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This type of reply is indicative of precisely why it's so off putting for programmers to get into music. The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while

This type of reply is indicative of precisely why it's so off putting for programmers to get into music. The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while artist after artist that produce music that we like are clearly following some type of ruleset, at least to some extent. Electronica might be rhythm and timbre based but even looking at rhythm you can start to ask some basic questions (what note length frequency is more pleasing? Why? What frequency of two underlying beats sounds good? Why?). Sometimes theory can be nothing more than a collection of discovered tricks. Sometimes it can be something more fundamental. To waive your hands and say that all of it is arbitrary is doing a disservice to anyone trying to learn and understand.

danShumway 5y ago
It's technically correct while also being practically useless. There are no fundamental rules to grammar, but we still teach writers what a simile is. Even in spelling, English has no consistency about a lot of this stuff. Are spelling rules useful though for non-native learners? Heck yes. Do we still have grammar books? Yes. It turns out that learning the exceptions is sometimes faster than memorizing everything. Music is a communicative medium based in large part around social norms of what combinations of sounds tend to feel good to people who grew up in a specific environment, and music theory is an attempt to break apart that social consensus into basic rules that can be imitated and built up into more complicated genres. The rules are somewhat arbitrary and made up, but that doesn't mean they're not real, and that doesn't mean you can't sort-of derive some of them from more basic rules or from basic principles. Music could have gone in multiple directions, but for whatever reason Western music went in the direction it did, and many people who are trying to learn music aren't trying to learn the full spectrum of every direction music could have gone. They're trying to learn how to imitate Western sounds, and for that purpose specifically music has rules -- many of them derivable from other rules, flexible and breakable as they may occasionally be.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  They're not rules unless your teacher is an asshole. Music theory is a language used to be able to have conversations about harmonic and melodic aspects of a piece of music. Rythmic aspects are less well supported (that's putting it mildly) by western musical theory, but the same is true there for whatever formalism or terminology/nomenclature you might pick: it's not a set of rules, it's a language to facilitate non-musical discusison.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    I think this is a distinction that only matters if your definition of rules is such that they can never be broken or played with. That's not typically the way I think of rules, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Even programmers understand that a lot of programming "rules" are actually just heuristics about how to produce good code. As another example, I've spent a ton of time learning game design rules, and all of them are optional, but they're still useful. "Rules" in this context means, yes, communicative terminology, but communicative terminology about particularly effective ways to build commonly understood musical motifs/phrases that affect Western listeners in somewhat predictable ways. Music theory is a language for talking about a language, music itself. It is partially social convention that leads us to have a 12 tone scale, and it is definitely social convention that leads us to call that a "scale". However, the average Western listener will respond to the notes of that scale in predictable ways, and there are "rules" that you can learn that will allow you to more easily and predictably manipulate that listener's emotions and communicate broader ideas through your music -- many of those underlying rules about tuning, ratios between notes, and so on are derivable from mathematical principles or at least describable in mathematical terms, even if ultimately the reason why listeners respond to some of those ratios is social and arbitrary. Of course, the rules are not concrete or immutable, they can be broken and often are. But the majority of rules we learn in most subjects are not concrete. Similarly, there are no concrete rules in writing, and the terminology we use to describe story structure is arbitrary and made up. However, learning the "rules" of writing will make you a better writer for typical audiences that live near you, and those rules are expressed through common set of terms and concepts that many professional/hobby writers have decided to use -- many of which can be partially derived or explained by talking about psychology or history or whatever. Sure, these are not immutable, scientific principles baked into the heart of the universe, but: A) the author goes out of her way to say that she isn't claiming that, and B) breaking down rules and building them back up from different starting points or looking at them mathematically is still a reasonable thing to do with rules that have a social origin, and C) even though a lot of why certain chords sound good is baked into culture rather than biology, it's also a kind of strong claim to say that all of it is purely social. But I don't think it would matter much even if it was purely social, people who do music theory for a living still talk about math sometimes.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  When giving this type of explanation, we want to emphasize that the rules are arbitrary and made up because the dominant way of teaching music theory from the 1920s through to the last decade or two has been to claim it as scientifically or mathematically "optimal" in some way. It isn't. Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Do you feel like the article isn't doing a good enough job getting that lesson across? > Western music has twelve distinct pitches. This is somewhat arbitrary — twelve has a few nice mathematical properties, but it’s not absolutely necessary. You could create your own set of notes with eleven pitches, or seventeen, or a hundred, or five. There are forms of music elsewhere in the world that do just that. [...] > I get the feeling that treating the whole chord/key ecosystem as a set of rules is like studying Renaissance paintings and deciding that’s how art is. It’s not. Do what you want, if it sounds good. I’m gonna go try that. Consensus seems to be that the real heart of music is managing contrast — like every other form of art. ---- > Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis. I would say it's more like starting out an explanation of color theory by talking about wavelengths, even though you don't really need to know any of that to understand composition, and even though most of the rules of image composition are contextual to specific cultures and aren't hard requirements that artists have to obey. The math behind color is definitely not a requirement that artists should be forced to learn, but some people find it helpful to know what mathematical formulas were used to create a given color wheel.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
They are not saying it's arbitrary, they're just saying it can't be consistently derived from some fundamental, smaller set of principles. 'Music theory' is much more of a working practice musicians use to communicate with each other and document their work and discoveries. How programmers feel about their notation systems isn't something working musicians should be concerned with, I don't think. There is no fundamental thing that makes some notes or combinations pleasing and others not. It is all culturally mediated. I know that possibly seems unlikely and uncomfortable, but nonetheless it is true. If you drill down far enough into music you find the harmonic ratios, and human culture. That's it, there is nothing else down there at the foundations.
zozbot234 5y ago
> The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while artist after artist that produce music that we like are clearly following some type of ruleset, at least to some extent. It's a craft, not a rigid system that you have to follow. What's called 'Rules' in music is more like patterns that have been found to sound good. For example, the famous 'Rule of the Octave' is a pattern based originally on playing thirds and sixths ("first inversion chords" if you want to phrase it that way) over a "walking" baseline. But the rule is far from fixed, and almost immediately the basic pattern using thirds and sixths was altered to use thirds and fifths ("root position chords") on the tonic and dominant degrees. Then the other chords were altered in turn, giving each bass scale degree a sonic identity of its own, with ascending and descending, major and minor varieties etc. Thus what literally started as a simple and basic rule has become incredibly complex. This just shows how a craft can evolve to become more interesting; rigid, foolproof rules cannot. And the "rule of the octave" is a tiny part of music as a whole (though it's pretty foundational, all things considered); but guess what, other "rules" work the exact same way!
pvarangot 5y ago
I agree with OPs sentiment only that it's not true there's no theory on rhythm or on timbre. I can share rhythms and patches with anyone in the world even if we don't speak the same language and we can work on them together, there's a rudimentary symbolic language for them that is universal. Maybe we don't have an algebra of timbre but we definitely have an algebra for rhythm. Theory is also taxonomy and categories of things. What "there are no rules!" is kinda the excuse for music theorists to keep on working on a field that has had so far little applications on how music is created. Maybe yeah on how some people learn it, but that's it. It's basically them admitting that actually successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated. If anything, it's just the opposite. The 'rules' (again, this should be understood as patterns, or perhaps rules of thumb) practitioners implicitly rely on are far more complex than most theorists are implicitly comfortable with. This is why bookish music theory was mired for centuries in pointless discussions about acoustics and ratios, or some incredibly weird formalisms for representing meter, whilst practitioners got on simply focusing on what sounded good.
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    I've gotten instruction from very prodigious practitioners and their opinion on the rules they are following is what I stated. You can get through introductory jazz or classical piano and also basic orchestral composition and the patterns or rules you'll know are about are going to be super basic and even very sophisticated niche and "intellectual" music is not being created by people with more theoretic knowledge than that.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      That's why I talked about implied reliance, as opposed to what people explicitly "know about". Surfacing the actual practical rules behind what practitioners are doing is arguably a theorist's job, but many theorists are not fully comfortable with the kind of thinking that this would require. (The 'Rule of the Octave', which is the kind of rule I'm pointing to, was quite exceptional in being explicitly taught in actual published treatises about music - and even that was practically forgotten later on; it's not usually taught in "introductory music theory" classes even though it arguably should be!)
teawrecks 5y ago
As someone who is firmly on the math side and knows very little about music theory, it seems like you should never expect music theory to answer subjective questions like "Why does x sound better than y?" There are so many factors for why someone will find a sound pleasing or not, and most of them are biological/psychological. IMO asking why a melody sounds pleasing would be like asking why a plot of the Mandelbrot set is interesting; math isn't going to be able to answer that. I would be fine with a music theory that is a set of tools to deal with sounds, just as math is a set of tools to deal with numbers. Whether certain properties are desirable are up to the theorist.
tomjakubowski 5y ago
Based on how many fellow programmers I know who play instruments or write compositions or otherwise produce music... it doesn't actually seem off putting for programmers to get into music. Is your experience different?
analog31 5y ago
Oddly enough I'm a programmer and musician. But I learned music before I learned programming.
scrozier 5y ago
I understand your frustration. However, as a trained musician and working programmer, I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview. Although I understand that it's hard, the answer is to study classical Western music theory. (Or Eastern or whatever; I come from the Western tradition.) It's not simple, but it's not rocket science either. When you have this basic theoretical grounding (intervals, scales, chords, music on staves, etc.) then the "world of music" won't seem obscure and magical. It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good." You'll discover things like this for yourself if you allow yourself to study music rather than studying music as applied programming.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  My problem is that I quite early learned most basic music theory. But I’ve never really figured out how to use it. I read sheet music and I can play several instruments (not particularly well any of them). It feels like I learned a list of keywords and syntax rules, but never figured out how to program.
  - scrozier 5y ago
    Ah. That's a very interesting way to put it! I think it's possible that some people just don't have a "feel" for creating music (call it talent, something you're born with, etc.). But I sense that you enjoy music and maybe feel like you have things you'd like to "say," musically, but are frustrated by your inability to wrestle the tools into doing what you hear in your mind. Do you play the piano? I think the piano is the best vehicle for grokking music—it allows for melody and harmony (and rhythm) all in one instrument, in sort of a visual way, that is hard to get in monophonic instruments, or even with guitar (for more complicated reasons). I think I developed my musical sense in two main ways: 1. listening to songs on records and on the radio, and figuring out how to replicate them at the piano, and 2. playing lots of music on the piano from sheet music, where I was constantly exposed to chord progressions and the like in other people's music; the "tropes" of Western classical and popular music, if you like. Neither of these are trivial, but both are within reach of most people, I think. I will posit that there are few shortcuts to musical mastery. Grokking music is definitely not like (as easy as) learning a new programming language.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The attitude of "there are no rules!" GP didn't say there are no rules. “The rules are culturally, and path, dependent and are not derived or derivable from a simple set of universal first principles” is very far from “there are no rules”. It does mean that certain approaches to learning the rules that might fit well with people's abstract preferences for how they’d like to approach the field don't work well in practice, though.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I'm a programmer that got into Music. I hit my head... and other people's heads... and tables and walls... until I realized that: 1. Yes, there are "rules" 2. They are far far far more arbitrary than I realized 3. They are far from universally applicable. Personally, I expected music to be heavily math based, with universal rules. But my current understanding is that while there IS a lot of math, what sounds good / what people in any given culture like, is all arbitrary. You can use math to describe some of it, but not to derive it. As well, unfortunately, when people say "Music Theory", they largely mean a variation on one or both of: 1. Note reading - Western music notation, which I don't consider "Music Theory" but rather notation, but many will disagree 2. Western Music Theory, largely though not entirely put down by 18th century old cranky europeans based on what they happened to like at the time There is FAR less "universalness" in Western Music theory than I thought. So there is this combination of: * Huge englightnment and pattern recognition and increased understanding as I learned more music theory and * tremendous frustration at inconsistency and arbitrariness, until I realized it wasn't my music teacher who hated me, it's that what they are teaching me is arbitrary So personally, I think it's important for programmer to accept "there are no rules (in the sense that we think of "rules", boolean logic and math etc), though there are guidelines and recommendations (which are completely arbitrary and cultural-based)" It turns out "what rhythm / note / combination / frequency is more pleasing" is 99% how you were brought up / what you are used to, rather than some math/physics correlation. Move to another part of the world and throw out your 4/4 and 12-note equal temperament and I-V-vi-IV
rtsil 5y ago
The difference between rules in programming and rules in music is that in the first case they're normative, in the second case they're descriptive. Music theory can tell you why a specific combination of notes and a chord progression in a musical piece are pleasant to the ear, but does not guarantee that using similar combinations and progressions will result in pleasant sounds. Part of the reason is subjectivity, in the sense of music is intended to be heard by subjects. And these subjects have their own experiences of music, which in turn conditions their expectations and their reactions to sounds. What sounds good is different from person to person, let alone from culture to culture. Coming from a classical background, when I heard jazz at a young age, I considered it chaotic and awful. Today, it's the most pleasant style of music for my ears. I've seen people who had never, ever heard opera music listen to an aria and laugh to tears because for them it was comically awful. Another is reason, I think, is that music is embodied by who plays it. I can play Blackbird in the exact same way Paul McCartney does, but when I do it the best I can expect is people saying "that's nice!". When McCartney plays it, the entire stadium hold their breath and get chills, some are in tears. I don't see how that level of emotion can be explained in a scientific way.

danShumway 5y ago

It's technically correct while also being practically useless. There are no fundamental rules to grammar, but we still teach writers what a simile is. Even in spelling, English has no consistency about a lot of this stuff. Are spelling rules useful though for non-native learners? Heck yes. Do we still have grammar books? Yes. It turns out that learning the exceptions is sometimes faster than memorizing everything. Music is a communicative medium based in large part around social norms of what combinations of sounds tend to feel good to people who grew up in a specific environment, and music theory is an attempt to break apart that social consensus into basic rules that can be imitated and built up into more complicated genres. The rules are somewhat arbitrary and made up, but that doesn't mean they're not real, and that doesn't mean you can't sort-of derive some of them from more basic rules or from basic principles. Music could have gone in multiple directions, but for whatever reason Western music went in the direction it did, and many people who are trying to learn music aren't trying to learn the full spectrum of every direction music could have gone. They're trying to learn how to imitate Western sounds, and for that purpose specifically music has rules -- many of them derivable from other rules, flexible and breakable as they may occasionally be.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
They're not rules unless your teacher is an asshole. Music theory is a language used to be able to have conversations about harmonic and melodic aspects of a piece of music. Rythmic aspects are less well supported (that's putting it mildly) by western musical theory, but the same is true there for whatever formalism or terminology/nomenclature you might pick: it's not a set of rules, it's a language to facilitate non-musical discusison.
- danShumway 5y ago
  I think this is a distinction that only matters if your definition of rules is such that they can never be broken or played with. That's not typically the way I think of rules, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Even programmers understand that a lot of programming "rules" are actually just heuristics about how to produce good code. As another example, I've spent a ton of time learning game design rules, and all of them are optional, but they're still useful. "Rules" in this context means, yes, communicative terminology, but communicative terminology about particularly effective ways to build commonly understood musical motifs/phrases that affect Western listeners in somewhat predictable ways. Music theory is a language for talking about a language, music itself. It is partially social convention that leads us to have a 12 tone scale, and it is definitely social convention that leads us to call that a "scale". However, the average Western listener will respond to the notes of that scale in predictable ways, and there are "rules" that you can learn that will allow you to more easily and predictably manipulate that listener's emotions and communicate broader ideas through your music -- many of those underlying rules about tuning, ratios between notes, and so on are derivable from mathematical principles or at least describable in mathematical terms, even if ultimately the reason why listeners respond to some of those ratios is social and arbitrary. Of course, the rules are not concrete or immutable, they can be broken and often are. But the majority of rules we learn in most subjects are not concrete. Similarly, there are no concrete rules in writing, and the terminology we use to describe story structure is arbitrary and made up. However, learning the "rules" of writing will make you a better writer for typical audiences that live near you, and those rules are expressed through common set of terms and concepts that many professional/hobby writers have decided to use -- many of which can be partially derived or explained by talking about psychology or history or whatever. Sure, these are not immutable, scientific principles baked into the heart of the universe, but: A) the author goes out of her way to say that she isn't claiming that, and B) breaking down rules and building them back up from different starting points or looking at them mathematically is still a reasonable thing to do with rules that have a social origin, and C) even though a lot of why certain chords sound good is baked into culture rather than biology, it's also a kind of strong claim to say that all of it is purely social. But I don't think it would matter much even if it was purely social, people who do music theory for a living still talk about math sometimes.
hannasanarion 5y ago
When giving this type of explanation, we want to emphasize that the rules are arbitrary and made up because the dominant way of teaching music theory from the 1920s through to the last decade or two has been to claim it as scientifically or mathematically "optimal" in some way. It isn't. Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Do you feel like the article isn't doing a good enough job getting that lesson across? > Western music has twelve distinct pitches. This is somewhat arbitrary — twelve has a few nice mathematical properties, but it’s not absolutely necessary. You could create your own set of notes with eleven pitches, or seventeen, or a hundred, or five. There are forms of music elsewhere in the world that do just that. [...] > I get the feeling that treating the whole chord/key ecosystem as a set of rules is like studying Renaissance paintings and deciding that’s how art is. It’s not. Do what you want, if it sounds good. I’m gonna go try that. Consensus seems to be that the real heart of music is managing contrast — like every other form of art. ---- > Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis. I would say it's more like starting out an explanation of color theory by talking about wavelengths, even though you don't really need to know any of that to understand composition, and even though most of the rules of image composition are contextual to specific cultures and aren't hard requirements that artists have to obey. The math behind color is definitely not a requirement that artists should be forced to learn, but some people find it helpful to know what mathematical formulas were used to create a given color wheel.

giraffe_lady 5y ago

They are not saying it's arbitrary, they're just saying it can't be consistently derived from some fundamental, smaller set of principles. 'Music theory' is much more of a working practice musicians use to communicate with each other and document their work and discoveries. How programmers feel about their notation systems isn't something working musicians should be concerned with, I don't think. There is no fundamental thing that makes some notes or combinations pleasing and others not. It is all culturally mediated. I know that possibly seems unlikely and uncomfortable, but nonetheless it is true. If you drill down far enough into music you find the harmonic ratios, and human culture. That's it, there is nothing else down there at the foundations.

zozbot234 5y ago

> The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while artist after artist that produce music that we like are clearly following some type of ruleset, at least to some extent. It's a craft, not a rigid system that you have to follow. What's called 'Rules' in music is more like patterns that have been found to sound good. For example, the famous 'Rule of the Octave' is a pattern based originally on playing thirds and sixths ("first inversion chords" if you want to phrase it that way) over a "walking" baseline. But the rule is far from fixed, and almost immediately the basic pattern using thirds and sixths was altered to use thirds and fifths ("root position chords") on the tonic and dominant degrees. Then the other chords were altered in turn, giving each bass scale degree a sonic identity of its own, with ascending and descending, major and minor varieties etc. Thus what literally started as a simple and basic rule has become incredibly complex. This just shows how a craft can evolve to become more interesting; rigid, foolproof rules cannot. And the "rule of the octave" is a tiny part of music as a whole (though it's pretty foundational, all things considered); but guess what, other "rules" work the exact same way!

pvarangot 5y ago

I agree with OPs sentiment only that it's not true there's no theory on rhythm or on timbre. I can share rhythms and patches with anyone in the world even if we don't speak the same language and we can work on them together, there's a rudimentary symbolic language for them that is universal. Maybe we don't have an algebra of timbre but we definitely have an algebra for rhythm. Theory is also taxonomy and categories of things. What "there are no rules!" is kinda the excuse for music theorists to keep on working on a field that has had so far little applications on how music is created. Maybe yeah on how some people learn it, but that's it. It's basically them admitting that actually successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated.

zozbot234 5y ago
> successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated. If anything, it's just the opposite. The 'rules' (again, this should be understood as patterns, or perhaps rules of thumb) practitioners implicitly rely on are far more complex than most theorists are implicitly comfortable with. This is why bookish music theory was mired for centuries in pointless discussions about acoustics and ratios, or some incredibly weird formalisms for representing meter, whilst practitioners got on simply focusing on what sounded good.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  I've gotten instruction from very prodigious practitioners and their opinion on the rules they are following is what I stated. You can get through introductory jazz or classical piano and also basic orchestral composition and the patterns or rules you'll know are about are going to be super basic and even very sophisticated niche and "intellectual" music is not being created by people with more theoretic knowledge than that.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    That's why I talked about implied reliance, as opposed to what people explicitly "know about". Surfacing the actual practical rules behind what practitioners are doing is arguably a theorist's job, but many theorists are not fully comfortable with the kind of thinking that this would require. (The 'Rule of the Octave', which is the kind of rule I'm pointing to, was quite exceptional in being explicitly taught in actual published treatises about music - and even that was practically forgotten later on; it's not usually taught in "introductory music theory" classes even though it arguably should be!)

teawrecks 5y ago

As someone who is firmly on the math side and knows very little about music theory, it seems like you should never expect music theory to answer subjective questions like "Why does x sound better than y?" There are so many factors for why someone will find a sound pleasing or not, and most of them are biological/psychological. IMO asking why a melody sounds pleasing would be like asking why a plot of the Mandelbrot set is interesting; math isn't going to be able to answer that. I would be fine with a music theory that is a set of tools to deal with sounds, just as math is a set of tools to deal with numbers. Whether certain properties are desirable are up to the theorist.

tomjakubowski 5y ago

Based on how many fellow programmers I know who play instruments or write compositions or otherwise produce music... it doesn't actually seem off putting for programmers to get into music. Is your experience different?

analog31 5y ago

Oddly enough I'm a programmer and musician. But I learned music before I learned programming.

scrozier 5y ago

I understand your frustration. However, as a trained musician and working programmer, I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview. Although I understand that it's hard, the answer is to study classical Western music theory. (Or Eastern or whatever; I come from the Western tradition.) It's not simple, but it's not rocket science either. When you have this basic theoretical grounding (intervals, scales, chords, music on staves, etc.) then the "world of music" won't seem obscure and magical. It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good." You'll discover things like this for yourself if you allow yourself to study music rather than studying music as applied programming.

Ma8ee 5y ago
My problem is that I quite early learned most basic music theory. But I’ve never really figured out how to use it. I read sheet music and I can play several instruments (not particularly well any of them). It feels like I learned a list of keywords and syntax rules, but never figured out how to program.
- scrozier 5y ago
  Ah. That's a very interesting way to put it! I think it's possible that some people just don't have a "feel" for creating music (call it talent, something you're born with, etc.). But I sense that you enjoy music and maybe feel like you have things you'd like to "say," musically, but are frustrated by your inability to wrestle the tools into doing what you hear in your mind. Do you play the piano? I think the piano is the best vehicle for grokking music—it allows for melody and harmony (and rhythm) all in one instrument, in sort of a visual way, that is hard to get in monophonic instruments, or even with guitar (for more complicated reasons). I think I developed my musical sense in two main ways: 1. listening to songs on records and on the radio, and figuring out how to replicate them at the piano, and 2. playing lots of music on the piano from sheet music, where I was constantly exposed to chord progressions and the like in other people's music; the "tropes" of Western classical and popular music, if you like. Neither of these are trivial, but both are within reach of most people, I think. I will posit that there are few shortcuts to musical mastery. Grokking music is definitely not like (as easy as) learning a new programming language.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The attitude of "there are no rules!" GP didn't say there are no rules. “The rules are culturally, and path, dependent and are not derived or derivable from a simple set of universal first principles” is very far from “there are no rules”. It does mean that certain approaches to learning the rules that might fit well with people's abstract preferences for how they’d like to approach the field don't work well in practice, though.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

I'm a programmer that got into Music. I hit my head... and other people's heads... and tables and walls... until I realized that: 1. Yes, there are "rules" 2. They are far far far more arbitrary than I realized 3. They are far from universally applicable. Personally, I expected music to be heavily math based, with universal rules. But my current understanding is that while there IS a lot of math, what sounds good / what people in any given culture like, is all arbitrary. You can use math to describe some of it, but not to derive it. As well, unfortunately, when people say "Music Theory", they largely mean a variation on one or both of: 1. Note reading - Western music notation, which I don't consider "Music Theory" but rather notation, but many will disagree 2. Western Music Theory, largely though not entirely put down by 18th century old cranky europeans based on what they happened to like at the time There is FAR less "universalness" in Western Music theory than I thought. So there is this combination of: * Huge englightnment and pattern recognition and increased understanding as I learned more music theory and * tremendous frustration at inconsistency and arbitrariness, until I realized it wasn't my music teacher who hated me, it's that what they are teaching me is arbitrary So personally, I think it's important for programmer to accept "there are no rules (in the sense that we think of "rules", boolean logic and math etc), though there are guidelines and recommendations (which are completely arbitrary and cultural-based)" It turns out "what rhythm / note / combination / frequency is more pleasing" is 99% how you were brought up / what you are used to, rather than some math/physics correlation. Move to another part of the world and throw out your 4/4 and 12-note equal temperament and I-V-vi-IV

rtsil 5y ago

The difference between rules in programming and rules in music is that in the first case they're normative, in the second case they're descriptive. Music theory can tell you why a specific combination of notes and a chord progression in a musical piece are pleasant to the ear, but does not guarantee that using similar combinations and progressions will result in pleasant sounds. Part of the reason is subjectivity, in the sense of music is intended to be heard by subjects. And these subjects have their own experiences of music, which in turn conditions their expectations and their reactions to sounds. What sounds good is different from person to person, let alone from culture to culture. Coming from a classical background, when I heard jazz at a young age, I considered it chaotic and awful. Today, it's the most pleasant style of music for my ears. I've seen people who had never, ever heard opera music listen to an aria and laugh to tears because for them it was comically awful. Another is reason, I think, is that music is embodied by who plays it. I can play Blackbird in the exact same way Paul McCartney does, but when I do it the best I can expect is people saying "that's nice!". When McCartney plays it, the entire stadium hold their breath and get chills, some are in tears. I don't see how that level of emotion can be explained in a scientific way.