Basic Music Theory
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The real 'theory' boils down to why the pattern of the major and minor scales is the pattern that it is (which is the same question as 'why are the black/white keys on the piano arranged that way?'). And the related question of why are there 12 of them in the octave.
And that underlying theory is much better explained in this page that was posted to HN some years ago:
'How Music Works'
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792063 (2016)
Also see 'Music Theory for Nerds' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 (2016)
I'd argue that one is only doing music theory if they're using the notation to analyze a piece of music.
E.g. taking apart a Bach Fugue to understand - or hypothesize - about a larger structure, uncover motivic developments, etc. Or analyzing a Bird solo to get at how he's interpreting the chord changes, how certain changes work together to form larger structures, where/how he's using enclosures, where and whether or not he's quoting other players, etc.
Most harmonic structure can be described very well just in terms of scale degree emphasis, and overlapping scales where the structure is complex. And it's quite easy to stumble into "spicy" yet listenable results by setting yourself up with two scales, playing monophonic arpeggiations that interchange them, and then condensing those into chord progressions. It's much harder to reach those chords by starting with a list of block chords, because that medium works in one scale at a time, so the notation quickly gets unwieldy.
You could regard the period and origin of a given theory as a set of axioms, e.g. African classical music has almost nothing to do with Bach, but you'd be missing the point.
20th century and Levine's books are a good introduction to applying music theory to do bizarre and twisted things when improvising.
Is definitely somewhat out of date, and in need of improvement to encompass not only the music created in other cultures but also textural and sonic expression which makes up interesting music which could otherwise be under - analysed using WCM as the baseline, but equating this to white supremacy is to me incorrect, and missing the point of what's actually needed - an update.
And he is still wrong. Every culture refers to its own music theory (or most any other kind of theory) as THE theory, not "A" theory. That's not because of supermacist tendencies, it's just familiarity and closeness.
It's usually not useful, nor are we get any special benefit from, to take into account 2000 other traditions (even our own past ones, or some niche traditions in our midst) when we talk of the kind of music we do 95% of the time.
It would be like saying "I am hungry - and this is my personal feeling", "This artist is fire - and I say this speaking on behalf of myself alone", "Macaroni and cheese is the best comfort food, for me that is".
A useless and tiresome clarification.
Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its own stuff as THE stuff.
So, yeah, this is just a fad, and a very US-centric 2010-20x0 at that. No Italian would give two fucks if they refer to regular western music theory as THE music theory.
> Even more so when everybody else (e.g. every other culture) doesn't reciprocate the same, and speaks of its own stuff as THE stuff.
I've never seen this to be true in Indian music discussion. They know Western music too. I can only assume the same is true in China being that America and Europe export so much.
Maybe start american people actually listening to music outside of the US and UK? (And I'm not referring to latin americans listening to latin music).
They're some of the most chauvinistic peoples when it comes to consumption of music, movies, tv series, books, etc.
Then we can worry about some jazz player at Berklee or some high schooler at a school band learning western music theory as "this is music" vs learning about the gamelan or classical indian ragas...
>I've never seen this to be true in Indian music discussion. They know Western music too. I can only assume the same is true in China being that America and Europe export so much.
That's only because they have to play this too, as it has become popular in the 20th century.
Historically however there was no mention or need to mention western music theory though.
That is true, but I don't see that happening in music education in the UK. I can't speak for anywhere else.
Well, Indian and Chinese theories you're never gonna use in 99% of the music you play in the US, so you might as well ignore it.
The same way Indians are not taught Bluegrass and the Chinese don't study ragas.
Indians and Chinese in India and China do study western music theory, but that's because it has become a global francize and thus they need it (e.g. to play a pop gig). They don't do it in order to merely be inclusive.
I'd reverse the charge, that only westerners (at least some modern ones) think of themselves as some engligtened all-inclusive superset of humanity, that they feel like they should be studying western + Indian + Chinese + whatever music theory, and not just the theories they need as working musicians (plus a la cart study if someone is interested in particular ethnic styles).
Chinese musicians don't feel any great urge to study Indian classical music, and Indian musicians don't particularly care/call for studing Chinese music...
Worse, if western musicians are made to study Indian/Chinese music, and start producing works in said formats, the end result will be the watering down of said musical traditions.
There is Indian and Chinese music, because it's tied to those peoples' history, tradition, artistic development, sentiments, and so on.
Without that, it's just "ethnic fusion" BS - which we shouldn't be encouraging more of...
If a westerner wants to learn that music, they shall go to a special Indian/Chinese music school (preferably in the respective countries), study it with reverance, understand it, live like the peoples who made it do, and so on, until they can actually feel it. Not have someone teach it to them at Berklee and then start producing works based on them....
You don't see how this comes across at least "racist-adjacent"? "Whatever, all that other stuff isn't relevant to what we do here in the US. It isn't worth learning."
That's obviously false. There's been a centuries long tradition of mixing of musical approaches to create great stuff. The most uniquely american musics (blues, jazz, hiphop) all have roots in western african music brought over via slavery. This isn't just "ethnic fusion" but truly deep exploration of the breadth of human music.
Saying that it doesn't encompass some traditions of music is one thing (and broadly correct, as I already said), but that's not the same as saying that it's white supremacist. Saying 'music theory is incomplete', or that 'music theory ignores other cultures', etc. would be fair enough, although again I think it would be one-sided. I'd be interested to see if the teaching in other cultures (such as, for instance Indian) encompasses Western Classical tradition (i.e. based around a 12-note octave instead of a 22 note one) in a similar manner - I would imagine that it doesn't, as it concentrates on the idiom that it describes. And I'm certainly not a music theory specialist, but I believe that attempts have been made to make a standard method of incorporating microtonality into western music notation.
For the record, I spent nearly 20 years teaching in UK schools, and the music curriculum is most definitely not exclusionary - a wide range of traditions are covered in detail, and the roots of popular music in 'The West' are traced back to their origins, often leading pupils to make some interesting wider discoveries about culture and history. Music is not taught in a way that the Western Classical tradition is an exclusionary yardstick (although at A-level some elements of it are covered in some detail) And this has been the case since I was at school in the 80s, so this isn't down to any current changes.
What is pitch? It is defined in hertz, the number of times the underlying vibration repeats per second.
If you have an octave, you take one pitch like 220, then you double it to 440. That is the next octave. It's clear that if you define the "underlying vibration" as a sound that oscillates twice (2hz) then the 440hz sound is also in a way a 220hz sound. Thus the octave is really just a recognition of that mathematical relationship between the two pitches.
Perhaps you compare it with something like Physic's theory. That it is not.
But it's more like a mathematical theory, a set of axioms, and an algebra of relationships and properties that derive from them.
And of course it's a theory as opposed to the actual practice (applying it to playing an instrument).
That's what I take issue with. I vaguely agree with the notion that music theory does have some kind of axiomatic form hidden deep within, but what can you prove? There is no fundamental theorem of Counterpoint, or that 12-tone rows are the work of the devil etc.
It's not about reductionistically (?) deriving even those from first principles.
Physics on the other hand, though it relies on mathematical models, can't really explain why the universe exists in the particular way that it does. The best we can do is use the scientific method to make very educated guesses at an accurate mathematical model that might help us accurately explain the behavior of some physical system we're interested in. Physics is full of inconsistencies and unexplained phenomena, but we're slowly getting better at making predictions.
Music theory is the same way. Music sounds good to humans, and there doesn't really need to be a deeper reason than that for me to listen to a song over and over. Music theorists will study the music that people tend to like / dislike, and do their best to come up with an explanation for why -- often by pulling it apart into its core components, comparing it to other works, analyzing chord structure, voicing, instrumentation, etc.. In the end, just as with physics, composers have slowly built up a reliable foundation of knowledge to help them compose music that will reliably sound "good". But every so often someone comes along with an earworm that can't fully be explained.
That's exactly what makes it like a mathematical theorem.
Mathematical theorems are not about proving anything about "subjective human experience".
The axioms of western music theory just prove that X chord is the dominant under these conditions, or Y plays this role in that context, or Z scale/mode/whatever should be constructed as such, or M and Y form a K together, and so on.
Similar to how a (quite simple) algebra would work.
I'm not saying traditional notation isn't useful, I'm saying it's unhelpful if you're trying to understand how music actually works.
All that to say I think they're both conveying similar pitch information and take a similar amount of effort to ready correctly. Piano roll doesn't convey rhythmic information and that's where I think piano roll falls short as a method of straight notation.
Traditional notations are obsessed with pretending there are only 7 notes when there are in fact 12. Accidentals and key changes are obfuscated.
Similarly, key changes are explicit in sheet music but hard to see on a piano roll without careful inspection.
Likewise, when a musician sees a run of adjacent notes without accidentals, they immediately know what to play. They don't need to inspect each one in turn to determine how many semitones it lies from the previous note. Likewise, when a composer wants to write such a run, they can just draw some black dots in a row. They don't need to squint at a grid and select the correct rows each time.
To sum up, traditional notation is uses a form of compression that makes reading and writing diatonic music easier.
Taking this even farther, some systems of music notation compress things even further and don't explicitly list all of the notes to be played. For example: figured bass, basso continuo, or even just chords that accompany lyrics. In fact, even regular sheet music doesn't usually precisely represent of duration of all of the notes. Some notes are sustained and bleed into others, some are meant to be played strictly in time. Human interpretation is an important part of the process.
On the other hand, the piano roll is a MIDI editor. It is a great way to tell a computer exactly what to play, but it is not easy to read quickly and it is impractical to print or write by hand. Both forms of notation have advantages and disadvantages but it seems to me you haven't spent enough time with the standard notation to fully appreciate its advantages. In other words, the piano roll notation might be your blub language for music. [1]
Because the most important thing is the actual semitone intervals, and the standard notation hides them and gives them weird names like augmented fourth (it's just six semitones, just call it that). And it names the 12 semitones based on the c major mode even though that's only one of about 50 modes/scales/keys you might want to use.
In relation to the staff, pitches in standard notation are just as "proportionally spaced". Instead of squeezing in black keys, you have to squeeze in accidentals, but then accidentals are an extremely useful way of "showing how chords work", especially in the context of progressions in tonal harmony, which a piano roll gives you no meta-information about. It's less intuitive only in that you need some study to parse it fluently, at which point you gain the advantage of being untied to the layout of a particular physical instrument.
In any quest to "understand how music actually works", as soon as you take some baby steps beyond the basic alphabet of intervals, a piano roll visualization is going to hold you back.
I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The layout allowed for speedy recognition of lone intervals and simple chords, but no more so than standard notation, and it was far worse than standard notation at showing any higher level musical content (the harmonic function of those intervals and chords in the context of the piece or a progression, polyphony and independent voices in general, counterpoint, organization of rhythms and cross rhythms, phrasing, larger compositional structures...). Also, because it's just a homogenous field of repeating piano octaves there is much less to positionally anchor the eye on as it reads through, like a staff with ledger and bar lines would provide to a fluent sight reader. All this musical meaning is stripped away and to reinstate it would be a case of painstakingly decoding the piano roll rather than just fluently reading the music.
I can see how this layout is really useful in a DAW for MIDI input and editing. As for learning the absolute basics of harmony, yeah it's accessible, if you can't be bothered to learn the basics of standard notation. After which point it's a dead end.
I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The layout allowed for speedy recognition of lone intervals and simple chords, but no more so than standard notation, and it was far worse than standard notation at showing any higher level musical content (the harmonic function of those intervals and chords in the context of the whole piece or local progression, polyphony and independent voices in general, counterpoint, organization of rhythms and cross rhythms, phrasing, larger compositional structures...). Also, because it's just a homogenous field of repeating piano octaves there is much less to positionally anchor the eye on as it reads through, like a staff with ledger and bar lines and key signature would provide to a fluent sight reader. All this musical meaning is stripped away and to reinstate it would be a case of painstakingly decoding the piano roll rather than just fluently reading the music.
I can see how this layout is really useful in a DAW for MIDI input and editing. As for learning the absolute basics of harmony, yeah it's accessible, if you can't be bothered to learn the basics of standard notation. After which point it's a dead end.
Musical notation provides a kind of symbiosis between composers / arrangers, and players. If you want to work, you have to read standard notation. If you want your material to get played, you have to write it in standard notation. And learning any notation to the point of sight-reading it is prohibitively difficult for most people, including good musicians who learned without reading.
Experiments with developing new notation tend to involve a cooperation between the composer and willing players, often in an academic setting. It's also a wide open field for electronic and computer aided music, where sight-reading might not be an issue at all.
Music notation is used for communication among musicians and is optimized for clarity in expressing real-world music. Real world music is based around scales (except for 12-tone music which is a really obscure niche), so notation is based around scales. (Although different genres may use different notations, like chord notation instead of notes.)
The underlying relationships of wavelength ratios is interesting part of theory but you don't really need to know about that to play music. But you do need to know about notes and scales, so this is what the notation is based on.
That doesn't make it any less useful for creating this type of music, but it's in no way a universal theory, or arguably, a theory at all. More a collection of rules and conventions used in Western music.
I've got a degree in classical performance (and deeply love and respect that tradition), but more often collaborate musically with people who don't come from that background. Most will say with a little embarrassment that they wish they knew more "music theory". It's difficult to communicate to, say, and indie songwriter how I think theory might help them (to communicate, or analyze their own or others' music), and ways it's probably totally irrelevant (depending on genre, functional harmony is really not very useful).
And that's still just western music traditions. Study Indonesian music and you can see how many ideas about music are encoded even into the notation of western art music.
If there were aliens physiologically equal to us, I'd bet they'd come to a similar set of conventions and it (their copy of our western tradition) would be the most popular musical tradition in their planet: 12 intervals separated by the equivalent frequency distances, etc. They'd probably have different (saner) names for the notes, but it would be the same kind of music.
It does not actually EXPLAIN anything. Where do these rules come from, and how to use them? Why are there white and black keys? Why does some notes have several names? What are modes for and how to use them?
When I started learning music a few years ago, stumbling upon this kind of content made me so frustrated it inspired me to start https://www.mamie-note.fr, a website to actually explain music theory.
It's in french but I'm considering releasing an english translation. Shoot me a message if you'r curious or interested.
I'm a jazz musician, and have learned very little theory myself beyond basic notation, scales, and chords. I can hold my own on the bandstand.
But without exception, the musicians who are capable of composing and arranging new material of any quality have all studied theory. I think it expands your creative vocabulary in ways that I can't really explain.
If you can analyze a riff or a progression, take it apart and identify its melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and tonal components, then you can use the combos you like to synthesis new stuff later with improv and audia-tion. Theory just gives you a catalog and process for naming things.
I think many musicians learn a lot of this implicitly through their ears, never learning the names and patterns. It works, but its probably slower.
It amazes me that Chick Corea had limited formal education, given his wizardry at both composition and improvisation. Nobody could thread a melodic line through complex changes, with such grace.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0882842250
I've been teaching myself classical piano from scratch (with a very good human teacher and weekly lessons) throughout the pandemic and this book has been a huge help for supplemental information and just getting me in the habit of marking up staff paper.
Here's a very useful collection of infographics on music theory.
"octave" sounds like 8, however it doubles frequency (x2) and is divided in 12 semitones.
"major third" sounds like 3, but involves 4 semitones and a ratio of 5:4
etc...