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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 som

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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
    I started out my musical explorations as a kid in piano lessons, then playing sax in school until halfway through high school. I never felt confident in playing, didn't feel free to explore, and judged every sound I made as right/wrong. 6 years ago, I accidentally abandoned my preferences and disengaged disgust in an attempt to stop automatically judging. And then I returned to music for the first time in 18 years with the idea that there is no wrong note. Here are some of my observations: - I wasn't deeply/actively/mindfully listening to music when I was younger. This was part of a cycle of an attention-degrading cycle where I'd hear music and then distract myself with judgements of it, emotions that followed the judgments, and judgments about those emotions. - Songs that "feel sad" don't. How a person hears/attends to music, how their body has been conditioned to receive different notes/chords/progressions, the meaning given to the sounds/words, the judgments around those things, and how they learned to feel in response to those judgments is what's being described when someone says a song feels a certain way to them. It's not universal and those feelings can be disengaged. - How I feel in response to music has gotten way deeper and more expansive as a result of releasing all those conditioned feelings. I did this, in part, by pressing a bunch of random keys down on an organ and sitting with the feelings that came up and let them pass. Part of the practice involves letting up on one key at a time and then pressing it again, back and forth, until I can distinguish the note in the cacophony and have reached a feeling of contentment with the sounds. Rinse and repeat for each note. - Music theory is absolutely unnecessary and in many ways hinders the learning process. I play improvisationally and not necessarily to play a song I've heard. Doing this for a year led to the emergence of a skill where I can start picking out melodies I remember. - Styles and genres are largely based around preferences. I have a friend whose connective tissue disease (Ehrler-Danlos Syndrome) keeps them from feeling music. As a result, they've developed a strong liking of noise music, which would likely feel very uncomfortable in the body to people whose bodies have been trained on more traditional forms of music. - The discomfort with dissonance is largely a learned thing, due to cultures of being unwilling to sit with dissonance. It can be turned off. - If what you're looking to do is make music people can easily like based on commonly cultivated body feels around different sounds and preferences, focus on rhythms that don't change much, avoiding dissonance by default, repetition and also on novelty. - If you want to make music people can easily ENJOY, repetition, improvisation, and novelty are keys. If you don't know any music theory, novelty will be easy. If you can make some sounds and then vaguely make the same sounds again, repetition will come (this can take a bit of practice, especially if not very connected with the body). Improvisation is such a broad idea because there's improvising around a melody or theme, around rhythm, around volume, around whatever the inspiration is (whether it be sounds, rhythms, feels, words, stories, colors, whatever), and probably more. Allowing and accepting whatever happens is a key to improvisation. - Music can be enjoyable, even with abrupt transitions from slow to fast, soft to loud, harmonious to dissonant, rhythmic to droning. - If I want to play what's in my mind, I can sing it and play along with how I'm singing. - "Wrong notes" played rhythmically can fit into anything. - If there's no wrong sound, I can play any instrument. - Everything is a drum. - Everything is music. Including silence. They cannot compel the silence to cease. So you are music trying to music in some ways and making music without trying. Trying to do that in a way that gains approval or caters to preferences is one way to live. Experimenting in the ways I describe here is another.
- scrozier 5y ago
  Addendum to the above: I also had lots of direct instruction in music: piano lessons, theory classes, music history classes, various instrument lessons, composition classes, etc. It all adds up.
dudeman13 5y ago
>It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good." And yet I get the feeling that if someone does investigates that (and adjacent topics) in depth with success there would be a bunch of interesting consequences to it. Maybe, I have got no knowledge in the field - it just sound like something interesting, why the heck wouldn't we want to know it?
- scrozier 5y ago
  Many people in music know the answer to that and related questions. Sometimes the answers prove interesting, as you say. What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly. They (questions like that) seem like they're interesting, because they appeal to us as programmers somehow (math-y), but they are largely on the fringe of the broad body of knowledge that makers of current popular music (say) operate with. You wouldn't expect a musician to come into programming saying, "so what's the equivalent of sonata allegro form in a typical computer program?" It would be applying the wrong paradigms/framework to the topic at hand.
  - dudeman13 5y ago
    >What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly. Thanks, I misunderstood you.
fknorangesite 5y ago
> I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview I sometimes feel like one could take this sentence and substitute just about anything for "music."
salty_biscuits 5y ago
It's just the Knuth quote "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." There is nothing wrong with trying to turn an art into a science. Music just has a bunch of implicit rules that people want to make explicit. Musicians find this frustrating because they aren't interested in understanding music this way. Both perspectives are fine.
- scrozier 5y ago
  Of course both perspectives are fine. And fair enough for you to point it out. I may have misinterpreted the person I was replying to. I got the impression that they wanted to better understand music from a musical point of view, and I responded that wanting to know optimal beat frequencies and such was probably not a fruitful route. But you're right, if one wants to view music as a deep treasure trove of source material for some kind of scientific analysis that makes one happy...go for it! And realize that that's probably not the route to becoming a musician, in the traditional sense.
  - salty_biscuits 5y ago
    I think most musicians recognise that the implicit rules are so complex that any reductive approach is going to fail if you want something like a simple formula for generating interesting music. It's just like language.
    - scrozier 5y ago
      Yes. But/and I see posts on HN about every two weeks that indicate that most programmer types (a group that includes me) do not recognize that. (Your analogy to language is apt, I think.)

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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
  I started out my musical explorations as a kid in piano lessons, then playing sax in school until halfway through high school. I never felt confident in playing, didn't feel free to explore, and judged every sound I made as right/wrong. 6 years ago, I accidentally abandoned my preferences and disengaged disgust in an attempt to stop automatically judging. And then I returned to music for the first time in 18 years with the idea that there is no wrong note. Here are some of my observations: - I wasn't deeply/actively/mindfully listening to music when I was younger. This was part of a cycle of an attention-degrading cycle where I'd hear music and then distract myself with judgements of it, emotions that followed the judgments, and judgments about those emotions. - Songs that "feel sad" don't. How a person hears/attends to music, how their body has been conditioned to receive different notes/chords/progressions, the meaning given to the sounds/words, the judgments around those things, and how they learned to feel in response to those judgments is what's being described when someone says a song feels a certain way to them. It's not universal and those feelings can be disengaged. - How I feel in response to music has gotten way deeper and more expansive as a result of releasing all those conditioned feelings. I did this, in part, by pressing a bunch of random keys down on an organ and sitting with the feelings that came up and let them pass. Part of the practice involves letting up on one key at a time and then pressing it again, back and forth, until I can distinguish the note in the cacophony and have reached a feeling of contentment with the sounds. Rinse and repeat for each note. - Music theory is absolutely unnecessary and in many ways hinders the learning process. I play improvisationally and not necessarily to play a song I've heard. Doing this for a year led to the emergence of a skill where I can start picking out melodies I remember. - Styles and genres are largely based around preferences. I have a friend whose connective tissue disease (Ehrler-Danlos Syndrome) keeps them from feeling music. As a result, they've developed a strong liking of noise music, which would likely feel very uncomfortable in the body to people whose bodies have been trained on more traditional forms of music. - The discomfort with dissonance is largely a learned thing, due to cultures of being unwilling to sit with dissonance. It can be turned off. - If what you're looking to do is make music people can easily like based on commonly cultivated body feels around different sounds and preferences, focus on rhythms that don't change much, avoiding dissonance by default, repetition and also on novelty. - If you want to make music people can easily ENJOY, repetition, improvisation, and novelty are keys. If you don't know any music theory, novelty will be easy. If you can make some sounds and then vaguely make the same sounds again, repetition will come (this can take a bit of practice, especially if not very connected with the body). Improvisation is such a broad idea because there's improvising around a melody or theme, around rhythm, around volume, around whatever the inspiration is (whether it be sounds, rhythms, feels, words, stories, colors, whatever), and probably more. Allowing and accepting whatever happens is a key to improvisation. - Music can be enjoyable, even with abrupt transitions from slow to fast, soft to loud, harmonious to dissonant, rhythmic to droning. - If I want to play what's in my mind, I can sing it and play along with how I'm singing. - "Wrong notes" played rhythmically can fit into anything. - If there's no wrong sound, I can play any instrument. - Everything is a drum. - Everything is music. Including silence. They cannot compel the silence to cease. So you are music trying to music in some ways and making music without trying. Trying to do that in a way that gains approval or caters to preferences is one way to live. Experimenting in the ways I describe here is another.
scrozier 5y ago
Addendum to the above: I also had lots of direct instruction in music: piano lessons, theory classes, music history classes, various instrument lessons, composition classes, etc. It all adds up.

dudeman13 5y ago

>It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good." And yet I get the feeling that if someone does investigates that (and adjacent topics) in depth with success there would be a bunch of interesting consequences to it. Maybe, I have got no knowledge in the field - it just sound like something interesting, why the heck wouldn't we want to know it?

scrozier 5y ago
Many people in music know the answer to that and related questions. Sometimes the answers prove interesting, as you say. What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly. They (questions like that) seem like they're interesting, because they appeal to us as programmers somehow (math-y), but they are largely on the fringe of the broad body of knowledge that makers of current popular music (say) operate with. You wouldn't expect a musician to come into programming saying, "so what's the equivalent of sonata allegro form in a typical computer program?" It would be applying the wrong paradigms/framework to the topic at hand.
- dudeman13 5y ago
  >What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly. Thanks, I misunderstood you.

fknorangesite 5y ago

> I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview I sometimes feel like one could take this sentence and substitute just about anything for "music."

salty_biscuits 5y ago

It's just the Knuth quote "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." There is nothing wrong with trying to turn an art into a science. Music just has a bunch of implicit rules that people want to make explicit. Musicians find this frustrating because they aren't interested in understanding music this way. Both perspectives are fine.

scrozier 5y ago
Of course both perspectives are fine. And fair enough for you to point it out. I may have misinterpreted the person I was replying to. I got the impression that they wanted to better understand music from a musical point of view, and I responded that wanting to know optimal beat frequencies and such was probably not a fruitful route. But you're right, if one wants to view music as a deep treasure trove of source material for some kind of scientific analysis that makes one happy...go for it! And realize that that's probably not the route to becoming a musician, in the traditional sense.
- salty_biscuits 5y ago
  I think most musicians recognise that the implicit rules are so complex that any reductive approach is going to fail if you want something like a simple formula for generating interesting music. It's just like language.
  - scrozier 5y ago
    Yes. But/and I see posts on HN about every two weeks that indicate that most programmer types (a group that includes me) do not recognize that. (Your analogy to language is apt, I think.)