Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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Scale is nice and short, it’s one syllable, and it goes up and down like how you scale a ladder. “Ordered basis” and “discrete spectrum” sound outright hostile to me. We want to make musical scales accessible to five-year-old kids here, not undergraduate math students. This is not the way terminology should evolve.

I can get behind car/cdr -> first/rest.

I could get behind renaming the modes, but I’m not sure how to rename them. I would be hesitant to name them after notes or using numbers, since that would be confusing. As it is, I can say “C dorian scale” and that’s a pretty concise and unambiguous name for a series of notes. Maybe I could say “C minor, natural sixth scale”. It’s a bit verbose and modes are fairly rare. It’s also a bit weird—would I then say “A dorian scale” as “A minor, sharp sixth scale”? Already I’m a bit confused by this terminology. Maybe “A minor, major sixth scale”? The “major minor” is a bit weird.

The trick with advancing expressiveness and meaningfulness is that 1) you are going to have to memorize new meanings even if the words are familiar and 2) if it’s not usable by experts, it won’t be adopted by experts and you’ll end up with at worst, multiple incompatible sets of terminology.

Face it—I’m going to have to do a fair bit of memorization to learn music theory. It is unavoidable with music theory as it is with other subjects. So I might as well pick nice, short words like “scale” which make some intuitive sense, rather than pick “ordered basis” which is a total mouthful. After all, I will only spend a short amount of time memorizing terms, and a much, MUCH longer time using them.

As I said in my other comment, I had to do a lot more memorization to learn to recognize typical patterns (like chords and scales) in traditional notation, while integer notation ... well, for starters I just about came up with it myself, before I learned it's (of course) an established way of notation in music theory. Second I just wrote some code to play around with the numbers, basically for myself to try and make sense of the traditional system, because it seemed (to me) easier to convert the bunch to numbers and see what chords come out. What happened is that, really through no effort on my own, I started recognizing the numerical patterns for what they mean in musical theory.

It's really that much more intuitive. Give somebody CEGC' and GBD'G' or give them {0,4,7,12} and {7,11,14,19}. And as a bonus, if you can read clock, you already know how to do modulo 12 arithmetic! 14:00 is 2pm, 19:00 is 7pm, therefore that last one can also be written as {7,11,2,7}.

I don't want to do away with traditional notation, it has its advantages. But I do think that integer notation can be used very effectively and should be used more, when teaching the fundamentals of music theory.

You apparently need an intro to music set theory: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scale

Edited link: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/

Why do I "need" this? I don't understand what you are trying to tell me. Does this explain some alternative terminology?

I'm a little put off by the way you wrote that comment.

Sorry, didn't mean to be offensive.

That link provides an introduction to MST terminology, starting from somewhat math/nerd angles and moving gently.

You will find that MST provides clear terminology for the sort of thing you're trying to talk about/say.

I’m familiar with this already. It’s unambiguous but it’s fairly verbose. Our notation already places the diatonic scales in a privileged position, so it makes sense that we have special names for modes of the diatonic scale.

The system is most useful for describing / exploring certain types of atonal music. I’m going to make an unfair generalization—most people are interested in tonal music. You can see that the references here are to Forte’s The Structure of Atonal Music and Rahn’s Basic Atonal Theory. So if that’s your jam, by all means, go and make atonal music. But I’m a fan of using modes of common scales, so I like having concise names like phrygian, mixolydian, and dorian.

So my own take on this is that it's not really about atonal music at all. The musical universe in which this is presented (certainly in the article I referenced) is already using 12TET, and where a specific scale (of the 4096 possible) has a known name in 1 or more cultures, it is cited (this includes the western "church mode" names that you mentioned).

It's still unclear how much "tonal music" is simply a shared set of cultural assumptions and practices, and how much arises from acoustic physics and acoustic perception. So ... rather than a priori priviledging a specific group of interval sets ("major", "minor" plus "a few modes"), why not start by exploring the full universe of all possible (12TET) interval sets (aka "scales"). By using an explicitly mathematical approach one can bring some analysis techniques to bear on the "full universe" that are not readily available when stuck in traditional western theory and notation. To me, this approach accomplishes two things. The first is that it offers a bridge to non-western musical traditions. The second is that it offers a common core from which to understand both "tonal" and "atonal" music, particularly their similarities and differences.

Finally, its a particular bug of mine when people connect "modes" and "scales" as you do in the your final sentence. What is important in (almost) all musical traditions are not the specific notes used to form the pitches that make a piece of music, but the intervals between the pitches, and their ordering. There's significant evidence that we are vastly more sensitive to relative pitch (intervals) than absolute pitch - play the same series of intervals starting from a different tonic/root and we experience it in almost the same way. Change the interval series (i.e. the scale), and we hear a much more noticeable difference. So, the major scale is just an interval series, and the "modes of the major scale" are also just interval series. There is no inherent relationship between them, other than one can construct them by rotation. The modes do not "belong" to the major or minor scales, nor vice versa (indeed, in fact the major and minor scale are just modes too ... just an interval series).

And now really finally: we actually don't have special names for most of the possible interval series that can constructed from the diatonic notes. We have a very limited number, and from my reading and understanding it is unclear if the ones we have names for are priviledged by physics and perception, or are mostly the result of historical precedent.

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