybe not many, that have a difficult time trying something new unless they have something familiar to form a relationship, even if the relationship is inaccurate and requires iterative improvement. We might say, that finding the Rosetta Stone hindered those who knew Greek trying to learn hieroglyphs. I was deathly afraid to try woodworking until someone showed me how to construct familiar angles on the machines using basic trigonometry. After I had a tiny relationship formed, I was able to experiment on my own (and then adopt woodworking vocabulary, to become entrenched in that community). I think using some arithmetic rules to entice someone who knows arithmetic, but otherwise is awkward around music theory, is an agreeable compromise to get them on the way.

mikorym 7y ago

You can also mention for interest that your scale is actually a logarithm. x + 12 = 880 Hz in your notation. The reason and importance of intervals are due to the harmonic series. Perfect 5th = 3/2 * x (or x + 7 in your notation) Perfect 4th = 4/3 * x (or x + 5 in your notation) The 12-note equal temperament is a little off from these ratios as a hack to allow multiple key signatures. You'll find that 3/2 ~= 12_sqrt(2)^7. You can go into complicated chords too, and you'll still find dualities and the hormonic series behind it. A major chord is a stacked major 3rd with a minor 3rd and together they range over a perfect 5th.

irscott 7y ago

While true this is way more complicated an explanation than using more traditional concepts. This also barely scratches the surface of useful music theory as it doesn't explain note relationships to one another. A 3rd, a 5th, a 7th, a 9th, etc are fundamentally important concepts to grasp. Also your comment about modes being the key to composing music intelligently is somewhat nonsense. Most jazz players will tell you that understanding the chord/melody relationship is far more important than worrying about what mode you're playing in, particularly in an improvisational setting. It's way more useful to understand that you're playing a ii v7 I and know what triads are available to you as well as maybe which color tones are useful to Target than to try to keep track of which mode you should/could play over a given chord. You're better off understanding the function of a chord in a key.

samirm 7y ago

To someone with 0 knowledge of music theory and the desire to learn it, this is kind of useless tbh. You're making a lot of assumptions in this post that aren't very helpful :/

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

While not incorrect, this is still a woefully limited vision of what scales / sequences of intervals can be. Start from a tuning system. 12TET (12 tones per octave, equal temperament) would be conventional if you live in a contemporary western culture, but there are others. Next step: pick a set of intervals (any number, though 4, 6, 7 are common numbers). Congratulations, you have a mode. Next step: pick a root/tonic. Congratulations, you have a scale. Next step: play it, over and over and over again till you can do so without thinking about. Next step: do the above steps again, with different choices. And again, and again, and again ... Next step: understand the differences in the "feel" of the different intervallic relationships present within the scale. Next step: understand the impact of presenting these intervallic relationships when ordered in time (i.e. melody, one note after another), or when presented all at once (i.e. harmony, chords) Then, when you're ready, tackle Music Set Theory: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales (sadly limited to 12TET tuning, but it's still a fabulous start) Bon Voyage!

tripzilch 7y ago

I kind of did this. I already had a background in writing realtime synth software and DSP, so I knew that MIDI notes (in 12TET, as I learned later) were just numbers with a frequency of the formula: 440 x (2 ^ ((n - 69) / 12)). (at least I think, I wrote that from memory). I usually asked others to produce something "musical" with my software. Realizing that every note was basically the same and all semitone intervals are the same, I asked myself the "innocent" question, then why are they labeled black and white on a piano keyboard? Trying to answer this question to my (full) satisfaction took me on a very deep google dive, several over a couple of years in fact. But it roughly led me through most areas of music theory. I'm still not entirely satisfied with the explanations I found, but some of the remaining questions are also kind of open in music theory. It comes down to the question of what's so special about the major scale? And the answer is kind of in the circle of fifths and combinatorial music theory. If you have a modulo 12 system (because octave equivalence, which seems to be a physiological property of human hearing), there are two generating primes, 5 and 7. These correspond to a fifth down or up. Generating prime means that it generates all the 12 notes if you follow it modulo 12. Also it turns out that the complementary scales of the major (7) and the pentatonic (5) are "maximally even" (IIRC), .. and now I forgot why that was important. It's complex stuff. There's also reasons why we got 12 notes instead of 10 or 16. Mainly to do with how close you can get to simple fractions of frequency ratios. You also have 19-TET, which has more notes and gets pretty close, but 12 is still superior in some ways afaik. This is the part that I found really interesting, but over time it's been nagging at me: Simple frequency ratios are special because their waves and harmonics coincide in periodic fashion. But if it's good enough to just be "close enough" to some ratio, that is actually equivalent to exactly hitting a much more complex fractional ratio. The accepted reasoning is, I guess, that human hearing is kind of fuzzy and not too fussy about these things. But that feels a little bit too hand-wavy to me. Especially cause the fuzzy can be trained, and most of us expect to hear the particular 12-TET tuning, and when they hear the exact ratios, they sound kind of "off". So I feel there's still some understanding missing from this theory, or at least more I'd like to learn (somewhere between physiological human hearing and cultural music theory of scales from all over the world and history). I kind of feel like I learned about music "in reverse" this way, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it as the way to study music theory, but it sure as hell has been interesting.