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Comment by scrozier | Hacker News Reader

As a musician and a computer scientist, I'm always interested when music stuff gets posted here. I looked this guy up; he's a bona fide composer, apparently. He looks at music in a very technical way that doesn't sound much (to me) like how musicians talk about music. He also says some wrong things. For example, "We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by listening." Um, yes, you bloody well can. In fact, "ear training" is a core skill in music theory education.

And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this with any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the room. Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!"

I'm not saying he doesn't have his reasons, but these sorts of things incline me to think he's not in the mainstream of musical culture. Which is fine, of course, but may be misleading to readers who think they're getting traditional musical information.

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> We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by listening

He's being (purposely?)confusing here, but in context what he's saying is that you can't determine the names of intervals just by listening: i.e., you can't distinguish between an augmented fifth and a minor sixth just by listening to the two pitches.

> If you did this with any group of musicians

I think you mean any group of musicians in the modern western tradition. Not all traditions count the same way, or even treat numbers as a standard way of marking rhythm. I suspect that if you counted 1-2-3-4 to Sappho she'd just look at you funny and throw her lyre at you or something.

I'd like to be gracious and assume the author is using this weird phrasing to emphasize this universality of his points, but I honestly suspect he's being purposely obscure to emphasize his professorship.

> Strictly speaking, this system is defined only for notated music. We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by listening. However, there are a set of common conventions for notating music that typically make it possible to guess the correct letter-name interval, merely by listening.

I think he means that when you hear a tritone you cannot say for sure whether it's an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth - the notation could technically be written either way. But usually, the "set of common conventions" that he mentions will make one "more correct" than the other.

He is a theorist: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html

See his work on orbifolds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold#Music_theory

> And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this with any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the room. Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!"

Of course this makes way more sense because it drives home the connection between rhythm and modular arithmetic.

Probably better to use 'aught' than 'zero', so they can still be single-syllable.

I don't understand the interval thing. Anyone who knows what 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' sounds like knows what an octave sounds like, and anyone who has seen 'Star Wars' knows a perfect fifth.

Does he mean two notes played at the same time?

I think _maybe_ he meant that you can't tell that you heard a C and an F, only that you heard a perfect fourth. Even that's not 100% true: some people can tell. And it's certainly not what he said.

I believe what he is referring to is the idea that you can't tell the difference between eg. an "augmented second" and a "minor third". One is written e.g. C-D#, one C-Eb. I've always found the distinction between these two types of interval largely pointless - for exactly his reasoning. They sound the same.

Potentially they are useful in discussing theory in writing, potentially they are relevant when tuning using non-equal temperament. But knowing this distinction doesn't help you make music that sounds good. An ear trained pianist, for example, would not distinguish these two intervals, and I would argue that would not be a limiting factor to the quality of music they could produce.

the reason they are named differently and are notated differently is that they serve different functions. they're more or less homophones.

or, perhaps to keep it within the artistic sphere, they're like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion and other "same color" illusions -- they are technically the same, but taken in context they signify different things.

you would build different chords around them, you would play different melodies around them, etc. in other words, it's not just when writing them out in english that we treat those two intervals differently -- we treat them differently while using them during music

you are, of course, correct that many very competent musicians would not correctly name this distinction using the official theory terms. but that doesn't mean that they don't understand the distinction when using them in musical contexts, or that the distinction is not meaningful. plenty of professionals are experts at something without being able to describe it perfectly in words

It depends on the instrument and tuning system. In 12-tone equal temperament they are the same. Some tuning systems treat them differently though, in fact some early keyboards had separate keys, the black keys were split in two so D# was a different key to Eb. Called "split sharps".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_sharp

This statement appears in the section on naming intervals. Does "Greensleeves" start with a minor third or an augmented second?

Strictly speaking, you can't actually know the name of the interval until you see the written notes, although obviously you can make some educated guesses based on the standard practice of the music style.

> I looked this guy up; he's a bona fide composer, apparently.

According to his website, he's a Harvard and Oxford grad that's studied music. He's also a prof at Princeton in their music department (which is no small feat).

It's likely that he's using terminology that's more common in certain circles. If you get into music theory at the top-tier music schools and other high-end educational institutions, the way they talk about music is going to be different than how most practicing musicians talk.

I listened to his Röckdöts on YouTube. Pretty interesting, and done well by the Third Coast Percussion Quartet.

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