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Comment by Cozumel | Hacker News Reader

If that's how you're getting taught music you need a better teacher!

I strongly disagree with using 'apps' to teach music, it's counter productive and you won't learn. To learn piano you need a piano (or keyboard) and a proper teacher that's it, you're also not limited to learning classical pieces. And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.

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>And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time

This meme has to die. Do you think Djembe players in west African village learned chords and scales to come up awesome sounding percussions ? I've seen young kids come up sweet rhythms with zero musical training. You can create new music on day one, it's built into us. Chords and Scales should be used to understand and enhance what you can create, its not a prerequisite .

Producing a rhythm is completely different than producing a song. Rhythms don't have tones, notes do. Not understanding chord structures, scales and how songs are built will make it quite difficult to produce any type of song. There are basic fundamental building blocks of how to build a song you'll need to understand or you'll just run in circles hitting notes. Imagine trying to learn to program without understanding the basics of MVC.

> Rhythms don't have tones, notes do.

Ummm.. I don't think this is true. I think Djembe has open tone, closed tone, slap, base tone ect. I What about folk songs from India, how did they come up with it ? I am not arguing against music theory, I am arguing against saying music theory is prerequisite for creating music.

Music is nothing like a programming language, there is no compiler rejecting your bad music. Sure people have discovered what sounds good and what doesn't and turned it into some sort of theory but those are merely guidelines not syntax rules that are enforced by the compiler.

Traditional Indian music has its own complex musical theory, named notes, etc.

folk music !!

A djembe is played with rhythm and tone, but the rhythm itself doesn't have any tone color.

Rhythm is time.

Notes are wavelength, and in Western music we use a 12 note system to denote them, and musical theory is a shorthand used to denote the complex mathematical intervals at work in it. It's fascinating stuff, and if you're interested in learning more about it there's a great BBC series available on YouTube that describes what's happening in Western musical theory: How Music Works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbOWi6f_IM

Suggesting that students don't need to learn basic music theory is kind of ridiculous. Can the human ears find the tonic/dominant/sub-dominant interval relationships on their own? Of course. That's part of the reason we find them so pleasing. You don't need music theory to hear. You need it to communicate with other musicians. Music is a group activity. It's an ongoing conversation in our culture. If you want to participate in the musical traditions of our society, you need to be able talk to other musicians.

This means different things for different traditions, but the amount of learning needed to get your feet under you in music is less than learning how how to play most video games or even the most basic syntax of a programming language.

Can we teach it better? Absolutely. But we still need to teach it.

It's more important to understand chord progressions and relationships than scales, and that's a lot of the philosophy of Suzuki and related approaches— you learn to sound out a melody, and then you learn what major chords sound good with that melody, and then you learn where to substitute an appropriate minor chord, and then you learn how create an accompaniment using those chords.

And at that point you've learned to recreate a song you already know, and it's not a huge step to improvise from scratch on your own melody.

There's a huge body of potential source material for this approach, including folk/pop songs, oldies, scores from musicals (think Disney Renaissance era), and most contemporary religious music.

Chord progressions and relationships are all built off scales. If you don't understand the underlying scale of a particular key you wouldn't know where the I,IV,V and VI progressions are.

...generations of programmers learned to program without understanding the basics of MVC.

When I was a kid, I read Anne McCaffery's book Dragonsong, and thought that I should make up a tune for the lyrics of one of the songs that the protagonist writes. We had a piano available, so I came up with said tune. I couldn't have (and still couldn't) told you which key it's in, and, you know, I'm certainly not going to claim that it was a brilliant composition that will endure for the ages, but it wasn't dissonant and was, through trial and error, in some minor key or other.

Obviously, having a keyboard helps, since you are forced to only play notes on the chromatic scale somewhere.

I am often inspired by Giorgio Moroder's interview on the latest Daft Punk album in which he praises the fact that nobody told him the rules and there was no "preconception of what to do." He just did it, and we are all better off for it, whether music or MVC -- and I could not disagree any more forcefully with your closing remark about MVC.

Fuck the rules, make stuff, see what happens. Nothing truly creatively wonderful in your life gave a shit about the rules.

It may have stopped him from feeling confined to a single genre/style, but most of his music very much follows very conventional rules.

Since when is MVC a requirement of programming? I completed an entire MIT-based CS curriculum and received my degree without writing a single line of MVC. It was mentioned in passing regarding GUI development, but I never needed it during those years when I wrote a compiler, a network stack, a raytracer, etc.

MVC was a bad example imo. It's closer to trying to build something interesting without knowing what a conditional. It's possible, but why would you do it when they're so easy to learn? Scales are the same. It's not difficult to teach someone major and minor scales and have them go from there. You don't need to be able to play them flawlessly at 200bpm to be able to make something with them, but I think it's much easier to create knowing them than not knowing them.

Then you keep doing what you're doing, and when you're better than Ahmad Jamal he'll listen to you.

I've played the piano for about 3 years now, took lessons for the first year of that then stopped. Using pianomarvel.com worked pretty well for me for a while for learning certain skills. I had already taken some lessons, so I wasn't completely lacking instruction in basic technique, but I was poor at reading music (let alone sight reading). My reading skills improved significantly over a few months of doing most of their course, which basically just has you plug in your keyboard by midi to your computer and then play along to songs until you get it nearly correct. If I had been self-studying, I wouldn't have been exposed to as wide a range of pieces (more even than when I was taking lessons). I'm now much more confident picking up a new piece of classical or modern music. So, I'd say that "apps" are still useful. (Though you definitely need one that uses a real keyboard or piano and not a tablet touchscreen - bleh!) Had I been more dedicated, I could have used it to practice chords, scales, and arpeggios too.

> I could have used it to practice chords

Get ready to learn over 200 illogical "hand positions" :).

> Get ready to learn over 200 illogical "hand positions" :).

Wait when did we start discussing emacs here?

Not sure what you mean - are you saying that the program wouldn't have provided motivations for the structure of chords and so it would have been brute memorization? That's pretty likely. It had very minimal instruction in music theory, and actually the program is more marketed at instructors to give their students structure to their non-lesson practice time and add some gamification to motivate young (and not-so-young) learners.

> And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.

If one has passed high school mathematics, the amount of music theory sufficient to compose typical pop tunes can be covered in about one day.

Diatonic scales, blues scale, intervals, 3-chords, some 4-chords, a hint of higher n-chords. Chord roles and examples of typical chord progressions. Something about bass lines and drum patterns.

It will probably not make you able to compose hit tunes, but you will learn enough terminology to understand what is going on.

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