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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

This type of reply is indicative of precisely why it's so off putting for programmers to get into music. The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while artist after artist that produce music that we like are clearly following some type of ruleset, at least to some extent.

Electronica might be rhythm and timbre based but even looking at rhythm you can start to ask some basic questions (what note length frequency is more pleasing? Why? What frequency of two underlying beats sounds good? Why?).

Sometimes theory can be nothing more than a collection of discovered tricks. Sometimes it can be something more fundamental. To waive your hands and say that all of it is arbitrary is doing a disservice to anyone trying to learn and understand.

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It's technically correct while also being practically useless.

There are no fundamental rules to grammar, but we still teach writers what a simile is. Even in spelling, English has no consistency about a lot of this stuff. Are spelling rules useful though for non-native learners? Heck yes. Do we still have grammar books? Yes. It turns out that learning the exceptions is sometimes faster than memorizing everything. Music is a communicative medium based in large part around social norms of what combinations of sounds tend to feel good to people who grew up in a specific environment, and music theory is an attempt to break apart that social consensus into basic rules that can be imitated and built up into more complicated genres.

The rules are somewhat arbitrary and made up, but that doesn't mean they're not real, and that doesn't mean you can't sort-of derive some of them from more basic rules or from basic principles.

Music could have gone in multiple directions, but for whatever reason Western music went in the direction it did, and many people who are trying to learn music aren't trying to learn the full spectrum of every direction music could have gone. They're trying to learn how to imitate Western sounds, and for that purpose specifically music has rules -- many of them derivable from other rules, flexible and breakable as they may occasionally be.

They're not rules unless your teacher is an asshole.

Music theory is a language used to be able to have conversations about harmonic and melodic aspects of a piece of music. Rythmic aspects are less well supported (that's putting it mildly) by western musical theory, but the same is true there for whatever formalism or terminology/nomenclature you might pick: it's not a set of rules, it's a language to facilitate non-musical discusison.

That's not entirely true. In fact, the Sound-Harmony-Melody-Rhythm-Growth model for analysis explicitly calls it out as a critical building block of the music that we hear and experience. Like any subject, it takes some study to get to the interesting bits.

For example, the vast majority of people who have taken Music Theory 101 have completed coursework that is the equivalent of "Hello, World!". That is barely scratching the surface and certainly give the aspiring programmer the skills necessary to create something non-trivial. The same is true of music theory. You don't instill in someone the musical understanding of Brahms with one music theory class.

I think that there are rules, but they're less about a teacher being an asshole. Musical styles evolve over time. We wouldn't have classical without baroque, and we wouldn't have romantic without classical. The style itself imposes a "rule" that is really a best practice. How do we in technology treat best practices? Well, they're basically rules that we shouldn't violate without careful thought. The same is true of music. People who study basic music theory learn about the cadences used most commonly in church music ... V-I ... IV-I ... and the deceptive I-IV-V-vi cadence! You feel where music is going because you've learned the rules by listening to other music and embedding yourself within its best practices. V-vi is deceptive because it violates a best practice, but used effectively, it works.

As music evolved, and as the world became smaller in terms of ease of travel and exposure to other cultures' music, we started to see new influences. Debussy and others were influenced by indonesian gamelan music. Without that influence, we might not have the jazz that we have today. Why? The impressionist style that Debussy practiced created floating pillars of sound, chromaticism, etc. that became important elements of early Jazz.

It's all connected and has evolved over time, just like technology. Personally, I do think they are rules, but like most rules, they're meant to be broken.

There's a world where no one thought to put the Amen break in a sampler, and that's a much less interesting world.

I think this is a distinction that only matters if your definition of rules is such that they can never be broken or played with. That's not typically the way I think of rules, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Even programmers understand that a lot of programming "rules" are actually just heuristics about how to produce good code.

As another example, I've spent a ton of time learning game design rules, and all of them are optional, but they're still useful. "Rules" in this context means, yes, communicative terminology, but communicative terminology about particularly effective ways to build commonly understood musical motifs/phrases that affect Western listeners in somewhat predictable ways.

Music theory is a language for talking about a language, music itself. It is partially social convention that leads us to have a 12 tone scale, and it is definitely social convention that leads us to call that a "scale". However, the average Western listener will respond to the notes of that scale in predictable ways, and there are "rules" that you can learn that will allow you to more easily and predictably manipulate that listener's emotions and communicate broader ideas through your music -- many of those underlying rules about tuning, ratios between notes, and so on are derivable from mathematical principles or at least describable in mathematical terms, even if ultimately the reason why listeners respond to some of those ratios is social and arbitrary.

Of course, the rules are not concrete or immutable, they can be broken and often are. But the majority of rules we learn in most subjects are not concrete.

Similarly, there are no concrete rules in writing, and the terminology we use to describe story structure is arbitrary and made up. However, learning the "rules" of writing will make you a better writer for typical audiences that live near you, and those rules are expressed through common set of terms and concepts that many professional/hobby writers have decided to use -- many of which can be partially derived or explained by talking about psychology or history or whatever.

Sure, these are not immutable, scientific principles baked into the heart of the universe, but:

A) the author goes out of her way to say that she isn't claiming that, and

B) breaking down rules and building them back up from different starting points or looking at them mathematically is still a reasonable thing to do with rules that have a social origin, and

C) even though a lot of why certain chords sound good is baked into culture rather than biology, it's also a kind of strong claim to say that all of it is purely social. But I don't think it would matter much even if it was purely social, people who do music theory for a living still talk about math sometimes.

Well, I wasn't really thinking of much in TFA as "the rules of western music theory" - it didn't really get that far. There was another comment that talked about how TFA didn't cover things like chord voicing and inversion, and there is just so much more that wasn't covered that really forms the meat of "the rules of western music theory". TFA really just covered "one basis for 12T, what scales and chords are", which is barely anything to work with.

"Western musical theory" is full of ideas about harmony (OMFG, so many rules), often with non-musical semantics overlaid on top of the actual musical elements. These are the "rules" that you get play with as a musician, and the very best of them do in fact break them frequently (but expertly). Why do so many people remember "Take 5" ... because it's in 5 not 4! Why do people consider Coltrane to be a genius ... because of the games he played with harmonic relationships mostly connected to the circle of fifths but deeply subverted. Why do some of us still celebrate the "genius" of Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Bartok ... they upended traditional rules about harmonic resolution, even the very notion of tonal harmony in some cases. Even within this thread, we see people noting a striking detail of a recent Adele song that consists of (almost certainly deliberately) singing somewhat off-key to strong effect.

There is a huge amount of recorded music that plays entirely by "the rules" (the ones that go way beyond TFA), but a lot of what people think of as musical genius is precisely the stuff that flouts the rules (with enough knowledge of the rules to make this work).

> There was another comment that talked about how TFA didn't cover things like chord voicing and inversion, and there is just so much more that wasn't covered that really forms the meat of "the rules of western music theory". TFA really just covered "one basis for 12T, what scales and chords are", which is barely anything to work with.

I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but people really underestimate how much the "barely anything" notation concepts are a real barrier to people who are unfamiliar with the domain. https://xkcd.com/2501/ comes to mind here; TFA is 5000 words and ends with multiple links to further tutorials and reading. That's a completely fine place to start. If you want to learn the rules of western music theory and get into the meat of what you're talking about, it is going to be a lot more work if you don't know what a scale or a chord is, and I don't see anything wrong with teaching those basic concepts from a mathematical perspective.

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> with enough knowledge of the rules to make this work

That's the part that the author's target demographic wants. They want to be able to either:

A) imitate the rules well enough to write something passable (say for game soundtracks), but aren't looking to innovate, or to

B) learn the rules well enough to innovate.

In both of those cases, even the most basic notation concepts like "what scales and chords are" is a serious barrier to entry for many people.

> I don't see anything wrong with teaching those basic concepts from a mathematical perspective.

One thing that often goes "wrong" with this is that the mathematics of frequency ratios is a huge barrier that's most often irrelevant to actual music making. If you literally know nothing about music, there's a good case for just letting the tuners deal with it for the time being, and starting from the old Do, Re, Mi etc. that teaches you both solfège (sight reading/aural skills) and the musical syntax of scale degrees. Then sing a whole lot of music in (movable do; fixed do is pointless except for specialists) solfège and try to make up simple embellishments and variations on what you sing. There's a "programmer's favorite" way of learning these too (these are called diminutions) based on the scale-degree leap that you're traversing, hypothetical elementary operations of musical syntax and whatnot; but good musical intuition will always be helpful. Guess what, now you're well on your way to improvising simple music at the keyboard, and later on you can even get started on learning counterpoint without being lost in all the details. Because, unlike actual college students who are forced to take a counterpoint class as part of studying bookish "music theory", you'll have the fundamentals down pat.

If that works for you, great. But I don't think the article is implying that learning music has to start with teaching people about frequencies, it's just saying that some people (like the author) have found it helpful to latch onto.

> If you want to learn the rules of western music theory and get into the meat of what you're talking about, it is going to be a lot more work if you don't know what a scale or a chord is, and I don't see anything wrong with teaching those basic concepts from a mathematical perspective.

The problem with teaching them from the particular mathematical perspective taken in this work is that...it doesn't actually teach them, and it throws up it's hands and says I don't really know about fairly basic stuff. This isn't an alternate pedagogical route chosen by someone who has a different view of how to get people up to speed for the domain, it's a smattering of trivia that isn't directed at learning the rest because the author doesn't understand the basics, much less have a particular pedagogical approach to them.

There's a bit of jumping around here, because I'm responding to people who are telling me that mathematical models for music shouldn't be taught at all and that we shouldn't use the word "rule" in music theory.

I think that's a separate conversation from whether this article specifically should be the entire basis for someone learning how to compose music. I agree that I would not point someone at this article and say, "this will be enough to get you on the road to learning how to compose music", I would want something more involved by someone who has more experience.

But that's different from saying it's wrong for the author to talk about sound frequencies.

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To your point in specific, I don't see where the author ever claims that this is an alternate pedagogical route to learning music, the author actively discourages people who already know music from reading the post. The post explains a few basic concepts like what a scale is -- and fairly accurately (or at least about as accurate as most of the other explanations that you'll find online). It openly works through the stuff that the author understands, and openly admits what the author doesn't understand, while sympathizing with the target reader that it's hard to pick up a new subject when it sounds like everyone else is speaking a different language from you.

So basically, it is every single technical blog post written on any subject by anyone who is openly learning about a thing online, and that is something that should be encouraged, not derided.

I also still kind of disagree with people who are saying that this is just trivia or too basic to even talk about, commenters are still underestimating how little normal people know about music.

If people come out of this article understanding stuff like:

- There are 12 "steps" in an octave

- An octave is doubling the frequency of a pitch

- Written down on a staff, we compress those 12 "steps" into roughly 7 spaces.

- A scale is 7 different notes.

- Because of weird ratio stuff and social consensus about which "steps" in an octave are most commonly used, some parts of the scale move 2 "steps" and some move 1

- Transposition exists as a concept, you can play the same song starting at different pitches

- Notes like B# and C can overlap, except some really professional players might treat them differently because it turns out the math we use for different pitches doesn't completely work out correctly in all scenarios.

That's all stuff that people who are unfamiliar with music don't know. Okay, the author doesn't really understand what's going on with minor keys, but this isn't a textbook, and there is value even in something as simple as "an octave is doubling the frequency of a pitch."

I'm weirded out by how upset HN is being about an amateur blog post with reasonably correct information by someone who is actively trying to teach themselves how to write music. This is exactly the content that we should want people to write about online, and it's written in exactly the style that we regularly encourage bloggers to write in when they're exploring new concepts/domains.

I remember Take Five mainly for the bass in the background during the drum break. But then, I like listening to rock music in Just Intonation, so I'm not typical.

Wholeheartedly agreed w/@danShumway - wish I read this before typing my own response. I might have saved myself some time :)

When giving this type of explanation, we want to emphasize that the rules are arbitrary and made up because the dominant way of teaching music theory from the 1920s through to the last decade or two has been to claim it as scientifically or mathematically "optimal" in some way. It isn't.

Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis.

Do you feel like the article isn't doing a good enough job getting that lesson across?

> Western music has twelve distinct pitches. This is somewhat arbitrary — twelve has a few nice mathematical properties, but it’s not absolutely necessary. You could create your own set of notes with eleven pitches, or seventeen, or a hundred, or five. There are forms of music elsewhere in the world that do just that.

[...]

> I get the feeling that treating the whole chord/key ecosystem as a set of rules is like studying Renaissance paintings and deciding that’s how art is. It’s not. Do what you want, if it sounds good. I’m gonna go try that. Consensus seems to be that the real heart of music is managing contrast — like every other form of art.

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> Starting off an explanation of music theory by talking about whole number frequency ratios is like starting off English class with a diagram of the glottis.

I would say it's more like starting out an explanation of color theory by talking about wavelengths, even though you don't really need to know any of that to understand composition, and even though most of the rules of image composition are contextual to specific cultures and aren't hard requirements that artists have to obey.

The math behind color is definitely not a requirement that artists should be forced to learn, but some people find it helpful to know what mathematical formulas were used to create a given color wheel.

I understand your frustration. However, as a trained musician and working programmer, I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview. Although I understand that it's hard, the answer is to study classical Western music theory. (Or Eastern or whatever; I come from the Western tradition.) It's not simple, but it's not rocket science either. When you have this basic theoretical grounding (intervals, scales, chords, music on staves, etc.) then the "world of music" won't seem obscure and magical. It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good." You'll discover things like this for yourself if you allow yourself to study music rather than studying music as applied programming.

My problem is that I quite early learned most basic music theory. But I’ve never really figured out how to use it. I read sheet music and I can play several instruments (not particularly well any of them). It feels like I learned a list of keywords and syntax rules, but never figured out how to program.

Ah. That's a very interesting way to put it! I think it's possible that some people just don't have a "feel" for creating music (call it talent, something you're born with, etc.). But I sense that you enjoy music and maybe feel like you have things you'd like to "say," musically, but are frustrated by your inability to wrestle the tools into doing what you hear in your mind.

Do you play the piano? I think the piano is the best vehicle for grokking music—it allows for melody and harmony (and rhythm) all in one instrument, in sort of a visual way, that is hard to get in monophonic instruments, or even with guitar (for more complicated reasons). I think I developed my musical sense in two main ways: 1. listening to songs on records and on the radio, and figuring out how to replicate them at the piano, and 2. playing lots of music on the piano from sheet music, where I was constantly exposed to chord progressions and the like in other people's music; the "tropes" of Western classical and popular music, if you like. Neither of these are trivial, but both are within reach of most people, I think. I will posit that there are few shortcuts to musical mastery. Grokking music is definitely not like (as easy as) learning a new programming language.

Thank you for your answer. It have given me something to ponder. I've already considering getting a digital piano as a birthday present for myself in a few weeks time. Not only for myself, but also hoping I can inspire, or at least give the opportunity for, my kids to play.

I started out my musical explorations as a kid in piano lessons, then playing sax in school until halfway through high school. I never felt confident in playing, didn't feel free to explore, and judged every sound I made as right/wrong.

6 years ago, I accidentally abandoned my preferences and disengaged disgust in an attempt to stop automatically judging. And then I returned to music for the first time in 18 years with the idea that there is no wrong note. Here are some of my observations:

- I wasn't deeply/actively/mindfully listening to music when I was younger. This was part of a cycle of an attention-degrading cycle where I'd hear music and then distract myself with judgements of it, emotions that followed the judgments, and judgments about those emotions.

- Songs that "feel sad" don't. How a person hears/attends to music, how their body has been conditioned to receive different notes/chords/progressions, the meaning given to the sounds/words, the judgments around those things, and how they learned to feel in response to those judgments is what's being described when someone says a song feels a certain way to them. It's not universal and those feelings can be disengaged.

- How I feel in response to music has gotten way deeper and more expansive as a result of releasing all those conditioned feelings. I did this, in part, by pressing a bunch of random keys down on an organ and sitting with the feelings that came up and let them pass. Part of the practice involves letting up on one key at a time and then pressing it again, back and forth, until I can distinguish the note in the cacophony and have reached a feeling of contentment with the sounds. Rinse and repeat for each note.

- Music theory is absolutely unnecessary and in many ways hinders the learning process. I play improvisationally and not necessarily to play a song I've heard. Doing this for a year led to the emergence of a skill where I can start picking out melodies I remember.

- Styles and genres are largely based around preferences. I have a friend whose connective tissue disease (Ehrler-Danlos Syndrome) keeps them from feeling music. As a result, they've developed a strong liking of noise music, which would likely feel very uncomfortable in the body to people whose bodies have been trained on more traditional forms of music.

- The discomfort with dissonance is largely a learned thing, due to cultures of being unwilling to sit with dissonance. It can be turned off.

- If what you're looking to do is make music people can easily like based on commonly cultivated body feels around different sounds and preferences, focus on rhythms that don't change much, avoiding dissonance by default, repetition and also on novelty.

- If you want to make music people can easily ENJOY, repetition, improvisation, and novelty are keys. If you don't know any music theory, novelty will be easy. If you can make some sounds and then vaguely make the same sounds again, repetition will come (this can take a bit of practice, especially if not very connected with the body). Improvisation is such a broad idea because there's improvising around a melody or theme, around rhythm, around volume, around whatever the inspiration is (whether it be sounds, rhythms, feels, words, stories, colors, whatever), and probably more. Allowing and accepting whatever happens is a key to improvisation.

- Music can be enjoyable, even with abrupt transitions from slow to fast, soft to loud, harmonious to dissonant, rhythmic to droning.

- If I want to play what's in my mind, I can sing it and play along with how I'm singing.

- "Wrong notes" played rhythmically can fit into anything.

- If there's no wrong sound, I can play any instrument.

- Everything is a drum.

- Everything is music. Including silence. They cannot compel the silence to cease. So you are music trying to music in some ways and making music without trying. Trying to do that in a way that gains approval or caters to preferences is one way to live. Experimenting in the ways I describe here is another.

I love the direction you took this. I happen to love experimental music and agree that it is a wonderful and fruitful avenue for musical exploration. I'm fascinated by your process of disassociating your emotional responses from what you heard.

I happened to go to an experimental concert just last week, involving organs (since you mentioned them). You might enjoy it. It's available for streaming here: https://roulette.org/event/cleek-schrey-and-weston-olencki-o...

Thanks for this! Gonna watch it right now if the 3yo wants to. Update: they do.

Here's the instructions for doing the nonjudgment practice that led to all these realizations. I highly recommend them. The effects are quite literally lifechanging, unlocking/unblocking joys I didn't even know were possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764591

We have a pump organ in our living room. This music is incredibly affirming for me because it sounds very much like music I first started playing when I started playing again AND I started on the pump organ (which at least one of the musicians at the start of the music is playing on).

I've had to really staunchly stand up for myself and my music to other musicians and to my past notions of music, and have definitely gotten defensive around playing music like this.

No more. I'll just send people to this. And I'm definitely going to focus on playing more like this again.

Thanks again for bringing this into our lives! <3

There were about 250 people in the audience that night, which I thought was amazing for a program of experimental music involving pump organs, a banjo, and a Korean mouth-blown reed instrument.

Addendum to the above: I also had lots of direct instruction in music: piano lessons, theory classes, music history classes, various instrument lessons, composition classes, etc. It all adds up.

> I get very frustrated with programmers posting here in HN that want to somehow fit music into their programmer worldview

I sometimes feel like one could take this sentence and substitute just about anything for "music."

It's just the Knuth quote

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

There is nothing wrong with trying to turn an art into a science. Music just has a bunch of implicit rules that people want to make explicit. Musicians find this frustrating because they aren't interested in understanding music this way. Both perspectives are fine.

Of course both perspectives are fine. And fair enough for you to point it out. I may have misinterpreted the person I was replying to. I got the impression that they wanted to better understand music from a musical point of view, and I responded that wanting to know optimal beat frequencies and such was probably not a fruitful route. But you're right, if one wants to view music as a deep treasure trove of source material for some kind of scientific analysis that makes one happy...go for it! And realize that that's probably not the route to becoming a musician, in the traditional sense.

I think most musicians recognise that the implicit rules are so complex that any reductive approach is going to fail if you want something like a simple formula for generating interesting music. It's just like language.

Yes. But/and I see posts on HN about every two weeks that indicate that most programmer types (a group that includes me) do not recognize that. (Your analogy to language is apt, I think.)

>It's really not terribly important to know "what frequency of two underlying beats sounds good."

And yet I get the feeling that if someone does investigates that (and adjacent topics) in depth with success there would be a bunch of interesting consequences to it.

Maybe, I have got no knowledge in the field - it just sound like something interesting, why the heck wouldn't we want to know it?

Many people in music know the answer to that and related questions. Sometimes the answers prove interesting, as you say. What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly. They (questions like that) seem like they're interesting, because they appeal to us as programmers somehow (math-y), but they are largely on the fringe of the broad body of knowledge that makers of current popular music (say) operate with. You wouldn't expect a musician to come into programming saying, "so what's the equivalent of sonata allegro form in a typical computer program?" It would be applying the wrong paradigms/framework to the topic at hand.

>What I'm saying is that I don't think questions like that are a useful/effective route to understanding music more broadly.

Thanks, I misunderstood you.

> The attitude of "there are no rules!" is espoused while artist after artist that produce music that we like are clearly following some type of ruleset, at least to some extent.

It's a craft, not a rigid system that you have to follow. What's called 'Rules' in music is more like patterns that have been found to sound good. For example, the famous 'Rule of the Octave' is a pattern based originally on playing thirds and sixths ("first inversion chords" if you want to phrase it that way) over a "walking" baseline. But the rule is far from fixed, and almost immediately the basic pattern using thirds and sixths was altered to use thirds and fifths ("root position chords") on the tonic and dominant degrees. Then the other chords were altered in turn, giving each bass scale degree a sonic identity of its own, with ascending and descending, major and minor varieties etc. Thus what literally started as a simple and basic rule has become incredibly complex. This just shows how a craft can evolve to become more interesting; rigid, foolproof rules cannot. And the "rule of the octave" is a tiny part of music as a whole (though it's pretty foundational, all things considered); but guess what, other "rules" work the exact same way!

They are not saying it's arbitrary, they're just saying it can't be consistently derived from some fundamental, smaller set of principles.

'Music theory' is much more of a working practice musicians use to communicate with each other and document their work and discoveries. How programmers feel about their notation systems isn't something working musicians should be concerned with, I don't think.

There is no fundamental thing that makes some notes or combinations pleasing and others not. It is all culturally mediated. I know that possibly seems unlikely and uncomfortable, but nonetheless it is true. If you drill down far enough into music you find the harmonic ratios, and human culture. That's it, there is nothing else down there at the foundations.

As someone who is firmly on the math side and knows very little about music theory, it seems like you should never expect music theory to answer subjective questions like "Why does x sound better than y?" There are so many factors for why someone will find a sound pleasing or not, and most of them are biological/psychological.

IMO asking why a melody sounds pleasing would be like asking why a plot of the Mandelbrot set is interesting; math isn't going to be able to answer that.

I would be fine with a music theory that is a set of tools to deal with sounds, just as math is a set of tools to deal with numbers. Whether certain properties are desirable are up to the theorist.

The difference between rules in programming and rules in music is that in the first case they're normative, in the second case they're descriptive.

Music theory can tell you why a specific combination of notes and a chord progression in a musical piece are pleasant to the ear, but does not guarantee that using similar combinations and progressions will result in pleasant sounds.

Part of the reason is subjectivity, in the sense of music is intended to be heard by subjects. And these subjects have their own experiences of music, which in turn conditions their expectations and their reactions to sounds. What sounds good is different from person to person, let alone from culture to culture. Coming from a classical background, when I heard jazz at a young age, I considered it chaotic and awful. Today, it's the most pleasant style of music for my ears. I've seen people who had never, ever heard opera music listen to an aria and laugh to tears because for them it was comically awful.

Another is reason, I think, is that music is embodied by who plays it. I can play Blackbird in the exact same way Paul McCartney does, but when I do it the best I can expect is people saying "that's nice!". When McCartney plays it, the entire stadium hold their breath and get chills, some are in tears. I don't see how that level of emotion can be explained in a scientific way.

> The attitude of "there are no rules!"

GP didn't say there are no rules.

“The rules are culturally, and path, dependent and are not derived or derivable from a simple set of universal first principles” is very far from “there are no rules”.

It does mean that certain approaches to learning the rules that might fit well with people's abstract preferences for how they’d like to approach the field don't work well in practice, though.

I agree with OPs sentiment only that it's not true there's no theory on rhythm or on timbre. I can share rhythms and patches with anyone in the world even if we don't speak the same language and we can work on them together, there's a rudimentary symbolic language for them that is universal. Maybe we don't have an algebra of timbre but we definitely have an algebra for rhythm. Theory is also taxonomy and categories of things.

What "there are no rules!" is kinda the excuse for music theorists to keep on working on a field that has had so far little applications on how music is created. Maybe yeah on how some people learn it, but that's it. It's basically them admitting that actually successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated.

> successful musicians usually work under a set of rules and techniques so simple from the theoretical standpoint that the whole field gets invalidated.

If anything, it's just the opposite. The 'rules' (again, this should be understood as patterns, or perhaps rules of thumb) practitioners implicitly rely on are far more complex than most theorists are implicitly comfortable with. This is why bookish music theory was mired for centuries in pointless discussions about acoustics and ratios, or some incredibly weird formalisms for representing meter, whilst practitioners got on simply focusing on what sounded good.

I've gotten instruction from very prodigious practitioners and their opinion on the rules they are following is what I stated. You can get through introductory jazz or classical piano and also basic orchestral composition and the patterns or rules you'll know are about are going to be super basic and even very sophisticated niche and "intellectual" music is not being created by people with more theoretic knowledge than that.

That's why I talked about implied reliance, as opposed to what people explicitly "know about". Surfacing the actual practical rules behind what practitioners are doing is arguably a theorist's job, but many theorists are not fully comfortable with the kind of thinking that this would require.

(The 'Rule of the Octave', which is the kind of rule I'm pointing to, was quite exceptional in being explicitly taught in actual published treatises about music - and even that was practically forgotten later on; it's not usually taught in "introductory music theory" classes even though it arguably should be!)

I'm a programmer that got into Music.

I hit my head... and other people's heads... and tables and walls... until I realized that:

1. Yes, there are "rules"

2. They are far far far more arbitrary than I realized

3. They are far from universally applicable.

Personally, I expected music to be heavily math based, with universal rules.

But my current understanding is that while there IS a lot of math, what sounds good / what people in any given culture like, is all arbitrary. You can use math to describe some of it, but not to derive it.

As well, unfortunately, when people say "Music Theory", they largely mean a variation on one or both of:

1. Note reading - Western music notation, which I don't consider "Music Theory" but rather notation, but many will disagree

2. Western Music Theory, largely though not entirely put down by 18th century old cranky europeans based on what they happened to like at the time

There is FAR less "universalness" in Western Music theory than I thought.

So there is this combination of:

* Huge englightnment and pattern recognition and increased understanding as I learned more music theory

and

* tremendous frustration at inconsistency and arbitrariness, until I realized it wasn't my music teacher who hated me, it's that what they are teaching me is arbitrary

So personally, I think it's important for programmer to accept "there are no rules (in the sense that we think of "rules", boolean logic and math etc), though there are guidelines and recommendations (which are completely arbitrary and cultural-based)"

It turns out "what rhythm / note / combination / frequency is more pleasing" is 99% how you were brought up / what you are used to, rather than some math/physics correlation. Move to another part of the world and throw out your 4/4 and 12-note equal temperament and I-V-vi-IV

Based on how many fellow programmers I know who play instruments or write compositions or otherwise produce music... it doesn't actually seem off putting for programmers to get into music. Is your experience different?

Oddly enough I'm a programmer and musician. But I learned music before I learned programming.

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