10 ms·

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 i

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/ https://www.lightnote.co/ Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792063 (2016) Also see 'Music Theory for Nerds' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 (2016)

maroonblazer 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
mhh__ 6y ago
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.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Adam Neely has an entertaining video essay ranting about that in some detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
  - djaychela 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
contingo 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - irscott 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
86J8oyZv 6y ago
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 https://beatscratch.io
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
goto11 6y ago
Music theory is the theory behind music the same way grammar is the theory behind sentence construction in natural languages. It is descriptive - it is not necessarily searching from some universal "laws of nature" and nor is it axiomatic like math. It is just studying and describing the structure of music. Some parts of theory seem to be universal, some are genre specific. Music notation is used for communication among musicians and is optimized for clarity in expressing real-world music. Real world music is based around scales (except for 12-tone music which is a really obscure niche), so notation is based around scales. (Although different genres may use different notations, like chord notation instead of notes.) The underlying relationships of wavelength ratios is interesting part of theory but you don't really need to know about that to play music. But you do need to know about notes and scales, so this is what the notation is based on.
kmmlng 6y ago
While it can be a good idea to supplement with material like the links you provided, at the end of the day you have to understand and internalize the canonical approach to music 'theory'. Why? Because the main point of it all is that you can communicate with other musicians and it doesn't do you any good if you create your own secret language that no one else understands.

maroonblazer 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

mhh__ 6y ago

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.

guerrilla 6y ago
Adam Neely has an entertaining video essay ranting about that in some detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
- djaychela 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.

contingo 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- irscott 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.

86J8oyZv 6y ago

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 https://beatscratch.io

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

goto11 6y ago

Music theory is the theory behind music the same way grammar is the theory behind sentence construction in natural languages. It is descriptive - it is not necessarily searching from some universal "laws of nature" and nor is it axiomatic like math. It is just studying and describing the structure of music. Some parts of theory seem to be universal, some are genre specific. Music notation is used for communication among musicians and is optimized for clarity in expressing real-world music. Real world music is based around scales (except for 12-tone music which is a really obscure niche), so notation is based around scales. (Although different genres may use different notations, like chord notation instead of notes.) The underlying relationships of wavelength ratios is interesting part of theory but you don't really need to know about that to play music. But you do need to know about notes and scales, so this is what the notation is based on.

kmmlng 6y ago

While it can be a good idea to supplement with material like the links you provided, at the end of the day you have to understand and internalize the canonical approach to music 'theory'. Why? Because the main point of it all is that you can communicate with other musicians and it doesn't do you any good if you create your own secret language that no one else understands.