Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People | Hacker News Reader

Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

academic.udayton.edu

236 pointsdmmalam55 comments

Teaching music theory is damned hard.

You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series): "A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note. These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made." It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual.

This is probably the best series of music theory cheatsheets I've ever seen, though... just about any other music theory resource you can find, online or off, gets bogged down immediately in sleep-inducing language. I had to poke around a bit to find the example above.

The real problem is the "building blocks" approach to music theory pedagogy; that is, making students learn all of the basic concepts before they can do anything remotely interesting or useful.

It's really, really logical. It's also a sort of mental torture, in the realm of music theory, because a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster. What about doing basic analysis of a piece of music? So, so many building blocks required first....

I think it's possible to make learning theory enjoyable, but it'd be damned hard (and not possible in a static form).

That said, if you have the external motivation already to make the slog through the basics, these are solid references to help get the details straight in your head.

Teaching music theory can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. I know, because I do it almost every day (its my day job). To make it relatable, you have to tie it into the elements of music-- for this, I use Copland's "What to Listen for in Music". Once students can generally grasp and talk specifically about Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, and Tone Color, you can relate the music theory to it.

I have about 200 6th-8th graders that are able to perform basic figured-bass analysis on major-key chorales in about 3-4 months by progressing in an orderly fashion from notation to rhythm to major scales to the Circle of Fifths to minor scales to intervals, to chords, and finally, to cadencial analysis. Some of them pretty much view it as a game we play with written notes, but, when reinforced by practical experience in private lessons or participation in ensembles, it is remarkable how much they like it and are sad when we move on to Music History in the second half of the year.

That's awesome! I wish you had been my music teacher when I was that age. Keep it up; you are giving a valuable gift to those children.

The way this teaches it is very difficult. They make the same mistake as all music theory lessons, which is to dive right into the Circle of Fifths without ever mentioning how the Circle of Fifths is derived.

I've been thinking about writing a music theory lesson for programmers and "normal" people. I swear it is a conspiracy theory of music teachers to make music theory seem hard. Once you see the logic of how it all comes together, it is head-slapping easy. Music theory is all created from a few easy-to-remember patterns.

I already wrote a bit of music theory code in Python. Maybe this will be my Thanksgiving project.

As a bit of encouragement for you, a primer on "music theory from the ground up" is exactly what I have been looking for. I have tried to learn proper notation as well as scales and chord structures, but I seem to hit a brick wall because it all seems so arbitrary to me. I'd love to know how the system was derived.

I'm hoping one day to find an explanation of what music really is; why do certain patterns of sounds appeal to us; why do we share a sense of melody, harmony, rhythm.

Ideally, this explanation would ignore centuries of historical cruft, starting instead from the physical and physiological basics, and making full use of the infinitely malleable sound generators we all own.

A little something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0

Is it really the case that teaching music theory is hard? I suppose what is hard is teaching music without using actual music -- which is what these sheets attempt to do.

It's pretty easy to teach what a tuplet is, even without written notation: play all eighth notes over a regular ♩♩♩♩ (that's 4 quarter notes) rhythm, then sixteenth notes, then play triplets.

> a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could already pick out by ear 10x faster.

That's why I like the Suzuki method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method

I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting.

Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.

I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.

I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.

The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).

Agreed. Ironically the only tolerable music theory book I read was "music theory for dummies". Actually learned something from that before falling asleep.

Then again, mashing 3 or 4 memorised chords on an old korg trinity gets you quite far without having to know what you are doing :)

This seems to be the perfect place to create interactive lessons, in the spirit of Bret Victor work.

I'm the author of the pages, and wow... I was wondering where all the sudden traffic was coming from. Thanks, dmmalam, for getting my stuff on the front page, and for those who emailed and let me know about it.

First, sorry about the Issuu thing. These pages are actually several years old, and at the time Issuu was actually the easiest way I knew to make them available without burning out my personal hosting bandwidth. I created the index page later on, but used the Issuu links since they were there. (You have to understand, there has never been more than a trickle of a demand for them outside of my own students.)

The other reason I was a little hesitant to bundle them all together is because I'm still working on them, and I didn't want to "publish" something that had the air of being complete.

But the internet has spoken... I've added a link at the top of the page which takes you to a single PDF. (Thanks to jamie_ca and pyroMax for doing this before I stumbled into the party.) Oh, and I fixed the <title> tag, too.

Also, thanks very much for the other feedback that has been sent my way; I do genuinely appreciate it. While I'd like to retain sole authorship (at least for now) rather than make them open-source, I most definitely welcome comments on how they can be improved.

One thing I noticed so far is that you make mention of half vs. whole steps on while discussing accidentals on page one but they're not defined until the major scale is introduced on the fifth page. That could throw beginners off a bit.

Hi Toby, thanks for taking the time to respond and update your page, much appreciated.

With regards to open sourcing, let me make a couple of notes which might help change your mind ;)

Firstly, open source is not the same as no control, or lack of authorship. Open sourcing simply lets others use your material in their own works, and depending on which license you use you can maintain a lot of control over what those derivative works can look like. Time and time again in the open source community we see that actively maintained projects almost always stay together. With large projects where differences arise we see the project split, often to fulfil multiple different needs, but almost always the original project remains as the single source of 'truth'. In truth, there is nothing stopping someone from trying to run their own linux kernel, and some have succeeded fairly well (such as the android kernel project), however everyone still sees Linus' as the 'true' kernel project; a lot of work went into merging the work done for android back into the mainline kernel for this reason.

What does this mean for you? The fact that you are the creator of these documents immediately gives you control of how they are shaped, even in an open sourced format. By open sourcing you allow three things to happen more easily than you would otherwise.

1. Others can use your work in their own works, according to the license you provide. This is bad or good depending on how you see it.

2. You allow someone else to keep maintaining the project if and when you lose interest. This is almost certainly a good thing.

3. You make it much easier for people to provide improvements and 'bug' fixes. You have already stated this is something you are willing for people to send you. By allowing people to actually make the changes themselves, and publish them back to you to incorporate into the 'true' version, you make it easier for people to help you. You are empowering others to do your work for you. You might claim that you lose control over what gets into the project this way - you don't. If someone points out an error you will want to correct it. If they rewrite a paragraph maybe you like the general idea but not the exact wording. You can ask them to rewrite it with suggestions until you like it, incorporate part of it using your own words, or ignore it completely; the power is yours.

Lastly, open sourcing does not inhibit you from making money from the ideas. You might want to treat carefully when selecting a license, and make sure any contributors (if you have any) are aware you might make money from the idea (sharing profits or not is a separate issue, just as important to understand). This side of it can get thorny and would be the one reason I might avoid open sourcing it, or at least avoid taking large contributions.

In any case, open source can be a great tool, and you can still maintain control of your project when using it.

This looks like a great resource, that is severely suffering from lack of accessibility (as pointed out by many others here). I emailed the author, hopefully they will be able to improve the usability. Following is the guts of message I sent, for reference. The documents look over a year old in most cases, so I doubt we will see much, but you never know!

----

First of all, thanks! These are some excellent notes. That said, it is extremely irritating trying to read them. If you could provide the ability to do one or all of the following it would be most excellent:

1. Download of the entire pdf as one document

2. View the documents as a web page/series of web pages

3. Open-source the documentation so others can contribute/provide fixes

This is truly a great effort. At the same time I am frustrated by the choice of the medium. We are well past the age of disseminating information through print. I would love to "hear" the concepts described. Why not make an interactive web page? Maybe sprinkle some audio samples here and there? It seems convoluted to not use sense of hearing to describe music.

Indeed. The ability to click on an interval and immediately hear it -- and/or simultaneously see it played on the piano -- would be quite nice. (Or, conversely, the ability to see piano notes instantly rendered on a staff and have the intervals identified.) Combining two learning pathways -- visual and aural = win.

If Java applets don't make you wince too badly, I have some interactive music theory concepts and drills freely available here:

http://www.emusictheory.com/interact.html

and here http://www.emusictheory.com/practice.html

I largely ran out of time to extend/improve it several years back, but it still gets quite a lot of use; students of subscribing teachers can use MIDI keyboards as well, which makes the instrument/theory link quite tangible.

The OP clearly has skills in page-layout as well as music, but maybe not software development. Some musician/programmer combination (maybe yourself?) is needed to produce what you describe.

As a matter of fact, I am a programmer as well, and I agree with the original comment here; a multimedia experience is the best way to do it. Of course, I'm a college professor, and I give my students that experience every day in class, but having something online makes a lot of sense.

If I had time, I'd start on it right away, but as it is, it's on the Big To-Do List. However, one thing I am actively working on right now is an aural skills practice site that includes the advanced stuff (most existing sites only deal with the basics) and which uses HTML5, CSS and other open standards tech (most existing sites are flash-based). I'm also designing it with an interface that works equally well using a mouse or a touchscreen. This is, IMHO, a huge need in my field. But my project is still in it's infancy, and not ready for prime time.

FYI, the name seems to be playing off 'music for geeks and nerds': http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295714

http://musicforgeeksandnerds.com/

I remember that book being posted on HN, but was hesitant to order it. Has anyone here read it? What are your thoughts?

OK, I can understand never including a leap of an augmented fourth in a single voice. That's just cruel to your singers. But an augmented second? As in a minor third? As in the first two notes of Greensleeves? or Misty? Whyever not?

An augmented fourth sounds great as long as it is then resolved e.g. to the fifth. See "Maria" from West Side Story[1] for the probably the most well known use of an augmented fourth. The first interval when he sings "Maria" is an augmented fourth.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

You're right, it sounds great--but it's darned hard for the average singer to nail it. In any case, I'd still consider your example to be an exception to the general rule, while the augmented second is used so often that I have to believe the author meant something other than what he actually said. (To be excruciatingly precise thought, augmented seconds are not used nearly as often as minor thirds, which are sonically identical, even though they're musicographically different.)

Actually, I'd say the beginning of The Simpsons' theme is the most famous example of an augmented fourth nowadays.

OT: I am not a musician, still kick myself for giving up piano lessons after only a couple years. I believe that anyone who writes software can learn from how musicians practice and get better and don't or do get in a creative/skills/motivation/passion/Groundhog-Day rut...

One of the most interesting books I have in my library is "Effortless Mastery". Recommended by a musician and artist.

http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-M...

Werner's book has value for software devs or mathematicians that read it, if you're the kind that falls into a trance, given a suitable problem to think about.

These also

http://sivers.org/berklee

http://sivers.org/kimo

http://sivers.org/session-musician

http://sivers.org/sakamoto

Thanks for posting this, I have had some very vague ideas about some cool music-related side projects that I could work on, but never knew how to go about learning the theory (enough to at least formulate some well-defined projects). This looks like a good start. Hoping the discussion here will pick up to see more suggestions for math/cs oriented crowd.

It's good, but I dislike the way that it's presented. If you want something that's presented a little better, you may want to try: http://www.musictheory.net/lessons

Anyone who spent time to download every single page want to upload the set?

...please? it just makes zero sense downloading these files one by one, such is the state of the internet. whoever is benefiting from this, please allow me to just send you a few bucks for not going through this awfulness...

This looks great; I hope the other puts a title on the HTML page!

Thanks, this is a nice summary of music theory. I wish the font were more readable... though I like how it conveys a casual feel.

This is pretty sweet. I wish there was a better way of browsing through all the cheat sheets in some kind of full-screen view.

I am also rather annoyed at issuu. If these were all in one PDF file, this would be much easier to consume.

This is awesome, nice work, thanks for sharing.

Issuu wins for most annoying way to break my web experience. I have a perfectly serviceable PDF renderer, but instead I have to let Flash have a shot at my security to get a slowly loading page that has navigation obscuring the content and ignores my scrolling input, requiring me to use their invented elements and watch their slow, jerky, scroll animation. Going to the next page requires closing a tab, searching for which page I was on last in a grid of similar thumbnails, clicking the next one, clicking again to really go to the page, and one more click to approve Flash (ok, that one is self inflicted).

That was a lot of effort on their part to make an interface annoying enough for me to ignore this work.

YES! I too hate these annoying PDF-download-pseudo-services that collect your email-address and your interests (extremely valuable virtual goods) in exchange for a PDF, that the author offers for free (extremely cheap) - this is an unbalanced exchange of information.

These kind of information hijacking must be marked as am abusive business modell that is not acceptable in a free world. We have to think longterm here and defend freedom of information on a very basic level, to be prepared for the larger battles that will come when chinese investors will be the only sources of money.

Please write the authors to remove their PDFs from these services and just put them on a webserver into a PDF folder. Or to use any free file hosting service, anything, but please do not support these ancient flash-fetish-stoneagers and information-suppressors, THANKS!

I'll say one thing for them: it's not quite as annoying as scribd.

Luckily you can (after stupid registration) download these pages and read them offline.

Yes, one page at a time.

After providing your age (I just turned 99 today!) among other required fields.

At least he licensed them CC visibly - Here's the first section merged:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1002031/Music%20Theory%20Fundamental...

Thank you so much. I would love the rest too, if you feel like making another pdf.

Here you go, all pages merged, plus a little bonus:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ln23462k6gu2ay8/Music_Theory.zip

Tip of the hat (repeated in 6/8) for using some of your time to save the rest of us a bit of time.

Thanks for taking the time to do this.

thank you ! issuu is unusable for regular reading.

Awesome, thanks!

I came here hoping to find exactly this. Cheers.

Thank you!

thanks!

There is a link provided to the whole thing as a PDF:

http://academic.udayton.edu/tobyrush/theorypages/complete.pd...

Age is easy - start of epoch! Jan 1 1970, every time.

To trigger some activism against these annoying pdf hijacking sites I just pinned down a FREEDOM-FOR-PDFs-TEMPLATE-TEXT side-project :) - you might use this as a starting point for your own emails, certainly this can be extended:

http://pastebin.com/GhKkAnVP

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