Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

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While neat and interesting, I think using information theory to analyze music can very easily fall flat especially when comparing across very different musical traditions.

A relevant story for this:

When Europeans came to Senegal they perceived the drumming as being irregular and chaotic. Through taking a class on this drumming I have been able to appreciate how much subtle time differences not represented by western music notation play a role in this music, and also how complex the rhythms are (even when just approximated via western music notation)

Very often there is an implicit discretization that happens before these analyses of music are run and it’s easy to choose a wrong one or for there to not be an easy and human interpretable way of defining the domain of your probability distributions required for such an analysis.

Another example: in pop music timbre plays a much bigger role than in classical music as artists have experimented with vocal styles, synthesizers, and many other ways of shaping sound which cannot be represented by classical music notation.

It’s not like we have many better options right?

Truly distilling quality of music down to metrics that would have predictive power… I mean that seems like an advancement beyond AGI given that humans can’t reliably do it by examining or listening to source material alone.

We have this today! Roman numeral analysis and the study of western music theory will give you the tools to be able to compose a piece of music, without listening to it, and know what will sound good or bad or new and surprising to the listener.

The metrics we have are Roman numeral analysis. We know the four chords to use that will make music sound familiar. We know the harmonies to use that will make music sound like jazz.

This makes sense since it’s possible to create music that sounds like a certain genre without trial and error.

This is to say nothing of non western music, and I’d be interested in an effort, like Chomsky, to define a universal grammar. But we have a lot of material to start with!

It's worth noting that GP's example was about non-quantized rhythmic patterns, which are poorly understand by music theory.

'There are two reasons why my fellow academics should be engaging closely with J Dilla’s music. The first is just cultural literacy; Dilla was influential and is more widely imitated with every passing year. The second is maybe more important: there are not widely used analytical tools for studying this music, and there is a whole world of microrhythm and groove out there that the music academy has been neglecting. Right now, “music theory” classes are mostly harmony and voice-leading classes, and that harmony is too often limited to the historical practices of the Western European aristocracy. But rhythm is at least as important as harmony, and in some musics, significantly more so. There is a persistent belief that rhythm is “less intellectual” or “more instinctive” than harmony and therefore less worthy of serious study. That is pure atavistic racist nonsense, but it also means that it’s hard to do better, because we don’t have the vocabulary or the methods to study rhythm in the depth that it deserves. If we can figure out how to talk about Dilla time, then that will open up a lot of other kinds of time as well.'

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/dilla-time/

Fair point about the original comment talking about rhythm. Agree we don’t study it in theory. And thanks for sharing Dilla, this is new to me.

> It's worth noting that GP's example was about non-quantized rhythmic patterns, which are poorly understand by music theory.

Of course, if you can play it from a CD it has to be 'quantised' at some point.

However I agree that conventional music theory doesn't care about such fine degrees of quantisation.

There is this alternative . But it’s harder to learn then classical music theory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)

There is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_theory_of_tonal_mus...

My impression is that it's not exactly mainstream. I'm also not sure to what extent it works for polyphonic music.

Yes, what you’re talking about is cool.

But rather than only what sounds good, it should be possible in principle to analyze a given piece of music and say, this is on par with the masters, this is not, etc.

Even more tangible if to determine what music is “great” that transcends time and culture. This is less subjective because a small body of work turns out to be great, yet it must have some intrinsic qualities that drive its longevity and universal appeal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

"Notation Must Die" ... excellent deep-ish dive into music notation by the inimitable Tantacrul

My point is general it’s better to do a deep dive into individual musicians and styles to look for findings than to take a framework of analysis developed for one style of music and use it to compare across very different styles of music.

For an interesting analysis of rhythmic variations not represented by classical notation, this is one of the best articles I e seen so far

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=7337

> It’s not like we have many better options right?

one could always decide to just not to (YAGNI).

> Very often there is an implicit discretization

Not just on the temporal dimension. I find that what is called "pitch bend" is highly relevant to the "quality" of most music (even western popular music).

no one's trying to compare across different traditions and your story is uncharitably critical of Europeans, could you pleases use a more ethnically neutral example in the future?

> no one's trying to compare across different traditions

Except that this is precisely what 18th century European musical theorists did, a practice that continues to the present day in some (not all) music education institutions.

While you can certainly hear jokes made in Africa, India and Asia about various deficencies of European music, what you will not find on those continents is a dominant cultural practice of explaining the inherent superiority of their own musicking.

And yes, it is also true that the culture that engages in this is but a single subset of European musical culture, but it also happens to be the dominant one, embraced by both the educational establishment and the elites across the continent. They may look down on certain Basque folk traditions as well as Gamelan and Carnatic traditions, but looking down is precisely what this European phenomena does whenever other traditions are under discussion.

> [...] what you will not find on those continents is a dominant cultural practice of explaining the inherent superiority of their own musicking.

Citation needed. Africa and Asia (including India) are fairly big places, and they also have some peoples with very high opinions of themselves and their cultural legacy. I don't know enough, but my null hypothesis would be that until proven otherwise, I would expect that to extent to music as well (and not just literature or cuisine etc, where I definitely know it's happening.)

It's not about whether there are individuals who feel that way. It's about whether that opinion/attitude has become baked into institutions that play key gatekeeping roles in those societies. One big difference in those countries is that music tends to be(not exclusively anymore, but historically) learned via apprenticeship, a social structure that reduces the scale and scope of "music school" type institutions.

I would have if I could think of one. Also anyone would think those rhythms were chaotic if they had no cultural familiarity with them (including myself!), so I don’t see it as a criticism?

Here’s an example of someone with a lot of twitter followers in the tech world using information theory to compare across different types of music:

https://twitter.com/aidangomez/status/1749532024258412740

God forbid someone be critical of Europe's relationship with west Africa

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