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seanhunter 15 hours ago [-]
This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books.
If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.
If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.
If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.
I originally read your comment as quite gatekeep-y and elitist. The article explained some of the "theory" behind certain things around music in a way that made sense to me, yet here was a professional telling me it was bad because it was bad.
However I've realised that "Music Theory" is a strictly defined term. If someone made an article called "Intro to Algebraic Geometry", and it was actually about geometric algebra, it'd be really annoying, even if to a uninformed person the meaning behind those terms would seem interchangeable.
teiferer 9 hours ago [-]
Props for mentioning “The Jazz Theory Book”! It's an excellent book.
The only thing I'd add to your recommendations is: Listen! When you hear a song, some melody, a rhythm, listen carefully, try to deconstruct the components, how they interplay, and try to figure out what is it that you like. Was it a feature of the harmony? The melody? Pacing? Whatever it is, keep listening. Theory is just a way to try to explain what we hear and why we might like it. The more you listen, the more you have that you can base the theory on.
SwtCyber 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is the advice I wish showed up more often in "learn music theory" discussions
apercu 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sort of the opposite - when I can name something, then play it, then I can hear it. E.g., going from minor third to major third to root. I can't "unhear" that in blues-based music now. But before it had a "name" it was just an interesting sounding "thing" that didn't pop out to me in any specific way.
SwtCyber 5 hours ago [-]
I think there's still a pedagogical niche for what the article is doing. For someone coming from programming, "here's why these conventions aren't completely arbitrary" can be the thing that gets them interested enough to later learn harmony properly
ripharamberip 14 hours ago [-]
You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.
seanhunter 13 hours ago [-]
It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.
Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.
To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.
And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.
[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac
The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing.
The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels much more intuitive to some (like the author, and myself), compared to traditional music education.
xiaoyu2006 12 hours ago [-]
I would not call it harsh. The author don't even bother to assemble sentences themselves. And a title "Music Theory for Programmers" imply it is comprehensive even at an elementary scale.
mcluck 10 hours ago [-]
The title does not imply it's comprehensive. If anything, a title like that suggests that it's only scratching the surface. If I read an article like "Haskell for C# Developers" I would not expect to be an expert in Haskell at the end. I would expect to have enough intuition to begin actually learning the language properly
gjvc 10 hours ago [-]
"implies"
iainctduncan 9 hours ago [-]
PhD Candidate in music and computer science and gigging jazz musicain here. It is not too harsh. Articles like this confuse people who interested in learning a topic more than they help.
Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
How does it confuse people?
There is "western music theory" ala Schenker, voice leading, serialism etc (to mention a couple of names that some people might have heard of) but that describes things to do once you've got a scale and chord system.
This is "12T music theory", describing how you might get to a scale and chord system.
I don't see how it is confusing. You can spend a lot of time doing "western music theory" without ever understanding most of what is in this article, that is certainly true. But the fact this this outlines a bunch of stuff that undergirds what a composing (or improvising) musician might consider "music theory" doesn't invalidate it, or make it confusing, IMO.
iainctduncan 7 hours ago [-]
"Music theory" has a near universally accepted meaning. This article is not about that, it's about what we all call in music academia acoustics and digital synthesis (which of course I know you know as I know your work). The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books. I've taken numerous theory courses and also taken university acoustics courses and digital synthesis courses, so I can certainly comment on what was taught where! If people go here and think they are learning music theory and then want to go on, they will be frustrated by not finding what they want, they will have issues communicating with others in the field, and they will lose credibility by not knowing the standard nomenclature. That kind of redefinition of standard terms is not good pedagogy.
Look, it's like me writing an introduction to "colour theory" and then writing about something else that eventually leads to how we see colour.
I'm not debating that the article has useful content – it does – but it's title and framing is misleading, which is a disservice to the new student. I happen to personally believe everyone getting into music theory would be well served by knowing more acoustics and that this is useful material. But muddying the waters by using terms in weird ways is off.
And when you write about a field and use the wrong terms, you lose credibility. Sorry, I don't trust authors who can't be arsed to use the standard nomenclature for a topic, it really doesn't make them sound trustworthy.
bonzini 6 hours ago [-]
Are Peano's axioms number theory? No one really uses them directly (other than induction) when working on practical number theory problems, but they are considered part of it.
Scales and chords build the fundamental basic blocks for Western music (I would introduce equal temperament third but that's only a matter of ordering). They are taken for granted in musical practice, I agree, but only because musical practice concerns itself about how/what to play and why. If somebody comes from the point of view that clefs and stems (which are undoubtedly musical tools) are gatekeeping and all you need is a piano roll, this article explains from first principles enough musical building blocks to tell them why they're wrong.
iainctduncan 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but none of that changes the fact that is someone reads that article and says "wow I like music theory!" and orders the best theory books or signs up for a course or lessons, they are going to be PISSED. They will get some books that don't cover what they think music theory is at all and that touch on basically nothing in this article.
On the other hand, if the author had said something like "Intro to the acoustics behind musical scales", then they might go on to order great books like Kyle Gann's or Gareth Loy's and be off to the races.
Redefining normal terms just makes people sound like they have no clue, and that is, 100%, a serious disservice to the reader/student.
bonzini 5 hours ago [-]
Or maybe not... surely if you are shown figured bass you will be pissed, but on the other hand understanding triads and sevenths provides some intuition about inversions, voice leading, rootless voicings, upper structures, diatonic movement of voices. Certainly not enough to orchestrate a piece, but enough to listen to educational YouTube videos, follow lead sheets, think about what you're hearing.
Harmonics and temperament aren't really relevant to all this, though at some point you have to explain why certain intervals are naturally consonant but "boring", and others can be made to make sense but mostly within a more complex voicing (which reconnects to topics like inversions and voice leading).
(For disclosure I studied piano until ~20, both classical and jazz, and I would call my knowledge of jazz theory "decent" for someone with zero professional or academic experience. Obviously not comparable to yours and not even in English, so perhaps what I wrote above will sound really stupid).
PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago [-]
> The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books.
And this is correct because ... ?
There are whole subsectors of "music theory" that cover precisely this sort of thing, even though they are fairly arcane. I'm thinking of things like pitch set theory.
My own take is that western musical pedagogy, at least historically, is one of the worst examples of pedagogy that exists, precisely because of what is taught, in what order, and why. It pretends (or used to) to have some sort of universality or inevitability, when even a scant familiarity with other musical cultures would make it clear that this is false. It is emphasizes a note-centric rather than interval-centric approach to melody (and chords) that ignores centuries of (folk) musical practice (most simply known as transposition, but the implications of it are staggering, and largely elided).
So, defending what that pedagogy calls "music theory" seems like weak sauce to me. Especially given, as many others have pointed out, western/european "music theory" is a codification of existing practice for the most, not a generative theory.
iainctduncan 5 hours ago [-]
It seems you arguing how things should be, not what they are. I don't disagree that in music we have lots of inconsistent nomenclature that could have better names. But writing an intro to a topic and using non-standard nomenclature (without explaining that that's what you're doing) is still a source of confusion to learners.
Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to the new learner, that's where it is! I actually think a crash course in acoustics would be a good addition to a comprehensive theory book, but it doesn't change the fact that no theory course or book has this stuff (not even my pitch set texts!)
I teach music students regularly. I spend a lot of time explaining what something is called in various contexts. They need to know this to learn in a productive and not frustrating manner. They can then learn later why the terms are imperfect and used differently in different subcultures.
But no argument on that is going to convince me that it's good pedagogy to tell new readers that a post on acoustics and synthesis is on music theory. That's just counterproductive at best, or ignorant at worst.
PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago [-]
What would you call the topic of "why are there 12 notes to the octave?" "why is the perfect fifth the most consonant chord?" "why do we use equal temperament?"
iainctduncan 4 hours ago [-]
In the all the textbooks I have or have seen, those are called "acoustics" (and more specifically "tuning and temperament"). They are covered in the text book I had for acoustics, and not covered in any of the textbooks I used for theory (jazz or classical). For example, in Rossings "The Science of Sound", it's in a chapter called "Musical Scales and Temperament".
Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.
My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.
PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago [-]
But TFA is called "Music Theory for Programmers". It's not called "Music Theory for Music Students".
iainctduncan 2 hours ago [-]
I guess we disagree on whether that should change anything.
Slow_Hand 4 hours ago [-]
While these are helpful topics to understand, they are not beginner topics. Not if you want to make music. They are fundamental questions in that they reside at the base of why things are the way they are, but they are not fundamental in the sense that you should teach them to a beginner who wants to make music.
The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.
To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.
PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago [-]
> The point is to make music.
Is it? Why?
Slow_Hand 3 hours ago [-]
Because music is pleasurable to play, to experience, and it's gratifying to be creative and to discover your creative potential.
If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.
Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.
PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago [-]
TFA is titled "Music Theory for Programmers".
fooster 4 hours ago [-]
It’s also worth mentioning that these are very western ideas. Lots of other cultures derive alternative structures not based around 12 half steps to an octave and so on.
PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago [-]
Oddly, or perhaps predictably, or both, most of them still converge on the same basic pitch classes.
The example I'm most familiar with is Carnatic and Hindustani music, where there are theoretically 22 tones per octave, and in fact the tones in most cases actually cover a range of frequencies rather than a single one. Nevertheless, the most common and most popular music from those traditions tends to only use about 7 tones per octave (equivalent to a western "scale"), and they still have a very central for tone ratios like 3/2.
sambapa 12 hours ago [-]
Because such posts get tiring after a while. Strong dunning kruger and all that.
chrisjj 11 hours ago [-]
> Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory.
I've always thought that's mistitled. Better would be Traditional Western Music Notation Theory.
Notice what's absent, e.g. frequency and timbre which are nicely introduced by the current article.
Music theory is a lot wider than the ABSRM syllabus. And the current article is a great starting point.
TheOtherHobbes 10 hours ago [-]
That's sound design theory, not music theory. They're not the same thing.
Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
Entry-level trad Western Theory gives you the concept of a basic grammar as a first introduction, but once you have that you can extend it fairly painlessly to jazz/funk/metal/pop/whatever.
Advanced classical grammar - baroque and modal counterpoint, extended harmony, and such - has some useful pointers for modern song-writing, but it's a specialised skill for experts. Movie and game score composers likely know it, but it's a degree-level skill.
Sound design theory is a subset of orchestration. The proof is that you can take most music and play it with simple sine wave bloops - no orchestration at all - and it remains completely recognisable.
Explaining equal temperament etc sounds clever and it's interesting if you like that kind of thing, but it's a distracting level of nerdery that doesn't help at all with basic song writing.
strenholme 10 hours ago [-]
For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a chromatic scale”) allows a programmer to understand not just the how but the why for the basics of western music.
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.
simonask 7 hours ago [-]
It's also a really strong example of "missing the forest for the trees".
Deriving Western music traditions from first principles does not help you to understand why, what, and how any of it actually works.
strenholme 3 hours ago [-]
If we teach theory without first principles, all we have to do is say “C + E + G make up a major triad”; we may go as far as to explain that, in a major key, the I, IV, and V chords are major chords, the ii, iii, and vi chords are minor chords, and the vii chord is a very dissonant diminished chord.
However, first principles explain “why” a major chord sounds the way it does, and “why” a minor chord has more tension.
Let’s look at the five-limit just intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5. 2/1 is a perfect interval; two notes an octave apart sound nearly the same. 3/2 and 4/3 are also perfect intervals, but there’s a little more tension and beating than with 2/1. 5/4 has a little more tension than 4/3, and 6/5 has even more tension. I just explained, using first principles, the octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, major third, and minor third. That’s most of the scale right there.
Now, let’s make a chord. Experience has shown that three notes is more interesting to the human ear than just two notes. That in mind, we want three distinct notes where the intervals between notes have a minimum of tension. Take the root, take 5/4 of that, then take 3/2 of the root. That’s a major chord. The reason we use 5/4 instead of 4/3 is because the interval between 5/4 and 3/2 is 6/5; the interval between 4/3 and 3/2 is 9/8. Since 9/8 has more tension than 6/5, that gives us a suspended chord, and it’s better to use a major chord with less tension to make a simple chord progression.
Now that we have our first chord, we can hear that having a 1-chord song becomes repetitive very quickly to the human ear. We can make the song more dynamic and interesting by giving it three chords: I, IV, and V. Take that chord: 1, 5/4, and 3/2 (a major chord). Move all three notes up 4/3, because 4/3 is a perfect interval with a minimum of tension. That’s our IV chord (F chord in the key of C major) Next, from the root position, instead of moving up the chord 4/3, we instead move it up 3/2. That’s a V (or dominant) chord—a G chord when played in the key of C major.
Now, from first principles, namely that the intervals 3/2, 4/3, and 5/4 sound pleasant to the human ear, that 6/5 has more tension, and 9/8 has even more tension (so we avoid suspended chords for now), we have a I IV V chord progression, which is the basis for countless rock and popular songs.
If we take all of the individual notes from the I IV V chord progression, that gives us the seven notes of the major scale, after explaining that, once we cross the octave threshold, we can transpose an octave down without affecting the musicality of the notes. We might even explain chord inversions here.
So instead of just parroting “I IV V makes a nice simple chord progression”, we now know the underlying physics which make I IV V sound so nice to the human ear, and how to get the major scale from those chords. I prefer understanding both the why and the how.
(I would have used two slightly detuned sawtooth waves instead of a sine wave for most of the examples if I were to write an article like the one this discussion links to, explaining this has a more pleasant, piano or violin like sound to it. Maybe even a low pass filter to tame the harmonics. Another option is to run a single sawtooth wave through a Solina style chorus, but explaining two detuned sawtooth waves is easier than trying to explain the Solina chorus effect)
oplav 10 hours ago [-]
I agree. As a (hobbyist) musician and a (professional) programmer, I would not classify this web page as “music theory” given its widely accepted definition.
At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.
I am missing the part where TFA said that the goal was to help with "basic song writing".
And what is "distracting level of nerdery" to someone can be the key that helps unlock a deeper level of understanding to someone else. I thought we understood neurodivergence a little better these days.
The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures. The contents of TFA, while not strictly comprehensive when considering other musical cultures, is still pretty on point. Even though Carnatic and Hindustani music theoretically uses 22 tones per octave, the most common ones are still drawn from the same set of 12 used in western music, and the most common scales are remarkably similar.
bossyTeacher 7 hours ago [-]
> The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures.
Say it louder for those at the back. People keep forgetting that western theory was unable to explain why the blues (the American music form by excellence) worked at all. And arguably, a lot of the western music theory is more akin to a codification of existing musical practices in the western world rather than some scientific model. But a lot of music theory fans seem to dogmatically treat it as THE science of ALL music.
simonask 7 hours ago [-]
You're confusing some tenses here. At the time when Blues became widely known, "Western music theory" covered Beethoven. That's about it.
chrisjj 8 hours ago [-]
> Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it.
> That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it.
Does anybody, though? Would anybody listen to it? Every culture on Earth has music. All of them use chords, scales, and rhythm, in various ways. Definitely not all of them use the Western diatonic system, but that's beside the point.
teiferer 9 hours ago [-]
Most music cultures work well without once thinking about frequency. The closest you get might be pitch. Starting from frequency is a very physics-oriented approach and will give you a hard time understanding why your favorite piece of music is so good.
khazhoux 4 hours ago [-]
Similar to me lobbying them to rename it Webster’s Traditional American English Dictionary
bossyTeacher 10 hours ago [-]
Done on purpose. The assumption here is that this theory is the one and only theory.
chrisjj 8 hours ago [-]
Sad but true.
sddsasdasda 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bonzini 12 hours ago [-]
I think what he means as music theory is the next step after what this (blatantly AI-written, but passable) article talks about. This is the part that you take for granted, but it certainly is music theory in the same way that Peano's axioms are number theory even though you don't use them explicitly.
The AI style gets boring very quickly, but I liked the explanation of what Western music notation is optimized for. For more information on this, there's a great and long video at https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4.
(Edit: I wrote this around the same time as the reply, which more or less confirmed my hunch)
otabdeveloper4 11 hours ago [-]
There's no such thing as "music theory".
Music theory was originally a tool for music critics in the 19th century to talk about conservatory music of the time.
There's nothing rigorous, systematic or scientific in it; it's mostly a historical cultural artifact more than anything else.
For example, music "theory" is completely helpless when describing an EDM track or how to compose one. EDM is one of the most primitive music styles ever (barely even qualifies as music in my opinion) and yet music "theory" is worthless in this case.
simonask 11 hours ago [-]
Spoken like someone with absolutely zero grasp of music theory or modern electronic music. I almost want to congratulate you for the worst-informed comment I’ve read today.
13 hours ago [-]
dosisking 13 hours ago [-]
> You say that the article isn't music theory but don't bother to say why.
His response sounded kind of gatekeep-y to me. Kind of like an academic with theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience.
Many great musicians never learned proper music theory. Innovation comes from outside, not from inside the establishment.
gentooflux 12 hours ago [-]
Music theory is a way of describing that cool thing you played, not the other way around
simonask 11 hours ago [-]
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve.
More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
bluGill 10 hours ago [-]
Music's theory is something you really need to understand at an unconscious level. All the study of how the notes relate and frequencies, that's very interesting and it may help you understand things better, but the real question is not, can you do all the math to figure out why this note and that note work together, it's can you hear it with your ears and play the correct harmony note for whatever purpose the music leads.
I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. They may occasionally have something finished, but 'it doesn't sound right'. Then go back to music theory and say, oh, this chord is wrong. I can fix that chord because I know music theory and come up with something that works. But they're not doing that at first. They're composing from their unconscious mind.
intrikate 10 hours ago [-]
> I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions.
Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.
Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.
bluGill 9 hours ago [-]
You have it backward. The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Music's theory describes what we already know works, not how to make things work.
No composer I know thinks in the terms of music theory. They often use a chord progression that music theory describes why it works, but they're not thinking of it in terms of music theory. They're thinking in terms of chord progression, just like the composers of thousands years ago were thinking of their chord progressions the exact style changes and so a thousand years ago they went to thought in terms of modern chord progressions but they were still thinking in similar terms.
simonask 6 hours ago [-]
> The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things.
Broadly completely untrue.
If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced musical tradition on the planet (including Western, but also Indian, Chinese, etc.) has developed alongside a system of analyzing that music, and for very good reason: It's a lot easier to teach music when you can actually talk about it.
I promise you, every single competent composer and musician on the planet - from every culture - has a fairly firm grasp on music theory, in whatever flavor is relevant to the form of music they practice. Every Indian musician who plays classical Indian music knows their ragas. Every Western musician can navigate the diatonic scale.
brookst 8 hours ago [-]
That’s like saying no programmer relies on computer science.
Sure, at some level of expertise you’re not sitting there saying “oh, I should name variables sensibly and encapsulate functionality because computer science says to”; they are doing those things because with training and experience that becomes innate and accessible in flow state.
But the fact that theory can become ingrained does not mean one isn’t using theory.
simonask 7 hours ago [-]
If you think music theory is about frequencies and math, you certainly have no idea what you’re talking about.
analog31 12 hours ago [-]
The only people I know who are productive as composers or arrangers are familiar with theory.
gentooflux 12 hours ago [-]
Because they can write it down. Good for them.
analog31 3 hours ago [-]
It's way more than that. They are just more fluent at creating things like melodies and harmonies that "work" without essentially starting from scratch on every composition.
I know music notation and can write things down, but I'm not a good composer. I'm at the mercy of others to write new material if that's what I'm interested in playing.
And writing it down in a way that other musicians can understand is of nontrivial value if you want people to play your stuff.
onraglanroad 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, being able to write is a good thing.
You can get so far with just an aural tradition but the invention of writing helps.
analog31 12 hours ago [-]
Retiring from music due to RSI suggests practical experience.
Disclosure: Musician
smuffinator 12 hours ago [-]
Definitely gatekeeping. I'm no wiz by any means, but I've done (and still do) a fair amount of paid work (gigs, studio recordings, teaching, etc.) and I would not describe Grade 5 ABRSM as "very basic"
curious_soul 2 hours ago [-]
Off topic, but given your credentials you might be a good person to ask. Any recommendations on how I should go about learning to play piano? I am just starting out. I have no music background except playing some basic self taught guitar in my teenage years. I can't read music fluently yet. I have access to a nice Yamaha with weighted keys.
When I see my friends who are into music play and talk about different instruments, it actually feels like magic to me. I tried to learn Violin some years ago but I could never understand why the note was correct. I do know that if I had learnt Keyboard instead, I would know where the correct notes are but I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is. Any pointer as to what I can do? Because I dont think learning music theory is going to be enough for me.
seanhunter 14 hours ago [-]
At many western music schools, if piano isn’t your first instrument, it is compulsory to study piano as a second instrument. The reason for this is that it really helps when understanding harmony. You also do ear training, which is meant to solve the problem I think you’re describing. I expect you would find ear training resources on youtube or something now but I did it the old-fashioned way where you start by listening when people play major / minor chords, all the intervals, learn to recognize inversions etc and then move on to doing transcriptions of music you like. I have box files full of transcriptions I did when learning. But Levine (for example) includes some ear training advice.
folkrav 10 hours ago [-]
That second point is spot on. The one thing I remember vividly - and that still helps me most - from all those years of classical piano training is the ear training. I don't have perfect pitch, but I remember A440 vividly (thanks to my electronic metronome) and the training left me with a strong sense relative pitch that helps me figure out pretty much any melody and chord progression relatively quickly.
sbrother 7 hours ago [-]
I really wish I had studied piano for that reason. I put many years into flute and almost went to conservatory for it, so I can play pretty much any melody by ear after hearing it, but I have zero ability to do the same for harmonies/chord progressions. I've tried to learn some piano (and like the parent said, was forced to as part of music curriculum at college) but it's incredibly difficult to learn a new instrument to a satisfying level as an adult.
vishalmullur 14 hours ago [-]
Thanks! That's actually very helpful :)
kaoD 14 hours ago [-]
> I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is
That is called "perfect pitch" and it is not necessary to play music. It's very rare to have perfect pitch, and it seems to be innate, not something you learn.
Contextual note recognition (relative pitch) is what musicians normally use to jam. It comes with practice and contextual clues that you pick up over tens of years (including familiarity with your jammate's instrument, even if it's not the one you play; familiarity with multiple eras of music theory; pure practice), so this shouldn't be your #1 priority since it just comes along for free (or a bit of practice), as you learn. Music playing 101 is just... playing music in your instrument. You don't need to recognize notes until you want to jam, which comes years after you start playing an instrument.
Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.
You might want to start here: https://www.musictheory.net/ (not affiliated, I just think it's a very good resource for Music Theory 101).
OroPla 11 hours ago [-]
Isn't perfect pitch just when you can tell a note without having a reference tone?
Once you have a point of reference things just go up and down and from there it should be manageable to identify each note.
Also, not sure about the innate thing. Seems to me that it's just a neural pathway that can be created by playing or listening to a whole lot of music while being aware of which tone is which, for example by reading the score alongside.
dyzone 13 hours ago [-]
> Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.
I used to think I was pitch blind until one day it just clicked. It just takes practice in my opinion.
otabdeveloper4 11 hours ago [-]
There's nothing magic in it. Any two pitches that have a rational number ratio with a small denominator sound "correct".
It's just a quirk of human physiology. The real creativeness and ingenuity comes from rhythm and the interplay of repetitive and surprising sounds. The pitches are not important.
tyffanypastecf 2 hours ago [-]
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odyssey7 7 hours ago [-]
+1 on recommending Schoenberg. Harmonielehre is a philosophical work as much as it is a music theory treatise.
Doesn't look like really a "v2" to me, rather v1 a bit re-arranged. A true "theory" able to explain present music (or even Jazz from the seventies) and also support its creation is still widely lacking, or just a naive variation of what was used for classical music. Tymoczko & co go a bit in a more general/useful direction where the theory eventually can also be used to define algorithms which can "compose" credible contemporary music, but still a long way to go. The latter is like the "litmus test" from my humble point of view whether a theory is indeed useful.
seanhunter 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know it personally but skimming it looks pretty good.
alwa 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this (and your other reactions downthread) with such depth and care.
Setting your off-the-cuff comment alongside TFA’s Claudish muddle reminds me—as if I needed reminding—about the hazardous parts of self-education, particularly when that education is, as it seems maybe to have been in the author’s case, led by LLM…
I appreciate a programmer hacking on sound and music—that’s awesome, and I’m really grateful the author did so and shared his experience. The trouble comes from the unearned air of authority.
When I worry about the broader question of subtle truths getting lost in the slop cycle, it feels reassuring when authentic expertise like yours still stands out clearly. I’ll take what optimism I can find!
0815beck 10 hours ago [-]
It is presented with a tone of "music theory, the way a musician could never understand it, because they do not know what a sin wave is" which makes it so infuriating.
HexDecOctBin 14 hours ago [-]
As a non-musician non-Western programmer, the only music book that is making sense to me (still reading) is Robert Snyder's Music and Memory[1]. It's the first book that doesn't trick me by trying to pass cultural artefacts (notes, scales, raga, etc.) as some universal truth, or douse me in medieval pseudo-science (Pythagorean small ratios, etc.)
I am not an expert, so maybe this book has its own shortcomings which I am being blind to. But this is the first book on music I have been able to read this far without having to fight the urge to fling it against a wall.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 are intervals which sound pleasant to the human ear. [1]
Once that is established, as per the linked article, 12-tone equal temperament makes a lot of sense (but isn’t universal, obviously) because it’s resulting tuning gives us a really close 3/2 and 4/3, and having a simple 12-tone scale reasonably in tune everyone can agree on makes sense.
We can then explain that 5/4 and 6/5 are a bit off in 12-tone, but are “good enough” that we tolerate them being slightly out of tune when using equal temperament. Once we accept that 12-tone has imperfect thirds, we can then look at the I IV V chord progression (I IV V comes from 3/2, 5/4, and 4/3 sounding pleasant to the human ear), and explain why that chord progression is so common in western popular music.
These aren’t universal truths—12-tone equal temperament is a compromise, but, as per the linked article, a reasonable one. Just intonation is, of course, another possible compromise.
[1] 2/1: Octave; 3/2: Perfect fifth; 4/3: Perfect fourth; 5/4: Major third; 6/5: Minor third
ludston 9 hours ago [-]
> we tolerate them being slightly out of tune
And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.
strenholme 8 hours ago [-]
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has.
The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
HexDecOctBin 7 hours ago [-]
West Asian maqam has 24 notes, Indian classical has 22 notes, Indonesian gamelan has 5 or 7 notes. What would be the ratios that sound pleasurable now?
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.
simonask 6 hours ago [-]
All of those systems you mention also include those so-called "pleasant" ratios.
strenholme 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2, and 5/3.
How would you divide 22 in small ratios, considering that 11 is a prime number?
pianopatrick 14 hours ago [-]
If you like that book, you might also enjoy David Huron's books on voice leading and anticipation. I have not read the book you referenced, but from the description it seems like a similar approach.
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
"Music of the Whole Earth" by David Reck is pretty good, too.
coldtea 8 hours ago [-]
A counter argument to the typical "piss on TFA" HN top voted comment: (musician of many decades) the post IS music theory of the kind it purports to be, it's not misleading in the least, at worst it's incomplete (but never claimed to be complete) and simplified.
It's just not conventional music theory (which is just a set of rules thrown at you). But the whole point that the parent missed, is that it is told in a way to arrive to music theory from first principles as understood by computer programmers and math nerds.
Any statement made in TFA is true (at least to a basic level, and, for some of claims, when focusing on western music).
You'll learn nothing of the sort you learn in TFA by reading "The Jazz Theory book" suggested by the parent. The opening paragraphs of TFA explicitly address why that doesn't cut it:
"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention. Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason. The major scale has the shape it has for a reason. Chords that sound good sound good for a reason, and you can compute those reasons."
The parent comment is stuck on trying to sell the conventional music theory nomenclature and its extensions, which, despite the name "theory", is a descriptive set of norms and rules based on historical practices.
The author of the above comment's "postgrad in music" and experience in conservertoires make then unable to see the worth of TFA, because they're too invested in the conventional description and "how things are done".
If you want to understand music theory as a construction, not merely as "here's a set of arbitrary rules and other rules that build on them", ignore jazz/classical musicians and people with music degrees trying to sell you on what they've been taught, as it will be near useless. This requires a different type of mindset.
There are books on musicology that address the concerns of TFA in an official and deep way, but TFA is a good programming-nerd oriented introduction to the matter.
simonask 6 hours ago [-]
I'm a programmer with a degree in musicology as well.
This ain't it.
I'm reading your comment with a certain disdain for analysis and theory, which I get - a lot of people come out scarred from music theory training, and I'm sorry someone hurt you that way.
But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music. "Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
Seriously, you're doing yourself a huge favor as a musician and broadening your conceptual thinking about music by learning this stuff.
coldtea 5 hours ago [-]
>I'm reading your comment with a certain disdain for analysis and theory, which I get - a lot of people come out scarred from music theory training, and I'm sorry someone hurt you that way.
I'm fine with contentional music theory training. Know my music theory, had official music training, been at it for some decades.
It's not the purpose of this. Traditional music theory training or a jazz theory book wont tell you about harmonics and timbre. It wont tell you how come we divided the octave like this, and things this tries to tackle.
It was written to serve a fundamentally different purpose. A purpose which apparently familiarity with regular music theory makes most blind to.
It's like someone wanting to learn about acoustics, and someone given them an earful about diatonic chords and how to read notation. It's simply not what they want to now about. Or it's like someone wants to know about the chemistry of cement or the physics behind structural engineering, and people try to tell him all about construction and construction terms. Not what he is interested in knowing, even if it's essential for building a house, just like music theory is essential (or at least useful) in playing and composing music.
>But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music.
That's neither here nor there. The purpose of TFA is not for musicians to talk about music with one another, or to help someone analyze that this piece of music is in that key or uses that mode, and modulates there, or that "this chord here is used as a chromatic mediant", or borrowed chords, or counterpoint, and all that.
>"Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
That's explicitly NOT what TFA wants to be useful for.
strenholme 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, he could have approached it differently.
It’s really good at explaining the octave, the fifth, it shows the mathematical basis for why just intonation has “wolf notes”, and why we use 12-tone equal temperament.
Once it hits the 12-tone scale, and explains why we generally avoid the tritone, it doesn’t explain very well why we generally use diatonic instead of chromatic scales (well, OK, great music can use chromatic scales, but there’s a reason “Entrance of the Gladiators” sounds like a clown show).
I would had, after explaining how 12-tone gives us an almost perfect fifth and fourth, explained that a major third is 5/4, and a minor third is 6/5, and that the thirds are noticeably but tolerably out of tune in 12-tone equal temperament.
Once we have the fifth and the major third, we then explain the major chord (Base note, 3/2, and roughly 5/4). Next, we explain the perfect fourth. From there, we can show the I IV V chord progression. And once we have I IV V we can then demonstrate the major scale. (The linked article shows us a major scale but doesn’t explain why the major scale is tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone—it’s that way because if we take all of the notes that exist in a I IV V chord progression, we get the seven notes of a major scale)
After I IV V, I would then look at a basic 4/4 rhythm, quarter notes, eight notes, the kick drum, the snare drum, and the closed hi hat.
I IV V, the major scale, and a simple 4/4 rhythm is enough music theory to write a good number of rock and pop songs.
I IV V and the major scale is roughly equivalent to understanding variables and variable assignment. Adding the structure of a 4/4 rhythm, with kick, snare, and high hat is equivalent to if-then-else and while.
From there, if I were to continue, I would next explain the minor third (6/5) and minor scale, the pentatonic scales (minor pentatonic gives us a large number of rock guitar solos), and probably show the I V vi IV chord progression.
Obviously, this is very basic, but things like ABRSM Grade 5 are the music equivalent of Forth-like and Lisp-like languages: They can be useful, but just as the majority of programs aren’t written in Forth or a Lisp dialect, the majority of music doesn’t use, say, an irregular time signature.
runarberg 8 hours ago [-]
I started learning guitar last July, and I wanted to learn music theory (and standard notation) from day 1.
I am following Absolutely Understand Guitar[1] as my music theory lessons (and Hal Leonard method for notation) along side my regular tutorials. So far I am very impressed. Quite beginner friendly, and learning music theory while starting out with the instrument has not been difficult for me at least.
> if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory
Your recommendation seems to mostly apply to western music (I assume so since you only mentioned western music), no? Will Jazz Levine's book help with ragga or gamelan?
cubefox 11 hours ago [-]
Many subject matters are initially so confusing and inaccessible that I have often wished for an audio-visual video lecture series in the following format:
Part 1: Music theory explained in just 5 minutes
Part 2: Music theory explained in just 20 minutes
Part 3: Music theory explained in 80 minutes
Etc. Starting with an extremely simplified overview and then making the overviews progressively more detailed.
Many people instead try to give simple explanations without making them short. But no confused beginner wants to be overwhelmed by a huge wall of text, let alone by a long theoretical book.
Unfortunately most people who have become knowledgeable about some subject matter then quickly and thoroughly forget how confusing, overwhelming or intimidating it was before.
andyclap2 11 hours ago [-]
Y
9 hours ago [-]
ergonaught 16 hours ago [-]
I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet.
It looks good at the begining, but at some point it starts saying "half truths", or stating facts/conclusions with confidence as if that was the main reason, but its just half of it (and maybe not the most important half)...
I wanted to read it because I like the topic, but i somehow felt it was folluting my brain. I think i will also start joining the club of AI;dr to protect myself from pollution, even though i may miss some iteresting articles.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
I mostly did not read it, but skimmed the words, and played with the code. That's much more instructive.
It's not "music theory" proper, it's rather about the underpinnings of the "music language", the basics you need to know to even be able to speak about music theory, and in this regard it's quite useful.
yiren 16 hours ago [-]
I did read it, found it mildly informative/interesting, then saw your comment, read the link, and pasted in two paragraphs into Pangram 4... ouch! I guess I'm not LLM-weary enough?
> Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.
does it make sense? Or perhaps it just seems like something easy enough to skim past without worrying about whether it makes sense?
Before LMs, I would have assumed that a person intentionally wrote that sentence, and perhaps spent some time trying to understand what could possibly "break" if there were "notes" rather than "just a number." Now there is a simpler explanation: the sentence actually doesn't mean anything.
strenholme 10 hours ago [-]
“Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.”
What the article is trying to explain here is that A=440 is just a convention. This is probably where the article should have had a discussion about perfect pitch vs. relative pitch. I would have written it like this:
“Since this note is 440 hertz, in Western music, because of convention, we call this note ‘A’. Now, let’s play a note that is 400hz. For most people, given enough time after hearing the 440hz note, this second note will sound like the first note. There is a minority of people with a talent called perfect pitch who would be able to tell that the 440hz note is in tune, while, with conventional Western music, 400hz is out of tune, because they are able to tell the absolute pitch of notes. Most people (including the famous composer Wagner) cannot do this: One pitch by itself sounds like another pitch by itself.”
bonsai_bar 6 hours ago [-]
What does "break" mean here? What does "at this level there are no notes yet, just a number" mean?
strenholme 3 hours ago [-]
Until we have an established scale, unless one has perfect pitch, one note is the same as another arbitrary note. It’s the ratios between notes that make up music.
mpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
Articles don't "try". Models don't "try". And if one prompts an LLM to write one's educational blog, one is not "trying".
You are giving an LLM entirely too much credit.
rcxdude 13 hours ago [-]
It's a very idiosyncratic (and often irritating) style, but I don't find it particularly difficult to understand. It's not meaningless, just weirdly phrased.
mpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
You might consider how much of your reading deals with topics that are already familiar to you. Or how closely you're reading things.
If you're trying to learn new information, you will trip over low-quality content like this more often.
rcxdude 7 hours ago [-]
Sure, I'll agree it's often obtuse, I'm just saying it does communicate some information, however poorly.
strenholme 10 hours ago [-]
It was a really good article up and until it explained the octave, the perfect fifth, and the equal tempered scale. It didn’t do a full explanation of equal temperament—we use it because, with it, it’s easy to change keys.
Once it jumps from the chromatic scale to the diatonic scale, it doesn’t explain the theoretical basis for the major scale. To understand the major scale, we need to first explain the major third then the major chord. From the major chord, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth, we can build up the major scale.
There’s also no discussion of time signature and rhythm.
tessierashpool 16 hours ago [-]
yeah, this is robot garbage.
the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.
but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.
handsome_jack_ 7 hours ago [-]
It’s LLM slop by a JavaScript script kiddie. What did you expect?
handsome_jack_ 7 hours ago [-]
It’s LLM slop by a JavaScript script kiddie. What did you expect?
polotics 15 hours ago [-]
Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing.
How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts and mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice.
> This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts
This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”.
> mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
For a programmer, deriving intervals and chords and then hearing the code produce them is a pretty effective bridge
polotics 14 hours ago [-]
Sure.
It is a trope amongst gigging musicians that over-intellectualizing the feels is a massive no-no.
Hence the joke about Db being the saddest chord... also Phil Collins said that, he would know :-D...
...and C# being the most evil chord. Hilarious.
I persist: "before you can be good, you first have to be bad" is more helpful music theory than that whole JavaScript visuals page.
amingilani 1 hours ago [-]
I know the trope. My first guitar teacher taught me how to play songs but didn’t know the notes on the fretboard. It’s a bit like being able to drive a car without understand what the clutch and gears actually do.
But personally, I couldn’t handle not knowing why the clutch needed to be pressed, or why a chord shapes is the why it is.
14 hours ago [-]
nprateem 11 hours ago [-]
Music theory is just that. Theory. There is no set of laws.
Creating melodies by doggedly applying any system is almost guaranteed to feel tired, predictable and boring.
amingilani 5 hours ago [-]
I like to think about it as an opinionated framework. Once you have the basics, you can take an unpredictable sounding song and deconstruct it to understand why it sounds so good.
I don’t really have a problem with systems.
SwtCyber 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think the article needs to get you all the way from A to S to be useful. A Fourier transform doesn't tell you why a song is good either, but understanding harmonics can still improve your mental model of sound. Same with temperament, intervals or why a keyboard is laid out the way it is.
xcf_seetan 8 hours ago [-]
Try Edgar Varese, Iannis Xenakis or Arnold Schoenberg and tell me how much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
chrisjj 11 hours ago [-]
> Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing.
Trying now. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
100%.
I tried three more. Same result.
How much do you see?
BigTTYGothGF 10 hours ago [-]
> Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. .... 100%
That's certainly a revealing example. TTLS is entirely melody, and the article says basically nothing about melody. At a stretch you could say "the article talks about the major scale, TTLS uses notes from a major scale" and if your conclusion is "that's why I like it", then you should feel the same way about any permutation of the notes in TTLS, or indeed anything you get from hitting the white notes on a piano one at a time.
chrisjj 8 hours ago [-]
> the article says basically nothing about melody
Its 13 mentions of melody sufficed for me.
BigTTYGothGF 6 hours ago [-]
Most of those are variable names. The rest:
> Why a melody wants to land where it lands is still mostly opaque to me
> A key, its diatonic chords, a progression, those chords broken into an arpeggio one note at a time, and a melody that sticks to the scale
> Change the melody array to anything at all and it will still fit
The first part of TTLS (in C) is: C C G G A A G F F E E D D C. Let's follow the guidance of this last part and change the "melody array"; for neatness we can alphabetize it: A A C C C D D E E F F G G G. Now that you understand melody, please tell me why even though it "still fit"s it doesn't sound as nice.
polotics 9 hours ago [-]
Haha well it's easy then please send us the MIDI, Openscore, Lylipond, MP3... anything really, of a composition of yours that will be as appealing as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
What else do I see: congruence between melody and lyrics, harmonic depth, dominant half-cadence in the tonic arrival. Also the versions by Mozart add a lot and explain a lot of the endurance of the tune I guess. That has chromatic passing, secondary dominants, even a parallel minor (in the 8th variation)
If I may plug here the Berklee College online courses as a satisfied customer I can say if you are ready to put in the effort they are great.
huflungdung 15 hours ago [-]
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rynn 4 hours ago [-]
The most amazing thing about HN comments is watching engineers demand that their expertise be taken seriously completely disregard the expertise of people in other domains because <make up a reason>.
JKCalhoun 25 minutes ago [-]
I've never wanted to learn music theory. I just want to play.
I would write songs on my guitar when I was in college. A friend who was a guitar theoretician stopped by and listened. He said something like, "Odd, you went with a G7 instead of an Am. In that triad you should have played the Am." (Or, you know, some kind of foreign language like that.)
I mean, it sounded fine my way. Although for a moment I questioned why thew G7 and tried an Am… briefly. I was afraid suddenly though that if I learned music theory I would have to start writing songs the right way.
Recently, I wrote https://www.jampea.com/learn , which is the music theory for "technical people". I believe it is the fastest way to get to understand the theory behind music (will take you 2 to 5 hours in total, 10% will be reading and 90% will be thinking about what you just read).
Crabber 8 hours ago [-]
I think music is a good "test" for logically thinking people because it requires you to put away your logical brain and just accept that music sounds good because "it just does" and music theory is the way it is because "it just is".
I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time. The fact that the author admits straight off the bat that he's never managed to learn an instrument kind of attests to this in my opinion.
odyssey7 8 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. Models tend to be imperfect, and music theory is definitely no exception to that rule, and we attempt to model music because we care about the underlying phenomenon (music).
As someone who enjoys listening to music, creating music, and music theory, I'd characterize the latter as providing a specialized vocabulary; an approach to listening, since words in the vocabulary represent concepts that you can hear; and a toolbox of concepts you can draw from.
It's a model, you can use it as much or as little as you like. And there's more than one model, and sometimes the different models overlap more or less, and you can choose any of them or none of them and still make and enjoy music.
The other thing it provides is a wildly complex logical system with fascinating philosophical connections. Some people enjoy exploring that more than making music with it, and that's also okay. I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that. It's made me a better thinker. In math, formulas can be elegant. In music theory, different constructions induce different experiences.
Crabber 8 hours ago [-]
Fair points, I should probably disclose that my comment is perhaps one of those "looking like I'm giving advice to other people but really just giving advice to myself" kind of comments :)
I have began learning instruments before and fell into the trap of asking too many "why" questions and then just got lost in music theory that a) didn't make too much logical sense and b) didn't help me actually get better at an instrument in any way.
I think it's very unlike programming where you could start with a hello world program and keep asking "why does it work like that" questions and keep getting deeper and deeper and actually end up with a very good understanding of computers by the end of it that actually would make you a better programmer.
But when you're learning an instrument I think perhaps at the start it's better to just accept that "chords sound good because they just do" rather than going off down a complete rabbit hole.
odyssey7 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, I agree, the rabbit hole is real. It has taken many people away from their initial intention of making music. If you're a musician first and foremost, music theory can be a trap. Although, Alice in Wonderland also shows us the intrinsic value of a good rabbit hole.
Edit: Also, what you mention about "why" is true. The models attempt to organize observations of conscious experiences into mathematical and logical frameworks, though they cannot ultimately explain the causes for those connections. The causes of the qualia remain mysterious. Musicians tend to be particularly in tune with how their own experiences connect to music, so some are enthralled to explore that connection itself.
Crabber 8 hours ago [-]
I think the internet makes this worse because I've noticed a lot of music content on youtube is theory related. But I think that's probably because of this bias the internet in general has of "you only see videos about things it's possible to make content about". What I mean by that is it's not possible to make a 10 minute video on "just sit down and play your instrument". But you can make 50 videos on theory.
Don't know if this phenomenon has a name, but I've thought about it before. Social media is filled with posts of people buying things. Because it's not really possible to make a video showing off something you decided not to buy. Same thing with music and people constantly buying gear. "I'm using the same guitar I've had for 10 years and decided to just sit down and practice for 2 hours this evening like the 2000 other evenings before" doesn't make good content.
odyssey7 7 hours ago [-]
All too true.
Something along these lines, people who would like to improve their musical abilities sometimes procrastinate by doing music theory instead. It's safe and it's introspective. And it's authoritative---a legitimate and difficult subject---so there's the potential to feel falsely reassured that you're not wasting time. In a sense, it avoids the more difficult act of creation. This seems to be especially more likely for those who would have wanted to write music.
I.e., "drink responsibly." Perhaps music theory classes should come with a warning label, like the Mirror of Erised. You can stare into it endlessly and produce nothing.
Pannoniae 6 hours ago [-]
Being decent at music has definitely made me a worse programmer because I just do many things - software design, structure, names, you name it - on the vibes instead of sticking to the rules to the chagrin of others :D
ur-whale 7 hours ago [-]
> I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
But then, please, don't call it "theory".
There is strictly nothing theoretical or indeed, logical, about it.
luqtas 6 hours ago [-]
with good strumming and fretting technique, you can play any of the 10 most used chord progressions in a nylon guitar and impress A LOT of people
most popular songs on charts today aren't on the edge of what's new... music theory is a rule set and to break the rules you need to know them. there's a big difference in an illiterate and a jazz musician improvising something for 10 min., as well a music from the scratch by someone who understand orchestration and your unknown local rock artist
Kuyawa 9 hours ago [-]
Musicians will cringe, programmers will rejoice, let them
'Intro to audio for programmers' would keep them away and let us have a party in the comments telling the author how interesting the tutorial was. Never use the word 'Music' again and you'll be safe
Kudos, every work of creation is a joy on its own, I was fascinated clicking every button
maybewhenthesun 15 hours ago [-]
> Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason.
There is of course a lot of physics involved. But there is at least as much convention at play. So imho this is a very one sided way of looking at it.
There is a physical reason the 12 notes are those 12 notes (though the exact frequencies assigned are influenced by culture as well), but lots of different cultures use less notes, or more, or extra notes inbetween.
So 'Because that is the convention.' is imho at least a good an explanation as the physics one.
seanhunter 14 hours ago [-]
Also his physics explanation is not the best, and you can see if you just ask the next “why” question.
He talks about the harmonic series giving the basic ratios of the Pythagorean scale but why is that the case? When you solve the equations of motion of any sort of harmonic oscillator (including crucially, strings, vibrating columns of air from a wind instrument etc) you see that you can solve them using a Fourier series, so if you solve this in trigonometric form you get
a_1 * cos blah_1 + 1/2 * (a_2) * cos blah_2 + 1/3 * (a_3) * cos blah_3 + … + 1/n * (a_n) * cos blah_n [1]
…so those fractions end up being the partials of the harmonic series (a_n/n) where a_n is the n_th coefficient, which you find using an integral. Now if you have a normal western musical instrument, the higher overtones (later terms of the Fourier series) are not prominent so those coefficients are small. So the terms that matter have ratios a_1, a_2/2, a_3/3, a_4/4, a_5/5 corresponding to the primary intervals that he’s talking about.
In cultures (eg Balinese and Javanese music from Indonesia) where they use a different number of tones and different scale, it’s no coincidence that they play a lot of gongs and bells, which have much more prominent higher overtones, so a different set of Fourier coefficients so different ratios are going to be “congruent”/melodious-sounding.
[1] the “blah” terms are a function of pi and the length and stiffness of the string etc. Not really relevant here.
pierrec 7 hours ago [-]
For metallophones used in Gamelan music, I don't think the key difference is emphasis on higher vs. lower overtones. Rather, their overtones don't follow the harmonic series but are still well-defined. Their tuning goes along with that, and it works given that particular non-harmonic timbre, but wouldn't work with western classical instruments, which tend to approximate the harmonic series in their overtones. In all cases the lower overtones remain the most audible and the most important ones for tuning and finding consonance.
seba_dos1 12 hours ago [-]
It took me a while to realize that "because that is the convention" was the answer to a big chunk of my confusion about music notation. A weirdly helpful answer, but so often nobody bothers to even tell you that, so you just assume you must be missing something when you can't see where these things are coming from!
ludston 9 hours ago [-]
It's a bit more circular than that. The music you were raised with sounds good to you, which means you want to understand how to make music like that hence the dominance of 12 tones and major and minor scales in Western music.
But also, nobody bothers to talk about this because for beginners without sufficient focus on mastery by copying other people, they're generally not going to be able to do anything notable with music anyway, so this kind of meta-theory is an unnecessary distraction. (And by the time you are actually decent with music literally years have passed and you've probably stumbled upon this idea by then)
dyzone 8 hours ago [-]
> The music you were raised with sounds good to you
Speaking for myself, the music I was raised with doesn't sound that good to me.
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
What is meant here is that there are different musical cultures around the world, and if you grew up in one that, for example, prominently uses quarter-tones/microtones (e.g. a lot of music from Arabic and Indian cultures) then we know that you will have a different reaction to, say, Bach, than someone who grew up in a culture that uses strict equal temperament.
It does not mean "my parents played a lot of <X> and that doesn't sound good to me".
hn993302 6 hours ago [-]
I grew up with Western music, and now Arabic music is one of my favorites. I really don't think Westerners hear semitones differently. Also, a lot of Arabic music is 12-tone, and even if it weren't, they probably appreciate Bach the same way.
PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago [-]
No, people don't "hear semitones differently" but ... practicing musicians from one culture will choose to use semitones, quartertones and microtones differently, and a listener with a lot of musical exposure will notice this when listening to music that does and does not involve such practices.
hn993302 3 hours ago [-]
Also just realized, I don't think much Arabic music has used semitones in like 100 years. The classical ones do.
hn993302 6 hours ago [-]
I tried making things like a 7-TET keyboard in JS at some point and concluded that they probably picked 12 because there are a lot of factors and it's a manageable number. Almost no two notes sounded harmonious on my 7-TET. I know plenty of cultures use other scales too.
nprateem 11 hours ago [-]
And even saying the 12 notes must have specific frequencies is wrong. It's very common when creating synths for example to detune them to create richer sounds, or play on dissonance to some extent.
iainctduncan 9 hours ago [-]
This is not an article about music theory, it's an introduction to what is called "acoustics" in educated music circles, along with examples from digital synthesis.
It's a decent enough intro to acoustics and digital synthesis, but saying it's music theory is just redefining terms with accepted meanings in their fields.
When I tried to post a duplicated link HN will just redirect me to the existing one, but somehow everyone else seems to be able to post the same link multiple times.
theanonymousone 15 hours ago [-]
Same. (but of course, you don't see the duplicates when they do accept your post)
> I V vi IV is the four chords that an alarming share of pop music is built from.
This is in line with hundreds of years of authors "explaining" music by starting with Pythagoras for their bona fides, then using that credibility to rationalize whatever opinions they hold about musical aesthetics.
To counter: these guys[1] play I-IV-V-I for nearly the whole song. They don't even change it between the verse and chorus. Someone here tell me the one important exception and the term from music theory that describes that exception.
Primers should start with the music excerpt that the author loves, and work backwards to the theory that helps explain what's going on. Otherwise it gets pretentious fast.
This is clearly interesting and contributing value, but it's also painfully AI prose to the point where it is hard to not dismiss it as likely false information.
Fun interactive examples though.
With another human pass, this could be great.
vishalmullur 15 hours ago [-]
The first couple of sentences got me hooked because I have had the same difficulty trying to learn music where I dont understand if I am producing the right sound or not. I thought it was fun so tried to push myself to read through but overcoming the dislike of the way AI structures the statements became impossible after a short while.
hypfer 14 hours ago [-]
I eventually just started clicking on the examples and thinking "hey that sounds nice".
And now I've realized that the page hosting that is for a JS snippet editor embedding thingy. Commercial stuff.
So this is just a tech demo created with AI to showcase what can be done with their library, and not someone actually caring about the topic :<
bob1029 8 hours ago [-]
> The problem was never the practice.
Extreme doubt.
The theory of music is about as useless as it gets if you aren't in some kind of academic program or collaborating with other musicians on a shared composition. It helps with dead reckoning over things you cannot audition, but that's pretty damn rare.
You'll get better a lot faster if you just try to follow along with a YouTube video in the style of Guitar Hero scrolling down your screen.
ta2112 8 hours ago [-]
Tuning pitches to one another is wildly complicated. The rabbit hole goes unfathomably deeper than this introductory stuff on ratios and equal temperament. High schools physics introduces basic concepts in a way that works in certain situations and can be confirmed somewhat through experimentation. However, when you go deeper into any subject, fluid mechanics and material tolerances come to mind, those simple introductions cease to resemble the complexity of the systems. Music is no exception. I remember being surprised by the many ways this platonic explanation of pitches breaks down when confronted by real instruments in real air heard by real ears. Welcome to beautiful complexity of music!
Example 1: Pianos are tuned with stretch tuning, where the high notes are tuned higher than their theoretical pitches, and vice versa for low notes. That's because of a thing called inharmonicity, where the overtones of short piano strings don't form perfect ratios with the fundamental. Maybe that has something to do with short strings vibrating more like metal cylinders than rods?
Example 2: French horns have a lot of tubing! The valves let you include different lengths of tube into the air column. With a single valve combination, the player can hit the fundamental and all the partials up until their lips can no longer take it. To play a scale or melody, they switch between different horn lengths, choosing the partial that will sound closest to the pitch they're going for. Really, all brass instruments function this way, I just mention French horns because I like them.
Example 3: String quartets tune their chords with each other on the fly. If you listen to a string quartet practice, they'll spend a good amount of time holding and adjusting intonation to each other. So unlike in the equal tempered world of keyboard tuning, strings and most instrumental ensembles are constantly adjusting to make their harmonies sound sweeter. Equal temperament doesn't come into play, unless you add a piano, which sort of forces everybody to uncomfortably conform to the limitations of set it and live with it keyboard tuning.
_kb 15 hours ago [-]
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, I highly recommend setting aside 90 minutes and strapping yourself in for a listen to https://malwebb.com/notnoi.html.
dyzone 13 hours ago [-]
The gigs page points to "file:///Users/malwebb/Documents/Mal%20Webb%20Site/gigs.html" haha.
jkahrs595 10 hours ago [-]
This is more “synthesizers for programmers” than “music theory for programmers”.
nialv7 14 hours ago [-]
For programmers and written by AI and mostly wrong... What a combo
lefra 16 hours ago [-]
I should not have to install a browser plug-in to opt out of Google analytics (that's what's proposed as an opt-out option in the privacy policy).
Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?
WindyTree 15 hours ago [-]
Pretty good, could use more on the tonic, how it’s defined for a diatonic set of 7 notes. The chosen I IV V primary chords are key for that, but a precious tidbit I learned is any of the notes can be set as tonic, but the I IV V chords are only for major and minor. Like for the notes in C major, it becomes A minor with I IV V chords starting off A, but to set the tonic to F, it becomes F Lydian mode with primary chords I, II, and VII. (Fmag, Gmaj, Emin) The rule for the primary chords of the modes is you find the note that differentiates it from the major or minor scale, and pick the chords that have it avoiding the diminished. Playing the notes of c major starting at f, it’s the sharp fourth b that is different, so the primary triads are f-a-c e-g-b and g-b-d.
Oh, and rhythm is just the same as consonance. Most are octave based, beats on wave peaks of overlaid octaves getting quieter. The 3 based on times like 6/8 are the same but for 5ths and 17ths. (The bottom number 8 is just a BPM hint from old days.) beyond those the intervals get unstable feeling, like 7/4 in Money by Pink Floyd has that cut off feeling, someone took a few from each measure, but maps to a minor 7th interval.
pianopatrick 14 hours ago [-]
For all the programmers reading this who think music theory is complex, just realize that is how programming seems to most people.
teiferer 9 hours ago [-]
>Sound is just air pressure wobbling.
Sorry man, if you approach things from that angle then no wonder music is a mystery to you.
The issue with "deriving from first principles" is that it very much depends on what you consider "principles" and which you pick. Take two people who want to derive sth "from first principles" and they will arrive at wildly different things. Because they start very differently. That's why this "ignore everything that came before" approach (different name for "from first principles) is so flawed and limited. There is so much insight to gain from the wisdom that came before you that ignoring it isn't going to help.
> the simpler the fraction, the better it sounds
That's comically wrong. If everything was just an octave, you wouldn't even have music.
Sorry, I stopped reading there. It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix.
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
> It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix
It might not help develop a cure for your appendix, but it does or can help understanding why certain cures work, or why some are preferred over others.
ps. background in biochemistry and biophysics
ur-whale 7 hours ago [-]
> It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix.
An entire civilization (China) completely missed having a proper scientific awakening and the following industrial revolution about a 1000 year ago exactly because of that kind of dumb thinking.
Great idea!
12 hours ago [-]
SwtCyber 5 hours ago [-]
I like this less as "music theory from first principles" and more as "why some of the machinery of Western music looks the way it does"
kmoser 16 hours ago [-]
This article is quite well done, especially from a programmer's perspective, but falls flat (no pun intended) for me because of my terrible ear for pitch.
> Here are five notes. Every one is double the frequency of the one before it. [...] They are different pitches, and yet they sound like the same note.
Nothing about these notes seem similar to me. You could play pretty much any sequence of rising notes and (falsely) claim they're the "same note" and I'd believe it. This is one reason I've always had trouble learning music.
> √2 the awkward one -> 311.13Hz
That one doesn't sound particularly awkward to me. Again, I blame my inability to distinguish pitch.
The only instrument I was able to pick up pretty easily was drums.
Vespasian 15 hours ago [-]
I thought the same for a long long time.
At least for me the solution was to grind ear training for a few weeks/ months 10 minutes a day.
I'll certainly never reach the heights of this skill but a bit of persistence to overcome lack of natural talent did propell me forward.
tambre 11 hours ago [-]
What method/software did you use for the ear training?
If tasked with this, I would start with an image of a piano keyboard and ask: Why the hell does it look so weird ? Black and white keys in some infernally strange layout ? WHY ?
Which takes you very quickly to equal temperament and perfect fourths and perfect fifths. This tells us where the notes C and F and G are located on the chromatic scale, but then the rest are pretty arbitrary eh. Semitones from C to C go 2-2-1-2-2-2-1, but there is nothing heavenly ordained by this particular arrangement. E-to-F and B-to-C are a collective choice.
If I had been presented with this kind of explanation fifty years ago, I might have been less skeptical of the entire enterprise.
hn993302 6 hours ago [-]
The tension and resolution thing always surprised me. Every major scale has a minor scale with the same exact notes but played in a different order, and other ones like Dorian. It's like oh, you started with this note 8 bars ago, so now it sounds melancholy. Everyone (including this site) just says it feels that way but doesn't explain why.
and there's one more 15 days ago, but really - it seems a link needs to be posted several times to take off.
@dang
pythonRon 12 hours ago [-]
I was interested in reading the article but, like so many I find online these days, the white text on black makes my eyes throb to the point of giving me a headache if I don't stop after a few seconds. so I have to give it a miss. I've read that white text on a black background is easier on the eyes, but it's obviously not universal.
yladiz 12 hours ago [-]
It’s not perfect but I’ve just tested and reader mode does work for this website.
altmanaltman 17 hours ago [-]
I learned to play guitar by my own when I was around 12. You don't really even need to know music theory to play guitar, as long as you understand the shapes etc.
Over time, I developed shorthands for understanding theory like i can easily look at a fretboard and know which note it is.
But what bugged me is that you seem to imply the reason why you couldn't learn a instrument was because you did not understand the why. That makes very little sense to me. I know several professional musicians who don't even know what a mode is or what formal notation is. One of them has pitch perfect ear, he can literally hear anything and tranpose that on his guitar. He has no idea how notes work and just writes tabs.
So while this is very nicely from a programmer point of view and an objective explanation of things but learning all this will not make you a better musician is the point.
Practice above all. Dont try to fit all theory into the pratice but understand what you are practicing particulalry using the theory. Otherwise you end up with all theory and no practice experience of using that theory and creativity.
As a perosn who likes code, this is interesting. As a musician who also understands music theory, this is kind of alienating in terms of how it presented. Like if someone just read this article and thought they understood music theory now, they would be pretty unsufferable to actual musicians.
jemmyw 16 hours ago [-]
It's funny though how different people respond to learning music theory differently. I started on guitar when I was 19. I played for a long time at campfire level. When my kids started learning music I also learnt a lot, and now I know scale shapes and modes on guitar, so I can reasonably play to a song I'm hearing for the first time, then figure it out by ear. But I just cannot make the leap to knowing the notes at each position. I can read music, very slowly, to play on piano, but fluency has never clicked for me even though I've put the time in.
My 8 year old hardly ever practices but just looks at the music and knows the notes on piano and violin.
In any case, I agree that this isn't that helpful to being able to play, it's just an interesting way to understand why things are as they are.
dyzone 16 hours ago [-]
Your kid might have absolute pitch. Only a few percent of people have it.
Perfect pitch is not correlated with the ability to see written notes and immediately know how to play them on any instrument. It is only barely correlated with the same but for singing the note.
I do not have perfect pitch, but I could always do what GP's kid does. I am now a pretty good amateur singer.
What matters for this is learning to read the music notation and developing a sense (mostly subconscious) of scales and harmony. Perfect pitch does not help either of those things.
dyzone 14 hours ago [-]
Oh right, I misread. GP is talking about reading, not listening.
altmanaltman 15 hours ago [-]
I think it gets significantly harder to learn new things as you age. It could make sense though like its significantly easier to learn a new language as a child than an adult, something simillar could apply to sheet music also i guess where they are naturally more intuined with its language vrs you who has to kinda use a dictionary for time to time because the "normal" way for you to speak has been so different for so long. But for your child, its another form of expression almost. Its really good to get kids into music while they are young imo
rTX5CMRXIfFG 15 hours ago [-]
Re: not knowing how to play because author doesn’t get the why
Quite a lot of people learn by imitation without knowing the underlying theory. Some people need a theoretical framework so that they have a mental model with which to understand everything else.
Fundamentally, you’re arguing against learning theory. Not everyone learns the same way. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with a basic fact of life.
altmanaltman 15 hours ago [-]
No I don't have a "problem with that". And yes, people learn by imitation, which is what I meant by practice. Playing the guitar is a fundamentally different activity than knowing music theory. Becoming good at one doesn't make you good at the other naturally (since you are practicing two different things) and I am worried some people think its the same thing.
Furthermore, in real life, I have seen the same approach actually be detremental to learning guitar. Its a bit like football - there is a physical skill level to the sport which you can practice and then there is a theoritical part (tactics and formation) that help you understand the game and play better.
But if you just want to start by kicking a ball and you know everything about Pep Guardiola's new counterattacking system. Yet when you are kicking the ball and practicing the basic skills, you are not thinking woah am i a midfield playing the right side and looking for a pass? That type of thinking is not useful when you are learning how to kick a ball.
Ideally you should do the two together and work really hard on practice first if you actually want to be a footballer is my point. If you say oh no everyone is different, some people just like tactics, I don't think I say anything against it.
Theory first is not a good way to learn an instrument is my qualified statement. Not that theory is not important or doesnt matter or everyone should follow the same way of learning.
yvdriess 13 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed the programmer's approach to build it up from first principles. I chuckled at rythm being the binary encoding of the duration's mantissa.
Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a scientific backing to music, there are also cultural conventions on top that you just have to accept. And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music.
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
> And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music.
TFA does acknowledge that it only really covers western music.
But on top of that, the other musical cultures you mention are in fact remarkably similar to western musical culture at the level TFA is describing.
They differ significantly in terms of what they do with e.g. dividing the octave into 12, but they all make heavy use of the 3/2 ratio and other similar concepts.
If you want to get really different, check out Byzantine musical culture. They have no octave equivalence (!) and their notation is 100% relative (i.e. they write melodies down as sequences of intervals, not sequences of absolute notes). Even so, they still use 12 tones per octave ...
raulparada 15 hours ago [-]
If you’re a programmer interested in music, do check out Strudel, at least the examples at https://strudel.cc/examples. If you like those (I love them, so much art in a few lines of code), the docs _will_ get you started. Enjoy!
rcgy 13 hours ago [-]
This is... Not a good article.
ur-whale 7 hours ago [-]
> This is... Not a good article.
This is... Not a good comment.
And unlike you, I don't believe I need to explain why I'm writing this.
anshc0 4 hours ago [-]
This is kind of random, but really interesting how it took 7 exactly same posts for it to go viral on Hacker News.
16 hours ago [-]
low_tech_punk 9 hours ago [-]
I still enjoyed going through it, for what it is.
1. runjs promoting itself using music REPL as an example
2. author used LLM to fit a few music related ideas into the web audio API
4. "The naming is not arbitrary, and the harmonic series explains why.", stop wasting tokens. Just say what it is please.
handsome_jack_ 7 hours ago [-]
As other commenters have said, this is not music theory. This is just a very basic attempt at finding the frequency relationship between notes from a JavaScript script kiddie.
vaastav 11 hours ago [-]
"You may have heard a little click at the end of that. That is not a bug in the browser, it is physics being unforgiving."
lolwut
chrisjj 11 hours ago [-]
It is true.
goekjclo 4 hours ago [-]
AI slop, "297 points", this fucking site is a joke.
Kye 2 hours ago [-]
Music theory is a tool for analyzing music and, optionally, helping make it. Treating analysis and composition as inverse operations is going to mislead you. There are useful analyses in music theory that would be completely alien to the person whose work it's based on.
bossyTeacher 11 hours ago [-]
"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention." This has the signature LLM writing style.
0815beck 10 hours ago [-]
that, and also it is very arrogant. typical superior complex of stem people, one of the worst examples, insufferable
yuumei 15 hours ago [-]
> Two things fall straight out of that.
Hi Claude
bvan 9 hours ago [-]
Perfect for me. When you’re raised in a world of science your brain does not rest until you understand some level of ‘why’. Beginner music instruction and theory usually assumes you’re brain-dead and just take in, no questions asked.
ahmedhossamdev 14 hours ago [-]
Website is down I think..
JonathanRaines 4 days ago [-]
Fantastic post. You took a subject that never made sense to me and made it seem simple.
BigTTYGothGF 10 hours ago [-]
"Seem" is doing a lot of work there.
cindyllm 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
IAmGraydon 9 hours ago [-]
>I can't play an instrument. I have tried more than once, and each time I got as far as being able to make roughly the right noises without ever understanding why they were the right noises. The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are.
You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.
That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.
Note != pitch. A note is a sound having properties of which one is pitch.
PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago [-]
Tell me more about the other properties.
chrisjj 3 hours ago [-]
You really don't know?
PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago [-]
I really don't know what you're referring to, no.
ur-whale 7 hours ago [-]
> Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic
Oh boy, couldn't agree more, this has been a lifelong frustration for me as well:
I've always been completely stumped by the utter lack of curiosity most musicians seem to have about that.
There's a convention, just learn it, why IHN would you want to ask questions about this?
Who cares about things like first principles anyways.
Fannon 17 hours ago [-]
Very nice, thanks for creating this!
> The system we want, where the octave is pure and the fifths are pure and everything closes into a neat loop, does not exist and never has. Every tuning system in history is a different choice about where to dump the error.
If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.
If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.
If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.
[1] https://www.shermusic.com/products/the-jazz-theory-book
However I've realised that "Music Theory" is a strictly defined term. If someone made an article called "Intro to Algebraic Geometry", and it was actually about geometric algebra, it'd be really annoying, even if to a uninformed person the meaning behind those terms would seem interchangeable.
The only thing I'd add to your recommendations is: Listen! When you hear a song, some melody, a rhythm, listen carefully, try to deconstruct the components, how they interplay, and try to figure out what is it that you like. Was it a feature of the harmony? The melody? Pacing? Whatever it is, keep listening. Theory is just a way to try to explain what we hear and why we might like it. The more you listen, the more you have that you can base the theory on.
Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.
To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.
And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.
[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac
[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...
The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels much more intuitive to some (like the author, and myself), compared to traditional music education.
Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"
There is "western music theory" ala Schenker, voice leading, serialism etc (to mention a couple of names that some people might have heard of) but that describes things to do once you've got a scale and chord system.
This is "12T music theory", describing how you might get to a scale and chord system.
I don't see how it is confusing. You can spend a lot of time doing "western music theory" without ever understanding most of what is in this article, that is certainly true. But the fact this this outlines a bunch of stuff that undergirds what a composing (or improvising) musician might consider "music theory" doesn't invalidate it, or make it confusing, IMO.
Look, it's like me writing an introduction to "colour theory" and then writing about something else that eventually leads to how we see colour.
I'm not debating that the article has useful content – it does – but it's title and framing is misleading, which is a disservice to the new student. I happen to personally believe everyone getting into music theory would be well served by knowing more acoustics and that this is useful material. But muddying the waters by using terms in weird ways is off.
And when you write about a field and use the wrong terms, you lose credibility. Sorry, I don't trust authors who can't be arsed to use the standard nomenclature for a topic, it really doesn't make them sound trustworthy.
Scales and chords build the fundamental basic blocks for Western music (I would introduce equal temperament third but that's only a matter of ordering). They are taken for granted in musical practice, I agree, but only because musical practice concerns itself about how/what to play and why. If somebody comes from the point of view that clefs and stems (which are undoubtedly musical tools) are gatekeeping and all you need is a piano roll, this article explains from first principles enough musical building blocks to tell them why they're wrong.
On the other hand, if the author had said something like "Intro to the acoustics behind musical scales", then they might go on to order great books like Kyle Gann's or Gareth Loy's and be off to the races.
Redefining normal terms just makes people sound like they have no clue, and that is, 100%, a serious disservice to the reader/student.
Harmonics and temperament aren't really relevant to all this, though at some point you have to explain why certain intervals are naturally consonant but "boring", and others can be made to make sense but mostly within a more complex voicing (which reconnects to topics like inversions and voice leading).
(For disclosure I studied piano until ~20, both classical and jazz, and I would call my knowledge of jazz theory "decent" for someone with zero professional or academic experience. Obviously not comparable to yours and not even in English, so perhaps what I wrote above will sound really stupid).
And this is correct because ... ?
There are whole subsectors of "music theory" that cover precisely this sort of thing, even though they are fairly arcane. I'm thinking of things like pitch set theory.
My own take is that western musical pedagogy, at least historically, is one of the worst examples of pedagogy that exists, precisely because of what is taught, in what order, and why. It pretends (or used to) to have some sort of universality or inevitability, when even a scant familiarity with other musical cultures would make it clear that this is false. It is emphasizes a note-centric rather than interval-centric approach to melody (and chords) that ignores centuries of (folk) musical practice (most simply known as transposition, but the implications of it are staggering, and largely elided).
So, defending what that pedagogy calls "music theory" seems like weak sauce to me. Especially given, as many others have pointed out, western/european "music theory" is a codification of existing practice for the most, not a generative theory.
Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to the new learner, that's where it is! I actually think a crash course in acoustics would be a good addition to a comprehensive theory book, but it doesn't change the fact that no theory course or book has this stuff (not even my pitch set texts!)
I teach music students regularly. I spend a lot of time explaining what something is called in various contexts. They need to know this to learn in a productive and not frustrating manner. They can then learn later why the terms are imperfect and used differently in different subcultures.
But no argument on that is going to convince me that it's good pedagogy to tell new readers that a post on acoustics and synthesis is on music theory. That's just counterproductive at best, or ignorant at worst.
Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.
My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.
The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.
To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.
Is it? Why?
If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.
Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.
The example I'm most familiar with is Carnatic and Hindustani music, where there are theoretically 22 tones per octave, and in fact the tones in most cases actually cover a range of frequencies rather than a single one. Nevertheless, the most common and most popular music from those traditions tends to only use about 7 tones per octave (equivalent to a western "scale"), and they still have a very central for tone ratios like 3/2.
I've always thought that's mistitled. Better would be Traditional Western Music Notation Theory.
Notice what's absent, e.g. frequency and timbre which are nicely introduced by the current article.
Music theory is a lot wider than the ABSRM syllabus. And the current article is a great starting point.
Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
Entry-level trad Western Theory gives you the concept of a basic grammar as a first introduction, but once you have that you can extend it fairly painlessly to jazz/funk/metal/pop/whatever.
Advanced classical grammar - baroque and modal counterpoint, extended harmony, and such - has some useful pointers for modern song-writing, but it's a specialised skill for experts. Movie and game score composers likely know it, but it's a degree-level skill.
Sound design theory is a subset of orchestration. The proof is that you can take most music and play it with simple sine wave bloops - no orchestration at all - and it remains completely recognisable.
Explaining equal temperament etc sounds clever and it's interesting if you like that kind of thing, but it's a distracting level of nerdery that doesn't help at all with basic song writing.
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.
Deriving Western music traditions from first principles does not help you to understand why, what, and how any of it actually works.
However, first principles explain “why” a major chord sounds the way it does, and “why” a minor chord has more tension.
Let’s look at the five-limit just intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5. 2/1 is a perfect interval; two notes an octave apart sound nearly the same. 3/2 and 4/3 are also perfect intervals, but there’s a little more tension and beating than with 2/1. 5/4 has a little more tension than 4/3, and 6/5 has even more tension. I just explained, using first principles, the octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, major third, and minor third. That’s most of the scale right there.
Now, let’s make a chord. Experience has shown that three notes is more interesting to the human ear than just two notes. That in mind, we want three distinct notes where the intervals between notes have a minimum of tension. Take the root, take 5/4 of that, then take 3/2 of the root. That’s a major chord. The reason we use 5/4 instead of 4/3 is because the interval between 5/4 and 3/2 is 6/5; the interval between 4/3 and 3/2 is 9/8. Since 9/8 has more tension than 6/5, that gives us a suspended chord, and it’s better to use a major chord with less tension to make a simple chord progression.
Now that we have our first chord, we can hear that having a 1-chord song becomes repetitive very quickly to the human ear. We can make the song more dynamic and interesting by giving it three chords: I, IV, and V. Take that chord: 1, 5/4, and 3/2 (a major chord). Move all three notes up 4/3, because 4/3 is a perfect interval with a minimum of tension. That’s our IV chord (F chord in the key of C major) Next, from the root position, instead of moving up the chord 4/3, we instead move it up 3/2. That’s a V (or dominant) chord—a G chord when played in the key of C major.
Now, from first principles, namely that the intervals 3/2, 4/3, and 5/4 sound pleasant to the human ear, that 6/5 has more tension, and 9/8 has even more tension (so we avoid suspended chords for now), we have a I IV V chord progression, which is the basis for countless rock and popular songs.
If we take all of the individual notes from the I IV V chord progression, that gives us the seven notes of the major scale, after explaining that, once we cross the octave threshold, we can transpose an octave down without affecting the musicality of the notes. We might even explain chord inversions here.
So instead of just parroting “I IV V makes a nice simple chord progression”, we now know the underlying physics which make I IV V sound so nice to the human ear, and how to get the major scale from those chords. I prefer understanding both the why and the how.
(I would have used two slightly detuned sawtooth waves instead of a sine wave for most of the examples if I were to write an article like the one this discussion links to, explaining this has a more pleasant, piano or violin like sound to it. Maybe even a low pass filter to tame the harmonics. Another option is to run a single sawtooth wave through a Solina style chorus, but explaining two detuned sawtooth waves is easier than trying to explain the Solina chorus effect)
At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.
https://ece.illinois.edu/academics/courses/ece402
And what is "distracting level of nerdery" to someone can be the key that helps unlock a deeper level of understanding to someone else. I thought we understood neurodivergence a little better these days.
The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures. The contents of TFA, while not strictly comprehensive when considering other musical cultures, is still pretty on point. Even though Carnatic and Hindustani music theoretically uses 22 tones per octave, the most common ones are still drawn from the same set of 12 used in western music, and the most common scales are remarkably similar.
Say it louder for those at the back. People keep forgetting that western theory was unable to explain why the blues (the American music form by excellence) worked at all. And arguably, a lot of the western music theory is more akin to a codification of existing musical practices in the western world rather than some scientific model. But a lot of music theory fans seem to dogmatically treat it as THE science of ALL music.
That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it.
Me, I agree with WP:
"Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory
Does anybody, though? Would anybody listen to it? Every culture on Earth has music. All of them use chords, scales, and rhythm, in various ways. Definitely not all of them use the Western diatonic system, but that's beside the point.
The AI style gets boring very quickly, but I liked the explanation of what Western music notation is optimized for. For more information on this, there's a great and long video at https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4.
(Edit: I wrote this around the same time as the reply, which more or less confirmed my hunch)
Music theory was originally a tool for music critics in the 19th century to talk about conservatory music of the time.
There's nothing rigorous, systematic or scientific in it; it's mostly a historical cultural artifact more than anything else.
For example, music "theory" is completely helpless when describing an EDM track or how to compose one. EDM is one of the most primitive music styles ever (barely even qualifies as music in my opinion) and yet music "theory" is worthless in this case.
His response sounded kind of gatekeep-y to me. Kind of like an academic with theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience.
Many great musicians never learned proper music theory. Innovation comes from outside, not from inside the establishment.
More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. They may occasionally have something finished, but 'it doesn't sound right'. Then go back to music theory and say, oh, this chord is wrong. I can fix that chord because I know music theory and come up with something that works. But they're not doing that at first. They're composing from their unconscious mind.
Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.
Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.
No composer I know thinks in the terms of music theory. They often use a chord progression that music theory describes why it works, but they're not thinking of it in terms of music theory. They're thinking in terms of chord progression, just like the composers of thousands years ago were thinking of their chord progressions the exact style changes and so a thousand years ago they went to thought in terms of modern chord progressions but they were still thinking in similar terms.
Broadly completely untrue.
If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced musical tradition on the planet (including Western, but also Indian, Chinese, etc.) has developed alongside a system of analyzing that music, and for very good reason: It's a lot easier to teach music when you can actually talk about it.
I promise you, every single competent composer and musician on the planet - from every culture - has a fairly firm grasp on music theory, in whatever flavor is relevant to the form of music they practice. Every Indian musician who plays classical Indian music knows their ragas. Every Western musician can navigate the diatonic scale.
Sure, at some level of expertise you’re not sitting there saying “oh, I should name variables sensibly and encapsulate functionality because computer science says to”; they are doing those things because with training and experience that becomes innate and accessible in flow state.
But the fact that theory can become ingrained does not mean one isn’t using theory.
I know music notation and can write things down, but I'm not a good composer. I'm at the mercy of others to write new material if that's what I'm interested in playing.
And writing it down in a way that other musicians can understand is of nontrivial value if you want people to play your stuff.
You can get so far with just an aural tradition but the invention of writing helps.
Disclosure: Musician
https://www.tagg.org/mmmsp/EverydayTonalityInfo.htm
That is called "perfect pitch" and it is not necessary to play music. It's very rare to have perfect pitch, and it seems to be innate, not something you learn.
Contextual note recognition (relative pitch) is what musicians normally use to jam. It comes with practice and contextual clues that you pick up over tens of years (including familiarity with your jammate's instrument, even if it's not the one you play; familiarity with multiple eras of music theory; pure practice), so this shouldn't be your #1 priority since it just comes along for free (or a bit of practice), as you learn. Music playing 101 is just... playing music in your instrument. You don't need to recognize notes until you want to jam, which comes years after you start playing an instrument.
Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.
You might want to start here: https://www.musictheory.net/ (not affiliated, I just think it's a very good resource for Music Theory 101).
Once you have a point of reference things just go up and down and from there it should be manageable to identify each note.
Also, not sure about the innate thing. Seems to me that it's just a neural pathway that can be created by playing or listening to a whole lot of music while being aware of which tone is which, for example by reading the score alongside.
I used to think I was pitch blind until one day it just clicked. It just takes practice in my opinion.
It's just a quirk of human physiology. The real creativeness and ingenuity comes from rhythm and the interplay of repetitive and surprising sounds. The pitches are not important.
Setting your off-the-cuff comment alongside TFA’s Claudish muddle reminds me—as if I needed reminding—about the hazardous parts of self-education, particularly when that education is, as it seems maybe to have been in the author’s case, led by LLM…
I appreciate a programmer hacking on sound and music—that’s awesome, and I’m really grateful the author did so and shared his experience. The trouble comes from the unearned air of authority.
When I worry about the broader question of subtle truths getting lost in the slop cycle, it feels reassuring when authentic expertise like yours still stands out clearly. I’ll take what optimism I can find!
I am not an expert, so maybe this book has its own shortcomings which I am being blind to. But this is the first book on music I have been able to read this far without having to fight the urge to fling it against a wall.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262692373/music-and-memory/
Once that is established, as per the linked article, 12-tone equal temperament makes a lot of sense (but isn’t universal, obviously) because it’s resulting tuning gives us a really close 3/2 and 4/3, and having a simple 12-tone scale reasonably in tune everyone can agree on makes sense.
We can then explain that 5/4 and 6/5 are a bit off in 12-tone, but are “good enough” that we tolerate them being slightly out of tune when using equal temperament. Once we accept that 12-tone has imperfect thirds, we can then look at the I IV V chord progression (I IV V comes from 3/2, 5/4, and 4/3 sounding pleasant to the human ear), and explain why that chord progression is so common in western popular music.
These aren’t universal truths—12-tone equal temperament is a compromise, but, as per the linked article, a reasonable one. Just intonation is, of course, another possible compromise.
[1] 2/1: Octave; 3/2: Perfect fifth; 4/3: Perfect fourth; 5/4: Major third; 6/5: Minor third
And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.
The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk
It's just not conventional music theory (which is just a set of rules thrown at you). But the whole point that the parent missed, is that it is told in a way to arrive to music theory from first principles as understood by computer programmers and math nerds.
Any statement made in TFA is true (at least to a basic level, and, for some of claims, when focusing on western music).
You'll learn nothing of the sort you learn in TFA by reading "The Jazz Theory book" suggested by the parent. The opening paragraphs of TFA explicitly address why that doesn't cut it:
"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention. Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason. The major scale has the shape it has for a reason. Chords that sound good sound good for a reason, and you can compute those reasons."
The parent comment is stuck on trying to sell the conventional music theory nomenclature and its extensions, which, despite the name "theory", is a descriptive set of norms and rules based on historical practices.
The author of the above comment's "postgrad in music" and experience in conservertoires make then unable to see the worth of TFA, because they're too invested in the conventional description and "how things are done".
If you want to understand music theory as a construction, not merely as "here's a set of arbitrary rules and other rules that build on them", ignore jazz/classical musicians and people with music degrees trying to sell you on what they've been taught, as it will be near useless. This requires a different type of mindset.
There are books on musicology that address the concerns of TFA in an official and deep way, but TFA is a good programming-nerd oriented introduction to the matter.
This ain't it.
I'm reading your comment with a certain disdain for analysis and theory, which I get - a lot of people come out scarred from music theory training, and I'm sorry someone hurt you that way.
But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music. "Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
Seriously, you're doing yourself a huge favor as a musician and broadening your conceptual thinking about music by learning this stuff.
I'm fine with contentional music theory training. Know my music theory, had official music training, been at it for some decades.
It's not the purpose of this. Traditional music theory training or a jazz theory book wont tell you about harmonics and timbre. It wont tell you how come we divided the octave like this, and things this tries to tackle.
It was written to serve a fundamentally different purpose. A purpose which apparently familiarity with regular music theory makes most blind to.
It's like someone wanting to learn about acoustics, and someone given them an earful about diatonic chords and how to read notation. It's simply not what they want to now about. Or it's like someone wants to know about the chemistry of cement or the physics behind structural engineering, and people try to tell him all about construction and construction terms. Not what he is interested in knowing, even if it's essential for building a house, just like music theory is essential (or at least useful) in playing and composing music.
>But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music.
That's neither here nor there. The purpose of TFA is not for musicians to talk about music with one another, or to help someone analyze that this piece of music is in that key or uses that mode, and modulates there, or that "this chord here is used as a chromatic mediant", or borrowed chords, or counterpoint, and all that.
>"Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
That's explicitly NOT what TFA wants to be useful for.
It’s really good at explaining the octave, the fifth, it shows the mathematical basis for why just intonation has “wolf notes”, and why we use 12-tone equal temperament.
Once it hits the 12-tone scale, and explains why we generally avoid the tritone, it doesn’t explain very well why we generally use diatonic instead of chromatic scales (well, OK, great music can use chromatic scales, but there’s a reason “Entrance of the Gladiators” sounds like a clown show).
I would had, after explaining how 12-tone gives us an almost perfect fifth and fourth, explained that a major third is 5/4, and a minor third is 6/5, and that the thirds are noticeably but tolerably out of tune in 12-tone equal temperament.
Once we have the fifth and the major third, we then explain the major chord (Base note, 3/2, and roughly 5/4). Next, we explain the perfect fourth. From there, we can show the I IV V chord progression. And once we have I IV V we can then demonstrate the major scale. (The linked article shows us a major scale but doesn’t explain why the major scale is tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone—it’s that way because if we take all of the notes that exist in a I IV V chord progression, we get the seven notes of a major scale)
After I IV V, I would then look at a basic 4/4 rhythm, quarter notes, eight notes, the kick drum, the snare drum, and the closed hi hat.
I IV V, the major scale, and a simple 4/4 rhythm is enough music theory to write a good number of rock and pop songs.
I IV V and the major scale is roughly equivalent to understanding variables and variable assignment. Adding the structure of a 4/4 rhythm, with kick, snare, and high hat is equivalent to if-then-else and while.
From there, if I were to continue, I would next explain the minor third (6/5) and minor scale, the pentatonic scales (minor pentatonic gives us a large number of rock guitar solos), and probably show the I V vi IV chord progression.
Obviously, this is very basic, but things like ABRSM Grade 5 are the music equivalent of Forth-like and Lisp-like languages: They can be useful, but just as the majority of programs aren’t written in Forth or a Lisp dialect, the majority of music doesn’t use, say, an irregular time signature.
I am following Absolutely Understand Guitar[1] as my music theory lessons (and Hal Leonard method for notation) along side my regular tutorials. So far I am very impressed. Quite beginner friendly, and learning music theory while starting out with the instrument has not been difficult for me at least.
1: https://www.absolutelyunderstandguitar.com/
Your recommendation seems to mostly apply to western music (I assume so since you only mentioned western music), no? Will Jazz Levine's book help with ragga or gamelan?
Part 1: Music theory explained in just 5 minutes
Part 2: Music theory explained in just 20 minutes
Part 3: Music theory explained in 80 minutes
Etc. Starting with an extremely simplified overview and then making the overviews progressively more detailed.
Many people instead try to give simple explanations without making them short. But no confused beginner wants to be overwhelmed by a huge wall of text, let alone by a long theoretical book.
Unfortunately most people who have become knowledgeable about some subject matter then quickly and thoroughly forget how confusing, overwhelming or intimidating it was before.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
I wanted to read it because I like the topic, but i somehow felt it was folluting my brain. I think i will also start joining the club of AI;dr to protect myself from pollution, even though i may miss some iteresting articles.
It's not "music theory" proper, it's rather about the underpinnings of the "music language", the basics you need to know to even be able to speak about music theory, and in this regard it's quite useful.
https://www.pangram.com/history/25773627-adfa-4efb-8c10-f4fd...
> Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.
does it make sense? Or perhaps it just seems like something easy enough to skim past without worrying about whether it makes sense?
Before LMs, I would have assumed that a person intentionally wrote that sentence, and perhaps spent some time trying to understand what could possibly "break" if there were "notes" rather than "just a number." Now there is a simpler explanation: the sentence actually doesn't mean anything.
What the article is trying to explain here is that A=440 is just a convention. This is probably where the article should have had a discussion about perfect pitch vs. relative pitch. I would have written it like this:
“Since this note is 440 hertz, in Western music, because of convention, we call this note ‘A’. Now, let’s play a note that is 400hz. For most people, given enough time after hearing the 440hz note, this second note will sound like the first note. There is a minority of people with a talent called perfect pitch who would be able to tell that the 440hz note is in tune, while, with conventional Western music, 400hz is out of tune, because they are able to tell the absolute pitch of notes. Most people (including the famous composer Wagner) cannot do this: One pitch by itself sounds like another pitch by itself.”
You are giving an LLM entirely too much credit.
If you're trying to learn new information, you will trip over low-quality content like this more often.
Once it jumps from the chromatic scale to the diatonic scale, it doesn’t explain the theoretical basis for the major scale. To understand the major scale, we need to first explain the major third then the major chord. From the major chord, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth, we can build up the major scale.
There’s also no discussion of time signature and rhythm.
the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.
but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.
This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts and mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
Maybe start by rewatching "This is Spinal Tap" instead, and consider that https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/59n3pg/remembe...
Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice.
> This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts
This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”.
> mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
Compared to the lessons on https://www.musictheory.net this is definitely programmer/engineer friendly. It’s better than my old go-to at https://www.lightnote.co
It is a trope amongst gigging musicians that over-intellectualizing the feels is a massive no-no.
Hence the joke about Db being the saddest chord... also Phil Collins said that, he would know :-D... ...and C# being the most evil chord. Hilarious.
I persist: "before you can be good, you first have to be bad" is more helpful music theory than that whole JavaScript visuals page.
But personally, I couldn’t handle not knowing why the clutch needed to be pressed, or why a chord shapes is the why it is.
Creating melodies by doggedly applying any system is almost guaranteed to feel tired, predictable and boring.
I don’t really have a problem with systems.
Trying now. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
100%.
I tried three more. Same result.
How much do you see?
That's certainly a revealing example. TTLS is entirely melody, and the article says basically nothing about melody. At a stretch you could say "the article talks about the major scale, TTLS uses notes from a major scale" and if your conclusion is "that's why I like it", then you should feel the same way about any permutation of the notes in TTLS, or indeed anything you get from hitting the white notes on a piano one at a time.
Its 13 mentions of melody sufficed for me.
> A key, its diatonic chords, a progression, those chords broken into an arpeggio one note at a time, and a melody that sticks to the scale
> Change the melody array to anything at all and it will still fit
The first part of TTLS (in C) is: C C G G A A G F F E E D D C. Let's follow the guidance of this last part and change the "melody array"; for neatness we can alphabetize it: A A C C C D D E E F F G G G. Now that you understand melody, please tell me why even though it "still fit"s it doesn't sound as nice.
What else do I see: congruence between melody and lyrics, harmonic depth, dominant half-cadence in the tonic arrival. Also the versions by Mozart add a lot and explain a lot of the endurance of the tune I guess. That has chromatic passing, secondary dominants, even a parallel minor (in the 8th variation)
If I may plug here the Berklee College online courses as a satisfied customer I can say if you are ready to put in the effort they are great.
I would write songs on my guitar when I was in college. A friend who was a guitar theoretician stopped by and listened. He said something like, "Odd, you went with a G7 instead of an Am. In that triad you should have played the Am." (Or, you know, some kind of foreign language like that.)
I mean, it sounded fine my way. Although for a moment I questioned why thew G7 and tried an Am… briefly. I was afraid suddenly though that if I learned music theory I would have to start writing songs the right way.
Recently, I wrote https://www.jampea.com/learn , which is the music theory for "technical people". I believe it is the fastest way to get to understand the theory behind music (will take you 2 to 5 hours in total, 10% will be reading and 90% will be thinking about what you just read).
I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time. The fact that the author admits straight off the bat that he's never managed to learn an instrument kind of attests to this in my opinion.
As someone who enjoys listening to music, creating music, and music theory, I'd characterize the latter as providing a specialized vocabulary; an approach to listening, since words in the vocabulary represent concepts that you can hear; and a toolbox of concepts you can draw from.
It's a model, you can use it as much or as little as you like. And there's more than one model, and sometimes the different models overlap more or less, and you can choose any of them or none of them and still make and enjoy music.
The other thing it provides is a wildly complex logical system with fascinating philosophical connections. Some people enjoy exploring that more than making music with it, and that's also okay. I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that. It's made me a better thinker. In math, formulas can be elegant. In music theory, different constructions induce different experiences.
I have began learning instruments before and fell into the trap of asking too many "why" questions and then just got lost in music theory that a) didn't make too much logical sense and b) didn't help me actually get better at an instrument in any way.
I think it's very unlike programming where you could start with a hello world program and keep asking "why does it work like that" questions and keep getting deeper and deeper and actually end up with a very good understanding of computers by the end of it that actually would make you a better programmer.
But when you're learning an instrument I think perhaps at the start it's better to just accept that "chords sound good because they just do" rather than going off down a complete rabbit hole.
Edit: Also, what you mention about "why" is true. The models attempt to organize observations of conscious experiences into mathematical and logical frameworks, though they cannot ultimately explain the causes for those connections. The causes of the qualia remain mysterious. Musicians tend to be particularly in tune with how their own experiences connect to music, so some are enthralled to explore that connection itself.
Don't know if this phenomenon has a name, but I've thought about it before. Social media is filled with posts of people buying things. Because it's not really possible to make a video showing off something you decided not to buy. Same thing with music and people constantly buying gear. "I'm using the same guitar I've had for 10 years and decided to just sit down and practice for 2 hours this evening like the 2000 other evenings before" doesn't make good content.
Something along these lines, people who would like to improve their musical abilities sometimes procrastinate by doing music theory instead. It's safe and it's introspective. And it's authoritative---a legitimate and difficult subject---so there's the potential to feel falsely reassured that you're not wasting time. In a sense, it avoids the more difficult act of creation. This seems to be especially more likely for those who would have wanted to write music.
I.e., "drink responsibly." Perhaps music theory classes should come with a warning label, like the Mirror of Erised. You can stare into it endlessly and produce nothing.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
But then, please, don't call it "theory".
There is strictly nothing theoretical or indeed, logical, about it.
most popular songs on charts today aren't on the edge of what's new... music theory is a rule set and to break the rules you need to know them. there's a big difference in an illiterate and a jazz musician improvising something for 10 min., as well a music from the scratch by someone who understand orchestration and your unknown local rock artist
'Intro to audio for programmers' would keep them away and let us have a party in the comments telling the author how interesting the tutorial was. Never use the word 'Music' again and you'll be safe
Kudos, every work of creation is a joy on its own, I was fascinated clicking every button
There is of course a lot of physics involved. But there is at least as much convention at play. So imho this is a very one sided way of looking at it.
There is a physical reason the 12 notes are those 12 notes (though the exact frequencies assigned are influenced by culture as well), but lots of different cultures use less notes, or more, or extra notes inbetween.
So 'Because that is the convention.' is imho at least a good an explanation as the physics one.
He talks about the harmonic series giving the basic ratios of the Pythagorean scale but why is that the case? When you solve the equations of motion of any sort of harmonic oscillator (including crucially, strings, vibrating columns of air from a wind instrument etc) you see that you can solve them using a Fourier series, so if you solve this in trigonometric form you get a_1 * cos blah_1 + 1/2 * (a_2) * cos blah_2 + 1/3 * (a_3) * cos blah_3 + … + 1/n * (a_n) * cos blah_n [1]
…so those fractions end up being the partials of the harmonic series (a_n/n) where a_n is the n_th coefficient, which you find using an integral. Now if you have a normal western musical instrument, the higher overtones (later terms of the Fourier series) are not prominent so those coefficients are small. So the terms that matter have ratios a_1, a_2/2, a_3/3, a_4/4, a_5/5 corresponding to the primary intervals that he’s talking about.
In cultures (eg Balinese and Javanese music from Indonesia) where they use a different number of tones and different scale, it’s no coincidence that they play a lot of gongs and bells, which have much more prominent higher overtones, so a different set of Fourier coefficients so different ratios are going to be “congruent”/melodious-sounding.
[1] the “blah” terms are a function of pi and the length and stiffness of the string etc. Not really relevant here.
But also, nobody bothers to talk about this because for beginners without sufficient focus on mastery by copying other people, they're generally not going to be able to do anything notable with music anyway, so this kind of meta-theory is an unnecessary distraction. (And by the time you are actually decent with music literally years have passed and you've probably stumbled upon this idea by then)
Speaking for myself, the music I was raised with doesn't sound that good to me.
It does not mean "my parents played a lot of <X> and that doesn't sound good to me".
It's a decent enough intro to acoustics and digital synthesis, but saying it's music theory is just redefining terms with accepted meanings in their fields.
Doesn't HN have a temporal deduplication system?
You can also see duplicates e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=semianalysis.com
This is in line with hundreds of years of authors "explaining" music by starting with Pythagoras for their bona fides, then using that credibility to rationalize whatever opinions they hold about musical aesthetics.
To counter: these guys[1] play I-IV-V-I for nearly the whole song. They don't even change it between the verse and chorus. Someone here tell me the one important exception and the term from music theory that describes that exception.
Primers should start with the music excerpt that the author loves, and work backwards to the theory that helps explain what's going on. Otherwise it gets pretentious fast.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0
Fun interactive examples though. With another human pass, this could be great.
And now I've realized that the page hosting that is for a JS snippet editor embedding thingy. Commercial stuff.
So this is just a tech demo created with AI to showcase what can be done with their library, and not someone actually caring about the topic :<
Extreme doubt.
The theory of music is about as useless as it gets if you aren't in some kind of academic program or collaborating with other musicians on a shared composition. It helps with dead reckoning over things you cannot audition, but that's pretty damn rare.
You'll get better a lot faster if you just try to follow along with a YouTube video in the style of Guitar Hero scrolling down your screen.
Example 1: Pianos are tuned with stretch tuning, where the high notes are tuned higher than their theoretical pitches, and vice versa for low notes. That's because of a thing called inharmonicity, where the overtones of short piano strings don't form perfect ratios with the fundamental. Maybe that has something to do with short strings vibrating more like metal cylinders than rods?
Example 2: French horns have a lot of tubing! The valves let you include different lengths of tube into the air column. With a single valve combination, the player can hit the fundamental and all the partials up until their lips can no longer take it. To play a scale or melody, they switch between different horn lengths, choosing the partial that will sound closest to the pitch they're going for. Really, all brass instruments function this way, I just mention French horns because I like them.
Example 3: String quartets tune their chords with each other on the fly. If you listen to a string quartet practice, they'll spend a good amount of time holding and adjusting intonation to each other. So unlike in the equal tempered world of keyboard tuning, strings and most instrumental ensembles are constantly adjusting to make their harmonies sound sweeter. Equal temperament doesn't come into play, unless you add a piano, which sort of forces everybody to uncomfortably conform to the limitations of set it and live with it keyboard tuning.
Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?
Oh, and rhythm is just the same as consonance. Most are octave based, beats on wave peaks of overlaid octaves getting quieter. The 3 based on times like 6/8 are the same but for 5ths and 17ths. (The bottom number 8 is just a BPM hint from old days.) beyond those the intervals get unstable feeling, like 7/4 in Money by Pink Floyd has that cut off feeling, someone took a few from each measure, but maps to a minor 7th interval.
Sorry man, if you approach things from that angle then no wonder music is a mystery to you.
The issue with "deriving from first principles" is that it very much depends on what you consider "principles" and which you pick. Take two people who want to derive sth "from first principles" and they will arrive at wildly different things. Because they start very differently. That's why this "ignore everything that came before" approach (different name for "from first principles) is so flawed and limited. There is so much insight to gain from the wisdom that came before you that ignoring it isn't going to help.
> the simpler the fraction, the better it sounds
That's comically wrong. If everything was just an octave, you wouldn't even have music.
Sorry, I stopped reading there. It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix.
It might not help develop a cure for your appendix, but it does or can help understanding why certain cures work, or why some are preferred over others.
ps. background in biochemistry and biophysics
An entire civilization (China) completely missed having a proper scientific awakening and the following industrial revolution about a 1000 year ago exactly because of that kind of dumb thinking.
Great idea!
> Here are five notes. Every one is double the frequency of the one before it. [...] They are different pitches, and yet they sound like the same note.
Nothing about these notes seem similar to me. You could play pretty much any sequence of rising notes and (falsely) claim they're the "same note" and I'd believe it. This is one reason I've always had trouble learning music.
> √2 the awkward one -> 311.13Hz
That one doesn't sound particularly awkward to me. Again, I blame my inability to distinguish pitch.
The only instrument I was able to pick up pretty easily was drums.
At least for me the solution was to grind ear training for a few weeks/ months 10 minutes a day.
I'll certainly never reach the heights of this skill but a bit of persistence to overcome lack of natural talent did propell me forward.
Also reminds me of https://www.languagetransfer.org/music
Which takes you very quickly to equal temperament and perfect fourths and perfect fifths. This tells us where the notes C and F and G are located on the chromatic scale, but then the rest are pretty arbitrary eh. Semitones from C to C go 2-2-1-2-2-2-1, but there is nothing heavenly ordained by this particular arrangement. E-to-F and B-to-C are a collective choice.
If I had been presented with this kind of explanation fifty years ago, I might have been less skeptical of the entire enterprise.
and there's one more 15 days ago, but really - it seems a link needs to be posted several times to take off.
@dang
Over time, I developed shorthands for understanding theory like i can easily look at a fretboard and know which note it is.
But what bugged me is that you seem to imply the reason why you couldn't learn a instrument was because you did not understand the why. That makes very little sense to me. I know several professional musicians who don't even know what a mode is or what formal notation is. One of them has pitch perfect ear, he can literally hear anything and tranpose that on his guitar. He has no idea how notes work and just writes tabs.
So while this is very nicely from a programmer point of view and an objective explanation of things but learning all this will not make you a better musician is the point.
Practice above all. Dont try to fit all theory into the pratice but understand what you are practicing particulalry using the theory. Otherwise you end up with all theory and no practice experience of using that theory and creativity.
As a perosn who likes code, this is interesting. As a musician who also understands music theory, this is kind of alienating in terms of how it presented. Like if someone just read this article and thought they understood music theory now, they would be pretty unsufferable to actual musicians.
My 8 year old hardly ever practices but just looks at the music and knows the notes on piano and violin.
In any case, I agree that this isn't that helpful to being able to play, it's just an interesting way to understand why things are as they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
I do not have perfect pitch, but I could always do what GP's kid does. I am now a pretty good amateur singer.
What matters for this is learning to read the music notation and developing a sense (mostly subconscious) of scales and harmony. Perfect pitch does not help either of those things.
Quite a lot of people learn by imitation without knowing the underlying theory. Some people need a theoretical framework so that they have a mental model with which to understand everything else.
Fundamentally, you’re arguing against learning theory. Not everyone learns the same way. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with a basic fact of life.
Furthermore, in real life, I have seen the same approach actually be detremental to learning guitar. Its a bit like football - there is a physical skill level to the sport which you can practice and then there is a theoritical part (tactics and formation) that help you understand the game and play better.
But if you just want to start by kicking a ball and you know everything about Pep Guardiola's new counterattacking system. Yet when you are kicking the ball and practicing the basic skills, you are not thinking woah am i a midfield playing the right side and looking for a pass? That type of thinking is not useful when you are learning how to kick a ball.
Ideally you should do the two together and work really hard on practice first if you actually want to be a footballer is my point. If you say oh no everyone is different, some people just like tactics, I don't think I say anything against it.
Theory first is not a good way to learn an instrument is my qualified statement. Not that theory is not important or doesnt matter or everyone should follow the same way of learning.
Now dispell the "this is just the western tradition": do Klingon music theory https://youtu.be/1LjcBv-OWtQ
TFA does acknowledge that it only really covers western music.
But on top of that, the other musical cultures you mention are in fact remarkably similar to western musical culture at the level TFA is describing.
They differ significantly in terms of what they do with e.g. dividing the octave into 12, but they all make heavy use of the 3/2 ratio and other similar concepts.
If you want to get really different, check out Byzantine musical culture. They have no octave equivalence (!) and their notation is 100% relative (i.e. they write melodies down as sequences of intervals, not sequences of absolute notes). Even so, they still use 12 tones per octave ...
This is... Not a good comment.
And unlike you, I don't believe I need to explain why I'm writing this.
1. runjs promoting itself using music REPL as an example
2. author used LLM to fit a few music related ideas into the web audio API
3. they tried it with math two years ago: https://runjs.app/blog/equations-that-changed-the-world-rewr... They are clearly targeting js developers, which is one of the largest coding community
4. "The naming is not arbitrary, and the harmonic series explains why.", stop wasting tokens. Just say what it is please.
lolwut
Hi Claude
You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.
That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.
> There are twelve notes for a reason
Twelve pitches, actually. (Strictly, twelve pitch classes).
Note != pitch. A note is a sound having properties of which one is pitch.
Oh boy, couldn't agree more, this has been a lifelong frustration for me as well:
I've always been completely stumped by the utter lack of curiosity most musicians seem to have about that.
There's a convention, just learn it, why IHN would you want to ask questions about this?
Who cares about things like first principles anyways.
> The system we want, where the octave is pure and the fifths are pure and everything closes into a neat loop, does not exist and never has. Every tuning system in history is a different choice about where to dump the error.