Hacker News Reader

Comment by heleninboodler | Hacker News Reader

I spent decades not understanding music theory and thinking of music as a sequence of notes, and I never understood why music notation and the layout of a piano were so bizarre. It just seemed like something that we were stuck with due to tradition and lack of innovation.

Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.

View on HN

Yeah, it even goes down to the physics of harmonics.

There's this absolutely wild video by Adam nealy about how polyrhythms are actually cords. (It's very approachable if you know just a smidgeon of music theory). Highly recommend Adam's channel if you're interested in music/music theory. https://youtu.be/JiNKlhspdKg?si=J7eaB1xH4Eo27cC9

>about how polyrhythms are actually cords

Meant chords? I'm not buying it. The commonality is very stretched (notes are ratios, and chords are several ratios together). That's like saying "code is actually poetry, both are based on the arrangement of alphabet symbols groupped in small blocks". More something for a TedX talk, than something practicing composers and musicians have in mind when using either.

For starters, in chords the ratios are stacked vertically (multiple "ratio" notes played together at once), in polyrhythms horizontally. In chords it carries harmonic information, where polyrhythms can and are just as well be played with unpitched drums and percussion. And in general they serve different purposes. You can have chords playing without any polyrhythm in the rhythm side or play monophonic lines with polyrhythms.

You can also play chords polyrhythmically. Timpani is a great example.

You can, but it's optional (and orthogonal).

I haven’t seen the video, but I assume what it’s getting at is that if you have like a simple 5 over 4 polyrhythm and you speed it up sufficiently you’ll start to perceive it as a major third.

I kind of also think that’s a little meaningless since while tempo for a beat and pitch for a tone are both sort of frequencies we perceive them completely differently.

Watched it. He does go into this perception difference, but he still makes a connection between the consonance of a chord due to the frequencies interacting and the consonance of a polyrhythm with the same ratios. A 3-4-5 polyrhythm is analogous to a major triad and has a pattern you can "feel" better than something dissonant.

I just watched the first half of the talk, and it's pretty interesting. I don't think Adam Neely is actually saying they're the same; he's saying it's interesting to think about their similarity. And what you actually get out of the talk is that his point is that pitch is our perception of frequency over a certain limit, and that rhythm is our perception of frequency under that limit. They're both perceptions of frequency and the ratios of those frequencies are the defining property of both chords and polyrhythms.

I haven’t seen the video (and likely will not) but there is a similar “shower thought” that vision is also energy of a given range of frequency, just like hearing.

Yup the more I learn music the more I'm impressed by sheet notation and realise (as someone passionate about programming language theory and also linguistics) that something that can unseat sheet notation will be a huge undertaking.

Granted it does have its edge cases. IIRC it's not great at representing complex rhythm.

But what sheet notation does great man does it do well at it. Like recently have been looking at quite a few different multi voice piano pieces and the fact that using convention you can differentiate between the lower and middles voices is pretty amazing.

Eg in Clair de lune the runs that are played by both hands will share the same beam to denote it's a single voice

However transposing music should not have a dramatic effect on notation. Melodies that sounds the same should look the same.

I'm not convinced, personally. Melodies that sound the same don't really sound the same (hitting different registers on the same instrument), and they aren't played the same (different fingerings), so why would they look the same in notation?

Strong disagree. On many instruments there is a strong memory association between the place of the note on the staff and the physical movement to play that note, Wether it be a fingering, valve combination or lip tension or whatever.

With sheet music, transposing music means moving it up or down the staff, and changing the key signature to match, and adjusting any accidentals.

Music theory gives good reasons for changing keys to have a significant effect on how the song sounds. Most pianos are tuned equal temperment so you don't get that effect, but there is a good argument for other tunings that do. (You may or may not agree, but the argument is valid)

I agree. Even though some (most?) instruments have different shapes for each scale, notation should transcend implementation and aim for the most general representation. See: isomorphic instruments.

I'll concede that traditional music notation is the most efficient way of representing classical music.

Part of me says yes and part of me says no. The thing that music notation recognizes is that which specific notes are important changes depending on which key you're in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com