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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

I've always had trouble drawing practical benefit from music theory. Once you go beyond simple scales, it always feels like it quickly devolves into "all these different things can also sound good", and every "rule" can also be broken to spice things up. As long as it sounds good. Conversely, there appears to often be many ways to "explain" a certain composition in terms of music theory.

To be clear, I have seen first-hand that people well-versed in music theory can "understand" and also create (e.g. improvise) music more readily. But I can't seem to find joy in approaching music analytically...

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I've found it better to consider theory a language to describe musical ideas, but not to impose rules. The "understanding" seems to be a bit more about just being able to name what a thing is, and thereby be able to manipulate it intentionally rather than kind of blindly grasping at musical emotion.

Thinking of it as a starting conceptual framework is helpful for me. I like to listen to music that seems to stray from those 'rules' all the time, but the more I learn about theory the more I see that what they're doing is quite intentional.

Agreed.

It's like understanding syntax or grammar for a language. Making explicit names, categories, and systems to take apart what you're doing/saying. 99% of the time though people don't think about that, they go by "feel."

But if you can understand the underlying framework, you can also work to intentionally use those to your advantage such as by reinforcing expectations or subverting them in clever ways. Obviously you can also do this by "feel," but an understanding of the underlying mechanics and systems gives you a better framework to spot the points where you can get away with things. When you want to get deeper and push the boundaries of a craft it also helps to understand what "best practices" are in place and why, and then look to exploit them.

I have a friend who was self-taught guitar and a variety of other instruments and only recently started on piano and proper theory. It's been fun watching him recognize and get a framework for why things he's intuitively known, such as how a cadence works or key transitions through a circle of fifths, be brought to the surface explicitly.

I listen to a lot of progressive metal/math metal and they basically live and die by music theory. While I am not the most musically educated individual, from my listening experience it allows them to defy the listeners expectations. Without this structure the complexity of their music would be closer to grindcore or something which is more chaotic.

Using music theory they can understand why certain composition works and then use the listeners intuition against them to subvert those expectations while still providing something coherent.

An example is something like Bleed by Meshuggah. Most people assume it uses some complex time signature but I am pretty sure its just 4/4. Periphery will have pieces that sound 4/4 but are actually 6/8s. Basically most time signatures (if not all, idk) are effectively extended 4/4, so they can create a riff that eventually hits the 4/4 your internal clock expects to hear but in between you can't necessarily find the pattern.

But like you said, music theory tells you all the rules so you can break them. It's sort of like any other set of rules. You need to understand why they are there so you can understand the right why to subvert them.

Have you seen Yogev Gabay's analyses of prog metal tunes? He did one on Bleed [1].

He uses the terms "guest" and "host" to describe complex time in the songs he analyses. So in Bleed for example, I think he'd say the "host" was 4/4, but the "guest" is definitely not.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcsAAPdJTBE

Oh looks interesting, I haven't seen that. Thanks!

also have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JBjLH_QVsY

Thank you kindly!

I mostly work with pre-classical and classical (pre-romantic) music. For me the utility is mostly about quickly learning and sight-reading music. Quickly getting an idea of phrasing, by seeing where the tension-release should be. Or figuring out how to tune with others in ensembles, when you're not bound by equal temperament (basically anything without piano, organ, guitar).

> Conversely, there appears to often be many ways to "explain" a certain composition in terms of music theory.

Remember that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's a description of existing musical practice, not a set of rules that say what is right and wrong.

To me it's more of a time-saver as opposed to an analytical approach. Having a framework saying (for example) "these four chords tend to sound pretty good together and here are some thoughts on what to play over them" allows me to get right at using those tightly-scoped set of sounds in new ways instead of spending a bunch of time noodling around just trying to find tones that mesh well.

For me it's just a way to make communicating about music quicker. My ear is mediocre at best. Given time I can figure out what's being played, but having another person say, "It's a I-vi-ii-V-I in F" communicates it much more quickly.

> every "rule" can also be broken to spice things up. As long as it sounds good.

This was certainly not the case for western music since the reintroduction of polyphony.

Music can't really only sound good or bad to you? Bach may sound good or bad, but there is surely something more to it than that when comparing it to Shostakovitch, right? Understanding why requires theory.

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