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Granted, I'm a musician, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. And I don't know what the author's background is. But I've noticed that the people who

Granted, I'm a musician, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. And I don't know what the author's background is. But I've noticed that the people who tend to have the biggest problem with music theory are engineers. I think it comes from an assumption that music should be learned like engineering, where you start with fundamentals, and then build upon them. And then they're horrified to discover that even the fundamentals are arbitrary and approximate. Most musicians don't start out with fundamentals. We started by choosing an instrument and somehow learning to play it. For the most part, musicians don't care about temperaments. Equal temperament only applies to a handful of instruments that can be kept in tune long enough for it to matter, and that can play the same note, the same way, twice. An orchestra, jazz band, or solo fiddler, have no temperament in any meaningful sense. Yes, musical notation is a cluster. But it serves its purpose well enough to be useful to support a symbiosis between the composer and the performer. If any composer chooses to try a bespoke notation, they'll discover that nobody will ever perform their composition. It's like a programming language that nobody likes, but that is supported by a job market and labor pool. My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Preferably a non-electronic one, so you won't be tempted to turn music into a numbers game.

k__ 5y ago
As educator for engineers, I would even go so far as to say your approach is good for engineering too. I had the impression that fundamentals are much easier if you played around with some real world tech. But to go back to music theory. I think, it helps when you already started a song and you're stuck. If you got a catchy melody, some theory gives you the tools to add fitting harmonies to it, etc.
defanor 5y ago
As a programmer studying music, I found the "music theory for nerds" article [1] very helpful to get started, and then kept noticing how many general music learning materials for beginners skip the fundamentals/justification, suggesting to just remember many non-arbitrary things that can be deduced, without explaining why they are that way. As the article itself mentions, the hard part is to figure which parts are arbitrary and which ones are not quite so arbitrary, but pretty sure an engineer can get an easy start by studying those bits first. Playing an instrument is nice and fun too, of course, but I think it's more helpful for intuition rather than actual understanding -- and those are usually best to combine. [1] https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/
narag 5y ago
Equal temperament only applies to a handful of instruments that can be kept in tune long enough for it to matter, and that can play the same note, the same way, twice. I'm confused. If I'm not mistaken, equal temperament is the norm for all instruments since Bach. Any keyboard instrument is tuned that way. Or any instrument with frets. Or any instrument that must be played alonside with one of the previous ones. If you meant something else, could you ellaborate?
- leephillips 5y ago
  I think that’s what analog31 said, and he gave examples. For an orchestra without a piano, there is no temperament issue.
  - narag 5y ago
    Do you mean that there are issues otherwise? Which ones?
    - analog31 5y ago
      Many issues. The tuning of each instrument is a bag of compromises, especially on instruments where the notes are not entirely independent of one another. Woodwind instruments have fewer keys than notes, so each key has multiple roles. Each octave has its own quirks. Woodwind instruments have "bad" notes, and I once saw an advertisement for a flute with a "new improved scale." Brass instruments have their main valves, but also little tuning slides with hooks on them so you can work them in and out with your extra fingers while playing. It's fascinating to see someone play tuba, it takes both hands to work the thing properly. Intonation is a lifelong journey for most musicians. Near the end of his life, they interviewed Ray Brown and asked him if he still needed to practice. He said that he still practiced every day, to improve his intonation. If players sound in tune, it's because of an almost obsessive effort to make that happen. What I'm saying is you can't begin to talk about temperaments until you can play the same note at the same pitch, in any octave, at least twice. I'm a double bassist, and I'm still working on that, after playing for nearly 40 years.
indigochill 5y ago
I'm a professional engineer and amateur musician. I've always made music a bit of an engineering puzzle and I don't necessarily consider that a problem. The thing about engineering music is that once you've established some soft constraints, there's still a ton of room for experimentation. And when you have a good handle on following the rules, breaking them can lead to interesting places too. I wrestled with temperaments for a bit before realizing that the "engineering rules" of music (at least at the compositional layer) are not dictated by physics but by culture. Equal temperament is in some sense "arbitrary", but because it's what people are used to hearing and performing music in, you have to just accept it as an axiom and move on (unless you're setting out with the express intent of challenging that norm, in which case more power to you). Also when you delve into world music (particularly from India or the Middle East) you quickly learn that twelve-tone octaves are also arbitrary and that musicians in those regions regularly perform tones that don't fit in that model and have other common musical idioms that western music theory is poorly equipped for because our common music theory originated from a particular western European style from a particular era. My hope for the future of music notation is that we recognize this and welcome more forms of music theory/notation for different styles of music just like we recognize different strengths of different programming languages.
jb1991 5y ago
This is exactly correct. Especially software developers who are new to music often approach it like learning a programming language, which is not how musicians think and learn music at all.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cptaj 5y ago
I'm not a musician but have tried many times to learn and I can definitely agree. It has always been frustrating how inadequate explanations coming from musicians are.
- dagmx 5y ago
  Isn't inadequate here completely subjective though? If you're expecting a set of hard rules, that's what music theory is for. If you're expecting the rest of the picture, that's easy to describe in an emotional sense but hard to form as rules. What aspects did you find inadequate?
- analog31 5y ago
  This is why I suggest the alternative of "get an instrument and learn to play it," because it bypasses those roadblocks. And if it gets you to the point where it provides you with some enjoyment, so much the better. Now, you have to choose an instrument. There's a good reason why the guitar remains popular. The learning curve for tone production is extremely gentle, and there's a huge variety of styles that you can enjoy, plus online learning materials. It's portable, affordable, and alcohol powered. ;-) It looks like Fender is moving towards a new business model that revolves around learning to play.
- kansface 5y ago
  Music is a social convention about the same as language. It may be interesting where words or grammar originate, but it’s ultimately not important to communication.
mfarstad 5y ago
Learning music is more like a language than a discipline in my experience. You can do it the engineers way, but if you follow the way babies learn speech then it becomes a lot more gratifying and things become more intuitive. Victor Wooten had a ted talk on the subject. Learn by mimicking, then learn structure after you've already had fun just making some noise.
sampo 5y ago
> But I've noticed that the people who tend to have the biggest problem with music theory are engineers. My problem with music theory is that in the presentation there is no clear separation of what can be derived from first principles (so, similar to physics theory), and what is based on observations of what people seem to like (so, similar to literary and film theories). Granted, both physics theory and literary theory are called theories. But they are very different approaches. And then music theory is a mix of both. Some parts can be explained physics-like from psychoacoustic fundamentals, and other parts are like anthropological observations: This is what people seem to like. And the way it's presented, you don't know which is which.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Much of psychoacoustics was derived from the observation of human hearing. It's not a matter of theorizing from first principles, because the reality on the ground is far more complex. Which is not to say that useful modeling is not possible, just that the scope of such models is necessarily unclear.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dagmx 5y ago
I find music is a lot like the movie Ratatouille. I'm a classically trained violinist, and when learning there was a huge sense of "just follow the rules and the sheet music exactly until you get to composing". In that sense, I think there's a lot of similarities to a lot of engineering practices. There's a straight line to follow on a lot of tasks, adhere to the rules and leave the magic/cleverness to the system architects. When I switched to guitar, and subsequently discovered the world of prog/math metal, it felt incredibly freeing. However describing that kind of freedom to my friends who adhered to sheet music exclusively was a struggle. Polyrhythms, improvisation, playing by feel were blasphemous to that world. In that sense I liken it to ratatouille. You must cook the recipe the master chef created exactly, and it's not our place to iterate and experiment. As a software engineer, I see a lot of the same mindset often. There's a world of engineers who are rigid about sticking to the tried and tested way of doing things. There's nothing wrong with it, in fact it's very valued. However you need the counterpoint. You need the innovative composers, you need the recipe creators, you need the system designers/architects. Having only one or the other is an imbalance. I think that's what a lot of engineers get hung up on. Music is taught as rules. but those rules quickly fall apart when you start having to account for feel, for emotion, for cultural differences etc... Things that aren't able to be captured in rules cleanly.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > I think that's what a lot of engineers get hung up on. Music is taught as rules. That's not what I see (as the author of a cross-platform DAW for the last 22 years). Engineers get hung up on the fact that despite the reality that almost all western (and, realistically) almost all of the world's musical tradition(s) are in fact rooted in clear rules and numerical relationships, music culture wants to use terminology and practice that pretend that it's not. The simplest example: the major scale. Like all scales, it's just a pattern of intervals. What intervals? Why is the scale not named after the interval series, which would allow you to see how similar it is to the minor scale, and precisely how it differs (ditto for comparisons between any other scale). Another example: ordinal naming of scale degrees, "the third" etc. These have no consistent meaning other than when you write out the notes of the scale, you count through them. But the third of a minor scale is a different interval from the root than the third of a major scale. If they were named by interval, you'd have consistent naming no matter what the scale is. There are dozens more examples like this, where consistency in naming would ease many a musician-engineer's mind.
rectang 5y ago
> My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. The most useful music theory I've ever learned was the stuff that I needed to play jazz guitar: to improvise solos and comp chords. That course of study has continued to pay dividends many years later. The second most useful was an esoteric but extremely approachable exercise called "arch mapping", where you draw arches on graph paper to represent the form of a piece of music in terms of its subdivisions. For music with a steady tempo and constant time signature, basically anybody can try it: https://williamwieland.midcoip.net/theory/form/archmaps.htm https://williamwieland.midcoip.net/theory/form/archmaps.htm I also like arch mapping because it explodes the possibilities of what "music theory" is. It can be applied to literally any genre. You don't need to read music. You don't need to know western harmonic theory. You don't even need to know what a major chord is!
jasode 5y ago
>My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Preferably a non-electronic one, so you won't be tempted to turn music into a numbers game. Not debating your advice but just saying that some brains work differently. I play both guitar and piano and also know the "math numbers" of music theory and after decades of learning, I've concluded that the mechanical aspect of hands playing an instrument often limited my understanding of music while the numbers aspect always enhanced it. I was about 11 years old when I first learned about mathematical relationships of note frequencies from an computer programming book. So to make the computer's sound chip play a C Major arpeggio would be coding something like this in the BASIC language: 10 CALL SOUND (1000, 262, 0) 20 CALL SOUND (1000, 330, 0) 30 CALL SOUND (1000, 392, 0) 40 CALL SOUND (1000, 523, 0) ... where 262 stands for 262Hz of C4, 330Hz is E4, etc. The programming reference book would have a numbers chart similar to these: https://www.google.com/search?q=note+frequencies+chart&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=note+frequencies+chart&tbm=i... I've always liked knowing that octaves are 1/2x or 2x multipliers frequency. And the guitar frets spacing is a visual representation of the 2^(1/12) formula. And because a B1 is 61.7Hz, that's why a 60Hz hum of electricity sounds like a slightly flat low B. And math group theory perspective of chord constructions helped me see how Chopin piano voicings transformed in a coherent way. For people like me, I'd slightly reword your advice as "My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music [enjoyment feedback loop] is, get an instrument and learn to play it." If you're engineering-minded like me, the "systems" approach of the numbers behind the music explains it in a way that the fingers will not.
- ghostpepper 5y ago
  > math group theory perspective of chord constructions Would love to hear more about this if you know of any good sources
  - lioeters 5y ago
    Here's a dense and fun book in that direction.. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html
davidmurdoch 5y ago
Funny, I know tons of hobby "musicians" (I use that term loosely here) that are professional engineers. I've always observed that engineers are often more interested in playing music than others. Perhaps we are observing the same thing still: engineers gravitate towards music but then get stuck because the rules are so arbitrary. Oh, and speaking of making music a numbers game: check out Tool's Lateralus!
jefftk 5y ago
> they're horrified to discover that even the fundamentals are arbitrary and approximate How so?
jefftk 5y ago
> My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Strong agreement there. And make sure at least some of your learning is by ear, getting the feel for the music. For me, music theory was only helpful (or even interesting) after I had already been playing for a while.

k__ 5y ago

As educator for engineers, I would even go so far as to say your approach is good for engineering too. I had the impression that fundamentals are much easier if you played around with some real world tech. But to go back to music theory. I think, it helps when you already started a song and you're stuck. If you got a catchy melody, some theory gives you the tools to add fitting harmonies to it, etc.

defanor 5y ago

As a programmer studying music, I found the "music theory for nerds" article [1] very helpful to get started, and then kept noticing how many general music learning materials for beginners skip the fundamentals/justification, suggesting to just remember many non-arbitrary things that can be deduced, without explaining why they are that way. As the article itself mentions, the hard part is to figure which parts are arbitrary and which ones are not quite so arbitrary, but pretty sure an engineer can get an easy start by studying those bits first. Playing an instrument is nice and fun too, of course, but I think it's more helpful for intuition rather than actual understanding -- and those are usually best to combine. [1] https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/

narag 5y ago

Equal temperament only applies to a handful of instruments that can be kept in tune long enough for it to matter, and that can play the same note, the same way, twice. I'm confused. If I'm not mistaken, equal temperament is the norm for all instruments since Bach. Any keyboard instrument is tuned that way. Or any instrument with frets. Or any instrument that must be played alonside with one of the previous ones. If you meant something else, could you ellaborate?

leephillips 5y ago
I think that’s what analog31 said, and he gave examples. For an orchestra without a piano, there is no temperament issue.
- narag 5y ago
  Do you mean that there are issues otherwise? Which ones?
  - analog31 5y ago
    Many issues. The tuning of each instrument is a bag of compromises, especially on instruments where the notes are not entirely independent of one another. Woodwind instruments have fewer keys than notes, so each key has multiple roles. Each octave has its own quirks. Woodwind instruments have "bad" notes, and I once saw an advertisement for a flute with a "new improved scale." Brass instruments have their main valves, but also little tuning slides with hooks on them so you can work them in and out with your extra fingers while playing. It's fascinating to see someone play tuba, it takes both hands to work the thing properly. Intonation is a lifelong journey for most musicians. Near the end of his life, they interviewed Ray Brown and asked him if he still needed to practice. He said that he still practiced every day, to improve his intonation. If players sound in tune, it's because of an almost obsessive effort to make that happen. What I'm saying is you can't begin to talk about temperaments until you can play the same note at the same pitch, in any octave, at least twice. I'm a double bassist, and I'm still working on that, after playing for nearly 40 years.

indigochill 5y ago

I'm a professional engineer and amateur musician. I've always made music a bit of an engineering puzzle and I don't necessarily consider that a problem. The thing about engineering music is that once you've established some soft constraints, there's still a ton of room for experimentation. And when you have a good handle on following the rules, breaking them can lead to interesting places too. I wrestled with temperaments for a bit before realizing that the "engineering rules" of music (at least at the compositional layer) are not dictated by physics but by culture. Equal temperament is in some sense "arbitrary", but because it's what people are used to hearing and performing music in, you have to just accept it as an axiom and move on (unless you're setting out with the express intent of challenging that norm, in which case more power to you). Also when you delve into world music (particularly from India or the Middle East) you quickly learn that twelve-tone octaves are also arbitrary and that musicians in those regions regularly perform tones that don't fit in that model and have other common musical idioms that western music theory is poorly equipped for because our common music theory originated from a particular western European style from a particular era. My hope for the future of music notation is that we recognize this and welcome more forms of music theory/notation for different styles of music just like we recognize different strengths of different programming languages.

jb1991 5y ago

This is exactly correct. Especially software developers who are new to music often approach it like learning a programming language, which is not how musicians think and learn music at all.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cptaj 5y ago

I'm not a musician but have tried many times to learn and I can definitely agree. It has always been frustrating how inadequate explanations coming from musicians are.

dagmx 5y ago
Isn't inadequate here completely subjective though? If you're expecting a set of hard rules, that's what music theory is for. If you're expecting the rest of the picture, that's easy to describe in an emotional sense but hard to form as rules. What aspects did you find inadequate?
analog31 5y ago
This is why I suggest the alternative of "get an instrument and learn to play it," because it bypasses those roadblocks. And if it gets you to the point where it provides you with some enjoyment, so much the better. Now, you have to choose an instrument. There's a good reason why the guitar remains popular. The learning curve for tone production is extremely gentle, and there's a huge variety of styles that you can enjoy, plus online learning materials. It's portable, affordable, and alcohol powered. ;-) It looks like Fender is moving towards a new business model that revolves around learning to play.
kansface 5y ago
Music is a social convention about the same as language. It may be interesting where words or grammar originate, but it’s ultimately not important to communication.

mfarstad 5y ago

Learning music is more like a language than a discipline in my experience. You can do it the engineers way, but if you follow the way babies learn speech then it becomes a lot more gratifying and things become more intuitive. Victor Wooten had a ted talk on the subject. Learn by mimicking, then learn structure after you've already had fun just making some noise.

sampo 5y ago

> But I've noticed that the people who tend to have the biggest problem with music theory are engineers. My problem with music theory is that in the presentation there is no clear separation of what can be derived from first principles (so, similar to physics theory), and what is based on observations of what people seem to like (so, similar to literary and film theories). Granted, both physics theory and literary theory are called theories. But they are very different approaches. And then music theory is a mix of both. Some parts can be explained physics-like from psychoacoustic fundamentals, and other parts are like anthropological observations: This is what people seem to like. And the way it's presented, you don't know which is which.

zozbot234 5y ago
Much of psychoacoustics was derived from the observation of human hearing. It's not a matter of theorizing from first principles, because the reality on the ground is far more complex. Which is not to say that useful modeling is not possible, just that the scope of such models is necessarily unclear.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dagmx 5y ago

I find music is a lot like the movie Ratatouille. I'm a classically trained violinist, and when learning there was a huge sense of "just follow the rules and the sheet music exactly until you get to composing". In that sense, I think there's a lot of similarities to a lot of engineering practices. There's a straight line to follow on a lot of tasks, adhere to the rules and leave the magic/cleverness to the system architects. When I switched to guitar, and subsequently discovered the world of prog/math metal, it felt incredibly freeing. However describing that kind of freedom to my friends who adhered to sheet music exclusively was a struggle. Polyrhythms, improvisation, playing by feel were blasphemous to that world. In that sense I liken it to ratatouille. You must cook the recipe the master chef created exactly, and it's not our place to iterate and experiment. As a software engineer, I see a lot of the same mindset often. There's a world of engineers who are rigid about sticking to the tried and tested way of doing things. There's nothing wrong with it, in fact it's very valued. However you need the counterpoint. You need the innovative composers, you need the recipe creators, you need the system designers/architects. Having only one or the other is an imbalance. I think that's what a lot of engineers get hung up on. Music is taught as rules. but those rules quickly fall apart when you start having to account for feel, for emotion, for cultural differences etc... Things that aren't able to be captured in rules cleanly.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> I think that's what a lot of engineers get hung up on. Music is taught as rules. That's not what I see (as the author of a cross-platform DAW for the last 22 years). Engineers get hung up on the fact that despite the reality that almost all western (and, realistically) almost all of the world's musical tradition(s) are in fact rooted in clear rules and numerical relationships, music culture wants to use terminology and practice that pretend that it's not. The simplest example: the major scale. Like all scales, it's just a pattern of intervals. What intervals? Why is the scale not named after the interval series, which would allow you to see how similar it is to the minor scale, and precisely how it differs (ditto for comparisons between any other scale). Another example: ordinal naming of scale degrees, "the third" etc. These have no consistent meaning other than when you write out the notes of the scale, you count through them. But the third of a minor scale is a different interval from the root than the third of a major scale. If they were named by interval, you'd have consistent naming no matter what the scale is. There are dozens more examples like this, where consistency in naming would ease many a musician-engineer's mind.

rectang 5y ago

> My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. The most useful music theory I've ever learned was the stuff that I needed to play jazz guitar: to improvise solos and comp chords. That course of study has continued to pay dividends many years later. The second most useful was an esoteric but extremely approachable exercise called "arch mapping", where you draw arches on graph paper to represent the form of a piece of music in terms of its subdivisions. For music with a steady tempo and constant time signature, basically anybody can try it: https://williamwieland.midcoip.net/theory/form/archmaps.htm https://williamwieland.midcoip.net/theory/form/archmaps.htm I also like arch mapping because it explodes the possibilities of what "music theory" is. It can be applied to literally any genre. You don't need to read music. You don't need to know western harmonic theory. You don't even need to know what a major chord is!

jasode 5y ago

>My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Preferably a non-electronic one, so you won't be tempted to turn music into a numbers game. Not debating your advice but just saying that some brains work differently. I play both guitar and piano and also know the "math numbers" of music theory and after decades of learning, I've concluded that the mechanical aspect of hands playing an instrument often limited my understanding of music while the numbers aspect always enhanced it. I was about 11 years old when I first learned about mathematical relationships of note frequencies from an computer programming book. So to make the computer's sound chip play a C Major arpeggio would be coding something like this in the BASIC language: 10 CALL SOUND (1000, 262, 0) 20 CALL SOUND (1000, 330, 0) 30 CALL SOUND (1000, 392, 0) 40 CALL SOUND (1000, 523, 0) ... where 262 stands for 262Hz of C4, 330Hz is E4, etc. The programming reference book would have a numbers chart similar to these: https://www.google.com/search?q=note+frequencies+chart&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=note+frequencies+chart&tbm=i... I've always liked knowing that octaves are 1/2x or 2x multipliers frequency. And the guitar frets spacing is a visual representation of the 2^(1/12) formula. And because a B1 is 61.7Hz, that's why a 60Hz hum of electricity sounds like a slightly flat low B. And math group theory perspective of chord constructions helped me see how Chopin piano voicings transformed in a coherent way. For people like me, I'd slightly reword your advice as "My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music [enjoyment feedback loop] is, get an instrument and learn to play it." If you're engineering-minded like me, the "systems" approach of the numbers behind the music explains it in a way that the fingers will not.

ghostpepper 5y ago
> math group theory perspective of chord constructions Would love to hear more about this if you know of any good sources
- lioeters 5y ago
  Here's a dense and fun book in that direction.. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html

davidmurdoch 5y ago

Funny, I know tons of hobby "musicians" (I use that term loosely here) that are professional engineers. I've always observed that engineers are often more interested in playing music than others. Perhaps we are observing the same thing still: engineers gravitate towards music but then get stuck because the rules are so arbitrary. Oh, and speaking of making music a numbers game: check out Tool's Lateralus!

jefftk 5y ago

> they're horrified to discover that even the fundamentals are arbitrary and approximate How so?

jefftk 5y ago

> My advice for any engineer wanting to get into music is, get an instrument and learn to play it. Strong agreement there. And make sure at least some of your learning is by ear, getting the feel for the music. For me, music theory was only helpful (or even interesting) after I had already been playing for a while.