3 ms·

This is great but if we could go back in time and influence the naming conventions so that the 12 semitones were called A-L or just numbered 1 to 12, and if the

This is great but if we could go back in time and influence the naming conventions so that the 12 semitones were called A-L or just numbered 1 to 12, and if the intervals were named after the actual semitone distance (a 'fifth' is actually seven semitones) the whole thing would be soooo much less jargonny. With all that bumf removed, the patterns of the 'scales' and 'chords' would be foregrounded and thats the actually interesting bit IMHO (the bit defined as 'formulas = {..}' in the article)

mvanga 5y ago
Agreed. The patterns are the most interesting bits. Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing. It's unfortunately hard to see them through the notation and that made it very unintuitive for me for the longest time. Unfortunately the momentum that Western music notation has, with a few centuries of tradition behind it, means one has to work within that system. There was an interesting discussion I came across on Stack Exchange while writing the article: https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/67730/why-have-sharps-and-flats-instead-of-twelve-notes-with-distinct-names https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/67730/why-have-sha...
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing. How so? If patterns didn't exist, it would just be random choices. Any non-random music making (and thus theory) requires patterns.
- codeulike 5y ago
  re: the patterns, see discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860627 and my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861415
protoman3000 5y ago
I disagree, because with the way of writing it down we have a homomorphism, e.g. transpositions preserve relations between letters, e.g. (A D E) -> (Ab Db Eb), or (G C D) -> (G# C# D#). Of course, for every rule there are exceptions, e.g. we have things like (F Bb C) -> (F# B C#)
keymasta 5y ago
I'm too excited not to comment on here specifically, although I have another comment in this thread already. I made a proposal for this in my book which isn't out yet but basically I'm using only consonants for these.. so that I can link a vowel for a separate encoding.. so in order of notes where their set notation is 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11, B D F G J K L M N P R S. It's an idea, and possibly somewhat arbitrary, but it's a proposal at least and it will connect to other things well due to uniformity. Then there's my python code which takes a scale.. and writes nonsense with shakespeare verse using words beginning with the letters that spell them. Then words can be used to learn melodies. But what I was really thinking about more is like depending on the vowel after that letter you will form different chord qualities.. The first most important being the unison, or 'a'.. so to play a major scale with single notes you would say Ba Fa Ja Ka Ma Pa Sa. But to say the seventh chords that the major scale implies you'd say: BatEk FabEt JabEt KaTEk MatEt PabEt Sabat, which would be a a way of saying: DMa7 Emi7 F♯mi7 GMa7 A7 Bmi7 C♯⌀ - but way less syllables ⌀ is pronounced "half diminished" or "half diminished seventh" which is a mi7(♭5) which would be pronounced "minor seven flat five" for those who don't know. The insanity of modern music theory is the superimposition of the number 7 (A B C D E F G) onto the number 12 (the number of notes).. everything in the system is skewed by this fundamental wonky shape. But I'll remind everyone that 12/2=6 and 12/3=4 and from these facts more logical systems can be envisioned, as opposed what's 12 notes with 7 names. 12/7=? A number that seems not to have relevance to the comprehension of music patterns.. BESIDE the fact we are forced to think like that with things that conform to 12/7 like sheet music, note names, or piano key locations... But nature and even a guitar fretboard has less concept of the obsession with the number 7 by design.
- bazeblackwood 5y ago
  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.
a_lieb 5y ago
Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1]. Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats. It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc. At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning. [1] http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/
- codeulike 5y ago
  I find the paino-roll notation on DAWs to be a lot more intuitive. Not much good for perfomers of course, but it helped me understand things better. Each semitone is given the same amount of space.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Here's that one weird tip that you were looking for all your life but didn't realize it: pretend the front part of the piano keyboard isn't there, and just look at the part closest to the fingerboard. Presto: chromatic keyboard.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    I find piano roll very hard to work with. The notes are just too far apart vertically.
  - kortex 5y ago
    I find piano roll a lot easier to write/produce but a lot harder to sight-read. I actually find hooktheory's system, where it's diatonic and accidentals are based on the active chord, not the current key, to be the easiest to understand relationships, but also hardest to translate into concrete notes to play.
chjdev 5y ago
There probably is a better or more general notation system, but specifically for western music it is actually pretty efficient and logical once you start working with it a bit. Just don't put too much weight on the names and think in intervals. You have a scale made up of 7 notes/intervals with the "fifth" simply being the fifth note in the scale. Same with third, etc. The specific flavor (major/minor) of e.g. the third you're playing usually depends on the mode, but it is still a "third" and serves the same-ish function. Extending the names i think would actually be more confusing. I'd argue it already puts the patterns of scales and chords in the foreground.
klodolph 5y ago
People have had this idea before but I've never seen a version of it that is better than our existing notation systems. Most of our music is diatonic, and we named the notes in our scale A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff. Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder. If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable. I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not. Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.
- codeulike 5y ago
  I appreciate most of your points and I appreciate the conciseness of the stave notation for example. But ... A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff. Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?
  - kortex 5y ago
    You have to pick something as your starting point. The sharps and flats diatonic system is way easier to read because you just mentally parse "key of D" instead of "start on D but also sharp the F and C". It takes time but your brain just starts to grok shapes. "Piano roll" notation, like in DAWs/midi editors, is actually in certain ways a lot hard to read than staff notation, due to the lower density and lack of reference frame. It _is_ easier to see chord shapes transposed up and down as the same. But I'd argue that's an anti-feature, because of said lack of reference points. The symmetry /sameness makes it a lot easier to start on the wrong note.

mvanga 5y ago

Agreed. The patterns are the most interesting bits. Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing. It's unfortunately hard to see them through the notation and that made it very unintuitive for me for the longest time. Unfortunately the momentum that Western music notation has, with a few centuries of tradition behind it, means one has to work within that system. There was an interesting discussion I came across on Stack Exchange while writing the article: https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/67730/why-have-sharps-and-flats-instead-of-twelve-notes-with-distinct-names https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/67730/why-have-sha...

coldtea 5y ago
>Actually, just the fact that there exist patterns is pretty amazing. How so? If patterns didn't exist, it would just be random choices. Any non-random music making (and thus theory) requires patterns.
codeulike 5y ago
re: the patterns, see discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860627 and my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26861415

protoman3000 5y ago

I disagree, because with the way of writing it down we have a homomorphism, e.g. transpositions preserve relations between letters, e.g. (A D E) -> (Ab Db Eb), or (G C D) -> (G# C# D#). Of course, for every rule there are exceptions, e.g. we have things like (F Bb C) -> (F# B C#)

keymasta 5y ago

I'm too excited not to comment on here specifically, although I have another comment in this thread already. I made a proposal for this in my book which isn't out yet but basically I'm using only consonants for these.. so that I can link a vowel for a separate encoding.. so in order of notes where their set notation is 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11, B D F G J K L M N P R S. It's an idea, and possibly somewhat arbitrary, but it's a proposal at least and it will connect to other things well due to uniformity. Then there's my python code which takes a scale.. and writes nonsense with shakespeare verse using words beginning with the letters that spell them. Then words can be used to learn melodies. But what I was really thinking about more is like depending on the vowel after that letter you will form different chord qualities.. The first most important being the unison, or 'a'.. so to play a major scale with single notes you would say Ba Fa Ja Ka Ma Pa Sa. But to say the seventh chords that the major scale implies you'd say: BatEk FabEt JabEt KaTEk MatEt PabEt Sabat, which would be a a way of saying: DMa7 Emi7 F♯mi7 GMa7 A7 Bmi7 C♯⌀ - but way less syllables ⌀ is pronounced "half diminished" or "half diminished seventh" which is a mi7(♭5) which would be pronounced "minor seven flat five" for those who don't know. The insanity of modern music theory is the superimposition of the number 7 (A B C D E F G) onto the number 12 (the number of notes).. everything in the system is skewed by this fundamental wonky shape. But I'll remind everyone that 12/2=6 and 12/3=4 and from these facts more logical systems can be envisioned, as opposed what's 12 notes with 7 names. 12/7=? A number that seems not to have relevance to the comprehension of music patterns.. BESIDE the fact we are forced to think like that with things that conform to 12/7 like sheet music, note names, or piano key locations... But nature and even a guitar fretboard has less concept of the obsession with the number 7 by design.

bazeblackwood 5y ago
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.

a_lieb 5y ago

Agreed. I whinge about this all the time. The C-based system is convenient for piano players but it's a mess for guitar players, violinists, and other instruments where there are no There have been many attempts at a chromatic music notation, but nothing has caught on so far [1]. Things are a little better with solfege -- there is "chromatic fixed do" solfege, where every note has its own name, rather than only having a name for the "white notes," which leaves you to mentally calculate the sharps and flats. It's a minority thing--maybe 5-10% in Europe? Even regular fixed "do" is rare in English-speaking countries, so I would assume the chromatic fixed "do" is almost unheard of in the US, Britain, etc. At any rate, there're are at least seeds of hope for a chromatic fixed-do solfege to catch on more. I use it for my own learning. [1] http://musicnotation.org/ http://musicnotation.org/

codeulike 5y ago
I find the paino-roll notation on DAWs to be a lot more intuitive. Not much good for perfomers of course, but it helped me understand things better. Each semitone is given the same amount of space.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Here's that one weird tip that you were looking for all your life but didn't realize it: pretend the front part of the piano keyboard isn't there, and just look at the part closest to the fingerboard. Presto: chromatic keyboard.
- klodolph 5y ago
  I find piano roll very hard to work with. The notes are just too far apart vertically.
- kortex 5y ago
  I find piano roll a lot easier to write/produce but a lot harder to sight-read. I actually find hooktheory's system, where it's diatonic and accidentals are based on the active chord, not the current key, to be the easiest to understand relationships, but also hardest to translate into concrete notes to play.

chjdev 5y ago

There probably is a better or more general notation system, but specifically for western music it is actually pretty efficient and logical once you start working with it a bit. Just don't put too much weight on the names and think in intervals. You have a scale made up of 7 notes/intervals with the "fifth" simply being the fifth note in the scale. Same with third, etc. The specific flavor (major/minor) of e.g. the third you're playing usually depends on the mode, but it is still a "third" and serves the same-ish function. Extending the names i think would actually be more confusing. I'd argue it already puts the patterns of scales and chords in the foreground.

klodolph 5y ago

People have had this idea before but I've never seen a version of it that is better than our existing notation systems. Most of our music is diatonic, and we named the notes in our scale A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff. Our harmonies are built on stacked thirds, and the stacked thirds line up perfectly on a staff. Line, line, line; or space, space, space. Three dots stacked neatly on top of each other. Easy peasy. Easy to read all the common intervals at a glance, once you get past an octave it starts getting a bit harder. If you had chromatic notation, you'd allocate a bunch of extra space and names for things that you spend most of your time not using. An octave would have eleven spaces in the middle, which is practically unreadable. I think in the long-run chromatic notation is just hostile. Go ahead and use chromatic solfege, that's super useful, but chromatic notation is usually not. Most often I hear the criticsm from people who are not musicians or do not know how to read music. It's often smart people with an analytical mind, but people who don't have much experience with music. Just speaking from my own experience, it's much harder to read a chord from a piano roll than to read a chord from traditional notation.

codeulike 5y ago
I appreciate most of your points and I appreciate the conciseness of the stave notation for example. But ... A B C D E F G. Seven notes in the scale, seven letters. Seven positions on the staff. Thats fine as long as you're in C Major. As soon as you depart from C Major it all starts going wonky. Why is C Major baked into the notation as if you'd never want to use anything else?
- kortex 5y ago
  You have to pick something as your starting point. The sharps and flats diatonic system is way easier to read because you just mentally parse "key of D" instead of "start on D but also sharp the F and C". It takes time but your brain just starts to grok shapes. "Piano roll" notation, like in DAWs/midi editors, is actually in certain ways a lot hard to read than staff notation, due to the lower density and lack of reference frame. It _is_ easier to see chord shapes transposed up and down as the same. But I'd argue that's an anti-feature, because of said lack of reference points. The symmetry /sameness makes it a lot easier to start on the wrong note.