Music Theory for Programmers
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If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.
If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.
If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.
That is called "perfect pitch" and it is not necessary to play music. It's very rare to have perfect pitch, and it seems to be innate, not something you learn.
Contextual note recognition (relative pitch) is what musicians normally use to jam. It comes with practice and contextual clues that you pick up over tens of years (including familiarity with your jammate's instrument, even if it's not the one you play; familiarity with multiple eras of music theory; pure practice), so this shouldn't be your #1 priority since it just comes along for free (or a bit of practice), as you learn. Music playing 101 is just... playing music in your instrument. You don't need to recognize notes until you want to jam, which comes years after you start playing an instrument.
Some people seem to just be physically unable to distinguish relative pitch though.
You might want to start here: https://www.musictheory.net/ (not affiliated, I just think it's a very good resource for Music Theory 101).
I used to think I was pitch blind until one day it just clicked. It just takes practice in my opinion.
Once you have a point of reference things just go up and down and from there it should be manageable to identify each note.
Also, not sure about the innate thing. Seems to me that it's just a neural pathway that can be created by playing or listening to a whole lot of music while being aware of which tone is which, for example by reading the score alongside.
There seems to be many different ways of having perfect pitch. For example, some singers may connect it more to the physical sensation of applying tension to their vocal cords (so they have to be singing the pitch or imagine singing it to be able to tell). For others it's purely auditive.
It's just a quirk of human physiology. The real creativeness and ingenuity comes from rhythm and the interplay of repetitive and surprising sounds. The pitches are not important.
I am not an expert, so maybe this book has its own shortcomings which I am being blind to. But this is the first book on music I have been able to read this far without having to fight the urge to fling it against a wall.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262692373/music-and-memory/
Once that is established, as per the linked article, 12-tone equal temperament makes a lot of sense (but isn’t universal, obviously) because it’s resulting tuning gives us a really close 3/2 and 4/3, and having a simple 12-tone scale reasonably in tune everyone can agree on makes sense.
We can then explain that 5/4 and 6/5 are a bit off in 12-tone, but are “good enough” that we tolerate them being slightly out of tune when using equal temperament. Once we accept that 12-tone has imperfect thirds, we can then look at the I IV V chord progression (I IV V comes from 3/2, 5/4, and 4/3 sounding pleasant to the human ear), and explain why that chord progression is so common in western popular music.
These aren’t universal truths—12-tone equal temperament is a compromise, but, as per the linked article, a reasonable one. Just intonation is, of course, another possible compromise.
[1] 2/1: Octave; 3/2: Perfect fifth; 4/3: Perfect fourth; 5/4: Major third; 6/5: Minor third
And in many cases we don't need to tolerate this because most instruments barring guitar and piano allow musicians to tune chords to just temperament, and players will do this automatically and completely subconsciously.
The linked article makes the case for equal temperament by showing that 12 just fifths played in sequence is flat compared to seven octaves.
Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a certain make.
Side note: It may very well be a sampled trumpet.
“"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying”
>>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’, for example, didn’t appear in the production until nine versions into the song. The final version, on a whim, we decided to try using a trumpet, a live trumpet, to play that line and it stuck. We ended up actually using the trumpet a lot throughout the album after we included it in ‘Safe and Sound’.
"It was trial and error, right? We felt like that line was an epic line and we thought about different instruments that sounded epic, and the trumpet is obviously one of them,<<<
The thing about trumpets is this: Their fifth is a little “sharp” because it’s a perfect just intonated fifth (i.e. a perfect 3/2 ratio).
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.
Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.
To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.
And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.
[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac
[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...
The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels much more intuitive to some (like the author, and myself), compared to traditional music education.
Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"
There is "western music theory" ala Schenker, voice leading, serialism etc (to mention a couple of names that some people might have heard of) but that describes things to do once you've got a scale and chord system.
This is "12T music theory", describing how you might get to a scale and chord system.
I don't see how it is confusing. You can spend a lot of time doing "western music theory" without ever understanding most of what is in this article, that is certainly true. But the fact this this outlines a bunch of stuff that undergirds what a composing (or improvising) musician might consider "music theory" doesn't invalidate it, or make it confusing, IMO.
Look, it's like me writing an introduction to "colour theory" and then writing about something else that eventually leads to how we see colour.
I'm not debating that the article has useful content – it does – but it's title and framing is misleading, which is a disservice to the new student. I happen to personally believe everyone getting into music theory would be well served by knowing more acoustics and that this is useful material. But muddying the waters by using terms in weird ways is off.
And when you write about a field and use the wrong terms, you lose credibility. Sorry, I don't trust authors who can't be arsed to use the standard nomenclature for a topic, it really doesn't make them sound trustworthy.
Scales and chords build the fundamental basic blocks for Western music (I would introduce equal temperament third but that's only a matter of ordering). They are taken for granted in musical practice, I agree, but only because musical practice concerns itself about how/what to play and why. If somebody comes from the point of view that clefs and stems (which are undoubtedly musical tools) are gatekeeping and all you need is a piano roll, this article explains from first principles enough musical building blocks to tell them why they're wrong.
On the other hand, if the author had said something like "Intro to the acoustics behind musical scales", then they might go on to order great books like Kyle Gann's or Gareth Loy's and be off to the races.
Redefining normal terms just makes people sound like they have no clue, and that is, 100%, a serious disservice to the reader/student.
Harmonics and temperament aren't really relevant to all this, though at some point you have to explain why certain intervals are naturally consonant but "boring", and others can be made to make sense but mostly within a more complex voicing (which reconnects to topics like inversions and voice leading).
(For disclosure I studied piano until ~20, both classical and jazz, and I would call my knowledge of jazz theory "decent" for someone with zero professional or academic experience. Obviously not comparable to yours and not even in English, so perhaps what I wrote above will sound really stupid).
And this is correct because ... ?
There are whole subsectors of "music theory" that cover precisely this sort of thing, even though they are fairly arcane. I'm thinking of things like pitch set theory.
My own take is that western musical pedagogy, at least historically, is one of the worst examples of pedagogy that exists, precisely because of what is taught, in what order, and why. It pretends (or used to) to have some sort of universality or inevitability, when even a scant familiarity with other musical cultures would make it clear that this is false. It is emphasizes a note-centric rather than interval-centric approach to melody (and chords) that ignores centuries of (folk) musical practice (most simply known as transposition, but the implications of it are staggering, and largely elided).
So, defending what that pedagogy calls "music theory" seems like weak sauce to me. Especially given, as many others have pointed out, western/european "music theory" is a codification of existing practice for the most, not a generative theory.
Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to the new learner, that's where it is! I actually think a crash course in acoustics would be a good addition to a comprehensive theory book, but it doesn't change the fact that no theory course or book has this stuff (not even my pitch set texts!)
I teach music students regularly. I spend a lot of time explaining what something is called in various contexts. They need to know this to learn in a productive and not frustrating manner. They can then learn later why the terms are imperfect and used differently in different subcultures.
But no argument on that is going to convince me that it's good pedagogy to tell new readers that a post on acoustics and synthesis is on music theory. That's just counterproductive at best, or ignorant at worst.
Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.
My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.
The example I'm most familiar with is Carnatic and Hindustani music, where there are theoretically 22 tones per octave, and in fact the tones in most cases actually cover a range of frequencies rather than a single one. Nevertheless, the most common and most popular music from those traditions tends to only use about 7 tones per octave (equivalent to a western "scale"), and they still have a very central for tone ratios like 3/2.
The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.
To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.
Is it? Why?
If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.
Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.
I've always thought that's mistitled. Better would be Traditional Western Music Notation Theory.
Notice what's absent, e.g. frequency and timbre which are nicely introduced by the current article.
Music theory is a lot wider than the ABSRM syllabus. And the current article is a great starting point.
Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
Entry-level trad Western Theory gives you the concept of a basic grammar as a first introduction, but once you have that you can extend it fairly painlessly to jazz/funk/metal/pop/whatever.
Advanced classical grammar - baroque and modal counterpoint, extended harmony, and such - has some useful pointers for modern song-writing, but it's a specialised skill for experts. Movie and game score composers likely know it, but it's a degree-level skill.
Sound design theory is a subset of orchestration. The proof is that you can take most music and play it with simple sine wave bloops - no orchestration at all - and it remains completely recognisable.
Explaining equal temperament etc sounds clever and it's interesting if you like that kind of thing, but it's a distracting level of nerdery that doesn't help at all with basic song writing.
At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.
Deriving Western music traditions from first principles does not help you to understand why, what, and how any of it actually works.
However, first principles explain “why” a major chord sounds the way it does, and “why” a minor chord has more tension.
Let’s look at the five-limit just intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5. 2/1 is a perfect interval; two notes an octave apart sound nearly the same. 3/2 and 4/3 are also perfect intervals, but there’s a little more tension and beating than with 2/1. 5/4 has a little more tension than 4/3, and 6/5 has even more tension. I just explained, using first principles, the octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, major third, and minor third. That’s most of the scale right there.
Now, let’s make a chord. Experience has shown that three notes is more interesting to the human ear than just two notes. That in mind, we want three distinct notes where the intervals between notes have a minimum of tension. Take the root, take 5/4 of that, then take 3/2 of the root. That’s a major chord. The reason we use 5/4 instead of 4/3 is because the interval between 5/4 and 3/2 is 6/5; the interval between 4/3 and 3/2 is 9/8. Since 9/8 has more tension than 6/5, that gives us a suspended chord, and it’s better to use a major chord with less tension to make a simple chord progression.
Now that we have our first chord, we can hear that having a 1-chord song becomes repetitive very quickly to the human ear. We can make the song more dynamic and interesting by giving it three chords: I, IV, and V. Take that chord: 1, 5/4, and 3/2 (a major chord). Move all three notes up 4/3, because 4/3 is a perfect interval with a minimum of tension. That’s our IV chord (F chord in the key of C major) Next, from the root position, instead of moving up the chord 4/3, we instead move it up 3/2. That’s a V (or dominant) chord—a G chord when played in the key of C major.
Now, from first principles, namely that the intervals 3/2, 4/3, and 5/4 sound pleasant to the human ear, that 6/5 has more tension, and 9/8 has even more tension (so we avoid suspended chords for now), we have a I IV V chord progression, which is the basis for countless rock and popular songs.
If we take all of the individual notes from the I IV V chord progression, that gives us the seven notes of the major scale, after explaining that, once we cross the octave threshold, we can transpose an octave down without affecting the musicality of the notes. We might even explain chord inversions here.
So instead of just parroting “I IV V makes a nice simple chord progression”, we now know the underlying physics which make I IV V sound so nice to the human ear, and how to get the major scale from those chords. I prefer understanding both the why and the how.
(I would have used two slightly detuned sawtooth waves instead of a sine wave for most of the examples if I were to write an article like the one this discussion links to, explaining this has a more pleasant, piano or violin like sound to it. Maybe even a low pass filter to tame the harmonics. Another option is to run a single sawtooth wave through a Solina style chorus, but explaining two detuned sawtooth waves is easier than trying to explain the Solina chorus effect)
Music theory is useful because it establishes a vocabulary.
Other ancient tuning systems are based on three limit tuning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi%27er_l%C3%BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning
Whether the human ear naturally prefers 5/4 (5-limit) over 81/64 (Pythagorean) for the major third, and 6/5 over 32/27 for the minor third, is still something I don’t have solid research on.
As it turns out, the modern western scale is more closely aligned with Pythagorean tuning than with five-limit tuning. In particular, the Pythagorean thirds are closer to modern 12-tone equal tempered thirds than they are to five limit thirds.
https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth5.html
>>>Around 1300, the English theorist Walter Odington proposes that major and minor thirds (81:64, 32:27) have ratios close to 5:4 and 6:5 respectively, and that singers lean toward these simpler ratios. His observation may reflect the style of much English polyphony of the period, where thirds often have a pervasive role in the texture and may even serve as closing sonorities.<<<
https://casfaculty.case.edu/ross-duffin/just-intonation-in-r...
>>>Beginning with Ramos de Pareja in 1482,Fn11 the simple ratios of Just intonation began to be cited by theorists and used in their divisions of the monochord. [...] an octave is 2:1, a fifth is 3:2, a fourth is 4:3, a pure major third is 5:4, a pure minor third is 6:5. These “six-limit” ratios—the senarius, or senario, as Zarlino calls them—are the basic harmonic intervals. Zarlino attributed almost mystical significance to the senario<<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gioseffo_Zarlino
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000313131706700215?...
This article is paywalled, but to summarize, it makes the case that the 5:4 and 6:5 ratios are ratios musicians naturally drift towards in polyphonic contexts.
It reminds me a bit of regular polygons or simple geometry like circles- and it makes sense the Greeks would be interested in both- things that are pleasant and can combine and tile well because of their symmetric and regular properties.
I think my "pushback" was more just at the phrasing of "why" something sounds "good"- I do think when we listen to music, we bring our past and our culture into it, and whether a chord sounds "sad" or "happy" depends on a lot more than just the harmonic structure- I wonder about this concept of "tension" you bring up, I can't tell if you mean something emotional or more mechanical. Is that like something you understand just by crunching the numbers on the ratios?
That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it.
Me, I agree with WP:
"Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory
Does anybody, though? Would anybody listen to it? Every culture on Earth has music. All of them use chords, scales, and rhythm, in various ways. Definitely not all of them use the Western diatonic system, but that's beside the point.
And what is "distracting level of nerdery" to someone can be the key that helps unlock a deeper level of understanding to someone else. I thought we understood neurodivergence a little better these days.
The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures. The contents of TFA, while not strictly comprehensive when considering other musical cultures, is still pretty on point. Even though Carnatic and Hindustani music theoretically uses 22 tones per octave, the most common ones are still drawn from the same set of 12 used in western music, and the most common scales are remarkably similar.
Say it louder for those at the back. People keep forgetting that western theory was unable to explain why the blues (the American music form by excellence) worked at all. And arguably, a lot of the western music theory is more akin to a codification of existing musical practices in the western world rather than some scientific model. But a lot of music theory fans seem to dogmatically treat it as THE science of ALL music.
His response sounded kind of gatekeep-y to me. Kind of like an academic with theoretical knowledge, but no practical experience.
Many great musicians never learned proper music theory. Innovation comes from outside, not from inside the establishment.
You can get so far with just an aural tradition but the invention of writing helps.
I know music notation and can write things down, but I'm not a good composer. I'm at the mercy of others to write new material if that's what I'm interested in playing.
And writing it down in a way that other musicians can understand is of nontrivial value if you want people to play your stuff.
More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions. They may occasionally have something finished, but 'it doesn't sound right'. Then go back to music theory and say, oh, this chord is wrong. I can fix that chord because I know music theory and come up with something that works. But they're not doing that at first. They're composing from their unconscious mind.
Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.
Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.
No composer I know thinks in the terms of music theory. They often use a chord progression that music theory describes why it works, but they're not thinking of it in terms of music theory. They're thinking in terms of chord progression, just like the composers of thousands years ago were thinking of their chord progressions the exact style changes and so a thousand years ago they went to thought in terms of modern chord progressions but they were still thinking in similar terms.
Broadly completely untrue.
If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced musical tradition on the planet (including Western, but also Indian, Chinese, etc.) has developed alongside a system of analyzing that music, and for very good reason: It's a lot easier to teach music when you can actually talk about it.
I promise you, every single competent composer and musician on the planet - from every culture - has a fairly firm grasp on music theory, in whatever flavor is relevant to the form of music they practice. Every Indian musician who plays classical Indian music knows their ragas. Every Western musician can navigate the diatonic scale.
Sure, at some level of expertise you’re not sitting there saying “oh, I should name variables sensibly and encapsulate functionality because computer science says to”; they are doing those things because with training and experience that becomes innate and accessible in flow state.
But the fact that theory can become ingrained does not mean one isn’t using theory.
Disclosure: Musician
The AI style gets boring very quickly, but I liked the explanation of what Western music notation is optimized for. For more information on this, there's a great and long video at https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4.
(Edit: I wrote this around the same time as the reply, which more or less confirmed my hunch)
Music theory was originally a tool for music critics in the 19th century to talk about conservatory music of the time.
There's nothing rigorous, systematic or scientific in it; it's mostly a historical cultural artifact more than anything else.
For example, music "theory" is completely helpless when describing an EDM track or how to compose one. EDM is one of the most primitive music styles ever (barely even qualifies as music in my opinion) and yet music "theory" is worthless in this case.
Is music "theory" actually a theory? Can it be used to predict or construct something? Even just a two-note steady-pulse acid bass beat. I'm not asking for much.
It’s really good at explaining the octave, the fifth, it shows the mathematical basis for why just intonation has “wolf notes”, and why we use 12-tone equal temperament.
Once it hits the 12-tone scale, and explains why we generally avoid the tritone, it doesn’t explain very well why we generally use diatonic instead of chromatic scales (well, OK, great music can use chromatic scales, but there’s a reason “Entrance of the Gladiators” sounds like a clown show).
I would had, after explaining how 12-tone gives us an almost perfect fifth and fourth, explained that a major third is 5/4, and a minor third is 6/5, and that the thirds are noticeably but tolerably out of tune in 12-tone equal temperament.
Once we have the fifth and the major third, we then explain the major chord (Base note, 3/2, and roughly 5/4). Next, we explain the perfect fourth. From there, we can show the I IV V chord progression. And once we have I IV V we can then demonstrate the major scale. (The linked article shows us a major scale but doesn’t explain why the major scale is tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone—it’s that way because if we take all of the notes that exist in a I IV V chord progression, we get the seven notes of a major scale)
After I IV V, I would then look at a basic 4/4 rhythm, quarter notes, eight notes, the kick drum, the snare drum, and the closed hi hat.
I IV V, the major scale, and a simple 4/4 rhythm is enough music theory to write a good number of rock and pop songs.
I IV V and the major scale is roughly equivalent to understanding variables and variable assignment. Adding the structure of a 4/4 rhythm, with kick, snare, and high hat is equivalent to if-then-else and while.
From there, if I were to continue, I would next explain the minor third (6/5) and minor scale, the pentatonic scales (minor pentatonic gives us a large number of rock guitar solos), and probably show the I V vi IV chord progression.
Obviously, this is very basic, but things like ABRSM Grade 5 are the music equivalent of Forth-like and Lisp-like languages: They can be useful, but just as the majority of programs aren’t written in Forth or a Lisp dialect, the majority of music doesn’t use, say, an irregular time signature.
Part 1: Music theory explained in just 5 minutes
Part 2: Music theory explained in just 20 minutes
Part 3: Music theory explained in 80 minutes
Etc. Starting with an extremely simplified overview and then making the overviews progressively more detailed.
Many people instead try to give simple explanations without making them short. But no confused beginner wants to be overwhelmed by a huge wall of text, let alone by a long theoretical book.
Unfortunately most people who have become knowledgeable about some subject matter then quickly and thoroughly forget how confusing, overwhelming or intimidating it was before.
Your recommendation seems to mostly apply to western music (I assume so since you only mentioned western music), no? Will Jazz Levine's book help with ragga or gamelan?
The only thing I'd add to your recommendations is: Listen! When you hear a song, some melody, a rhythm, listen carefully, try to deconstruct the components, how they interplay, and try to figure out what is it that you like. Was it a feature of the harmony? The melody? Pacing? Whatever it is, keep listening. Theory is just a way to try to explain what we hear and why we might like it. The more you listen, the more you have that you can base the theory on.
I am following Absolutely Understand Guitar[1] as my music theory lessons (and Hal Leonard method for notation) along side my regular tutorials. So far I am very impressed. Quite beginner friendly, and learning music theory while starting out with the instrument has not been difficult for me at least.
It's just not conventional music theory (which is just a set of rules thrown at you). But the whole point that the parent missed, is that it is told in a way to arrive to music theory from first principles as understood by computer programmers and math nerds.
Any statement made in TFA is true (at least to a basic level, and, for some of claims, when focusing on western music).
You'll learn nothing of the sort you learn in TFA by reading "The Jazz Theory book" suggested by the parent. The opening paragraphs of TFA explicitly address why that doesn't cut it:
"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention. Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason. The major scale has the shape it has for a reason. Chords that sound good sound good for a reason, and you can compute those reasons."
The parent comment is stuck on trying to sell the conventional music theory nomenclature and its extensions, which, despite the name "theory", is a descriptive set of norms and rules based on historical practices.
The author of the above comment's "postgrad in music" and experience in conservertoires make then unable to see the worth of TFA, because they're too invested in the conventional description and "how things are done".
If you want to understand music theory as a construction, not merely as "here's a set of arbitrary rules and other rules that build on them", ignore jazz/classical musicians and people with music degrees trying to sell you on what they've been taught, as it will be near useless. This requires a different type of mindset.
There are books on musicology that address the concerns of TFA in an official and deep way, but TFA is a good programming-nerd oriented introduction to the matter.
This ain't it.
I'm reading your comment with a certain disdain for analysis and theory, which I get - a lot of people come out scarred from music theory training, and I'm sorry someone hurt you that way.
But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music. "Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
Seriously, you're doing yourself a huge favor as a musician and broadening your conceptual thinking about music by learning this stuff.
I'm fine with contentional music theory training. Know my music theory, had official music training, been at it for some decades.
It's not the purpose of this. Traditional music theory training or a jazz theory book wont tell you about harmonics and timbre. It wont tell you how come we divided the octave like this, and things this tries to tackle.
It was written to serve a fundamentally different purpose. A purpose which apparently familiarity with regular music theory makes most blind to.
It's like someone wanting to learn about acoustics, and someone given them an earful about diatonic chords and how to read notation. It's simply not what they want to now about. Or it's like someone wants to know about the chemistry of cement or the physics behind structural engineering, and people try to tell him all about construction and construction terms. Not what he is interested in knowing, even if it's essential for building a house, just like music theory is essential (or at least useful) in playing and composing music.
>But music theory is fundamentally a way to talk about music. Nobody is trying to "sell" you anything, but it does become much easier to work together as musicians when we share a language we can use to talk about the music.
That's neither here nor there. The purpose of TFA is not for musicians to talk about music with one another, or to help someone analyze that this piece of music is in that key or uses that mode, and modulates there, or that "this chord here is used as a chromatic mediant", or borrowed chords, or counterpoint, and all that.
>"Take it from the candenza", "a bit more ritenuto", etc. is just more efficient and precise than "take it from the place where it goes dun-dun-dunnnn", or "go more slowly-like".
That's explicitly NOT what TFA wants to be useful for.
Setting your off-the-cuff comment alongside TFA’s Claudish muddle reminds me—as if I needed reminding—about the hazardous parts of self-education, particularly when that education is, as it seems maybe to have been in the author’s case, led by LLM…
I appreciate a programmer hacking on sound and music—that’s awesome, and I’m really grateful the author did so and shared his experience. The trouble comes from the unearned air of authority.
When I worry about the broader question of subtle truths getting lost in the slop cycle, it feels reassuring when authentic expertise like yours still stands out clearly. I’ll take what optimism I can find!
Personally I am aiming towards becoming a low-intermediate guitar player over the course of a full year by self studying. My biggest fear is that I develop bad habits, but I am hopeful that the bad habits can be trained out of me with a lot of effort during the intermediate phase.
However I've realised that "Music Theory" is a strictly defined term. If someone made an article called "Intro to Algebraic Geometry", and it was actually about geometric algebra, it'd be really annoying, even if to a uninformed person the meaning behind those terms would seem interchangeable.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.
but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.
I wanted to read it because I like the topic, but i somehow felt it was folluting my brain. I think i will also start joining the club of AI;dr to protect myself from pollution, even though i may miss some iteresting articles.
https://www.pangram.com/history/25773627-adfa-4efb-8c10-f4fd...
> Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.
does it make sense? Or perhaps it just seems like something easy enough to skim past without worrying about whether it makes sense?
Before LMs, I would have assumed that a person intentionally wrote that sentence, and perhaps spent some time trying to understand what could possibly "break" if there were "notes" rather than "just a number." Now there is a simpler explanation: the sentence actually doesn't mean anything.
If you're trying to learn new information, you will trip over low-quality content like this more often.
What the article is trying to explain here is that A=440 is just a convention. This is probably where the article should have had a discussion about perfect pitch vs. relative pitch. I would have written it like this:
“Since this note is 440 hertz, in Western music, because of convention, we call this note ‘A’. Now, let’s play a note that is 400hz. For most people, given enough time after hearing the 440hz note, this second note will sound like the first note. There is a minority of people with a talent called perfect pitch who would be able to tell that the 440hz note is in tune, while, with conventional Western music, 400hz is out of tune, because they are able to tell the absolute pitch of notes. Most people (including the famous composer Wagner) cannot do this: One pitch by itself sounds like another pitch by itself.”
You are giving an LLM entirely too much credit.
Once it jumps from the chromatic scale to the diatonic scale, it doesn’t explain the theoretical basis for the major scale. To understand the major scale, we need to first explain the major third then the major chord. From the major chord, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth, we can build up the major scale.
There’s also no discussion of time signature and rhythm.
It's not "music theory" proper, it's rather about the underpinnings of the "music language", the basics you need to know to even be able to speak about music theory, and in this regard it's quite useful.
Over time, I developed shorthands for understanding theory like i can easily look at a fretboard and know which note it is.
But what bugged me is that you seem to imply the reason why you couldn't learn a instrument was because you did not understand the why. That makes very little sense to me. I know several professional musicians who don't even know what a mode is or what formal notation is. One of them has pitch perfect ear, he can literally hear anything and tranpose that on his guitar. He has no idea how notes work and just writes tabs.
So while this is very nicely from a programmer point of view and an objective explanation of things but learning all this will not make you a better musician is the point.
Practice above all. Dont try to fit all theory into the pratice but understand what you are practicing particulalry using the theory. Otherwise you end up with all theory and no practice experience of using that theory and creativity.
As a perosn who likes code, this is interesting. As a musician who also understands music theory, this is kind of alienating in terms of how it presented. Like if someone just read this article and thought they understood music theory now, they would be pretty unsufferable to actual musicians.
My 8 year old hardly ever practices but just looks at the music and knows the notes on piano and violin.
In any case, I agree that this isn't that helpful to being able to play, it's just an interesting way to understand why things are as they are.
I do not have perfect pitch, but I could always do what GP's kid does. I am now a pretty good amateur singer.
What matters for this is learning to read the music notation and developing a sense (mostly subconscious) of scales and harmony. Perfect pitch does not help either of those things.
Quite a lot of people learn by imitation without knowing the underlying theory. Some people need a theoretical framework so that they have a mental model with which to understand everything else.
Fundamentally, you’re arguing against learning theory. Not everyone learns the same way. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with a basic fact of life.
Furthermore, in real life, I have seen the same approach actually be detremental to learning guitar. Its a bit like football - there is a physical skill level to the sport which you can practice and then there is a theoritical part (tactics and formation) that help you understand the game and play better.
But if you just want to start by kicking a ball and you know everything about Pep Guardiola's new counterattacking system. Yet when you are kicking the ball and practicing the basic skills, you are not thinking woah am i a midfield playing the right side and looking for a pass? That type of thinking is not useful when you are learning how to kick a ball.
Ideally you should do the two together and work really hard on practice first if you actually want to be a footballer is my point. If you say oh no everyone is different, some people just like tactics, I don't think I say anything against it.
Theory first is not a good way to learn an instrument is my qualified statement. Not that theory is not important or doesnt matter or everyone should follow the same way of learning.
This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts and mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
Maybe start by rewatching "This is Spinal Tap" instead, and consider that https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/59n3pg/remembe...
Very clearly. The author constructed a melody from first principles in the article. You can take any song, deconstruct it using the information in there and begin to see why it sounds nice.
> This article is trivializing music down to a few not-so-important facts
This is a music theory lecture with code examples. Hardly “not-so-important”.
> mistaking some math for anything that would help `programmers` (?) understand music.
Compared to the lessons on https://www.musictheory.net this is definitely programmer/engineer friendly. It’s better than my old go-to at https://www.lightnote.co
It is a trope amongst gigging musicians that over-intellectualizing the feels is a massive no-no.
Hence the joke about Db being the saddest chord... also Phil Collins said that, he would know :-D... ...and C# being the most evil chord. Hilarious.
I persist: "before you can be good, you first have to be bad" is more helpful music theory than that whole JavaScript visuals page.
But personally, I couldn’t handle not knowing why the clutch needed to be pressed, or why a chord shapes is the why it is.
https://hub.yamaha.com/brand/creativity/the-saddest-of-all-k...
Creating melodies by doggedly applying any system is almost guaranteed to feel tired, predictable and boring.
I don’t really have a problem with systems.
Trying now. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
100%.
I tried three more. Same result.
How much do you see?
That's certainly a revealing example. TTLS is entirely melody, and the article says basically nothing about melody. At a stretch you could say "the article talks about the major scale, TTLS uses notes from a major scale" and if your conclusion is "that's why I like it", then you should feel the same way about any permutation of the notes in TTLS, or indeed anything you get from hitting the white notes on a piano one at a time.
Its 13 mentions of melody sufficed for me.
> A key, its diatonic chords, a progression, those chords broken into an arpeggio one note at a time, and a melody that sticks to the scale
> Change the melody array to anything at all and it will still fit
The first part of TTLS (in C) is: C C G G A A G F F E E D D C. Let's follow the guidance of this last part and change the "melody array"; for neatness we can alphabetize it: A A C C C D D E E F F G G G. Now that you understand melody, please tell me why even though it "still fit"s it doesn't sound as nice.
What else do I see: congruence between melody and lyrics, harmonic depth, dominant half-cadence in the tonic arrival. Also the versions by Mozart add a lot and explain a lot of the endurance of the tune I guess. That has chromatic passing, secondary dominants, even a parallel minor (in the 8th variation)
If I may plug here the Berklee College online courses as a satisfied customer I can say if you are ready to put in the effort they are great.
There is of course a lot of physics involved. But there is at least as much convention at play. So imho this is a very one sided way of looking at it.
There is a physical reason the 12 notes are those 12 notes (though the exact frequencies assigned are influenced by culture as well), but lots of different cultures use less notes, or more, or extra notes inbetween.
So 'Because that is the convention.' is imho at least a good an explanation as the physics one.
He talks about the harmonic series giving the basic ratios of the Pythagorean scale but why is that the case? When you solve the equations of motion of any sort of harmonic oscillator (including crucially, strings, vibrating columns of air from a wind instrument etc) you see that you can solve them using a Fourier series, so if you solve this in trigonometric form you get a_1 * cos blah_1 + 1/2 * (a_2) * cos blah_2 + 1/3 * (a_3) * cos blah_3 + … + 1/n * (a_n) * cos blah_n [1]
…so those fractions end up being the partials of the harmonic series (a_n/n) where a_n is the n_th coefficient, which you find using an integral. Now if you have a normal western musical instrument, the higher overtones (later terms of the Fourier series) are not prominent so those coefficients are small. So the terms that matter have ratios a_1, a_2/2, a_3/3, a_4/4, a_5/5 corresponding to the primary intervals that he’s talking about.
In cultures (eg Balinese and Javanese music from Indonesia) where they use a different number of tones and different scale, it’s no coincidence that they play a lot of gongs and bells, which have much more prominent higher overtones, so a different set of Fourier coefficients so different ratios are going to be “congruent”/melodious-sounding.
[1] the “blah” terms are a function of pi and the length and stiffness of the string etc. Not really relevant here.
But also, nobody bothers to talk about this because for beginners without sufficient focus on mastery by copying other people, they're generally not going to be able to do anything notable with music anyway, so this kind of meta-theory is an unnecessary distraction. (And by the time you are actually decent with music literally years have passed and you've probably stumbled upon this idea by then)
Speaking for myself, the music I was raised with doesn't sound that good to me.
It does not mean "my parents played a lot of <X> and that doesn't sound good to me".
I really like classical arabic music. But when I tried to play the half tones in a tune I studied hard on the syrian guy I was playing with told me to please not attempt those because I was horribly out of tune :-P . Not because I played a half tone, of course. He did play them. But because my half tone was subtly slightly off the right half tone.
When it's done well, I don't notice unless I'm looking for it. Like speaking of Syria, I think this George Wassouf song uses quarter tones, not even sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsD7ixyFm90 . It's more noticeable in oud solos, but someone who doesn't know better could write it off as just the way the instrument sounds.
There are lots of tuning systems. Equal temperament is just 12 (logarithmic) equal steps. But other tuning systems use different priorities.
The basis is physical, though. It's always about trying to get the frequency ratios as simple as possible (or as close as possible to a simple ratio). Based on the fact that natural overtones are always (more or less) integer multiples of the base frequency so that's what sounds pleasing to us. Using only integer ratios is impossible though, so we have to deviate from those. And on top of that we want to deviate because people get bored ;-)
Recently, I wrote https://www.jampea.com/learn , which is the music theory for "technical people". I believe it is the fastest way to get to understand the theory behind music (will take you 2 to 5 hours in total, 10% will be reading and 90% will be thinking about what you just read).
'Intro to audio for programmers' would keep them away and let us have a party in the comments telling the author how interesting the tutorial was. Never use the word 'Music' again and you'll be safe
Kudos, every work of creation is a joy on its own, I was fascinated clicking every button
Doesn't HN have a temporal deduplication system?
You can also see duplicates e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=semianalysis.com
I don't think you can get good at an instrument or enjoy music if you keep trying to force it to make logical sense in your brain all the time. The fact that the author admits straight off the bat that he's never managed to learn an instrument kind of attests to this in my opinion.
As someone who enjoys listening to music, creating music, and music theory, I'd characterize the latter as providing a specialized vocabulary; an approach to listening, since words in the vocabulary represent concepts that you can hear; and a toolbox of concepts you can draw from.
It's a model, you can use it as much or as little as you like. And there's more than one model, and sometimes the different models overlap more or less, and you can choose any of them or none of them and still make and enjoy music.
The other thing it provides is a wildly complex logical system with fascinating philosophical connections. Some people enjoy exploring that more than making music with it, and that's also okay. I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that. It's made me a better thinker. In math, formulas can be elegant. In music theory, different constructions induce different experiences.
I have began learning instruments before and fell into the trap of asking too many "why" questions and then just got lost in music theory that a) didn't make too much logical sense and b) didn't help me actually get better at an instrument in any way.
I think it's very unlike programming where you could start with a hello world program and keep asking "why does it work like that" questions and keep getting deeper and deeper and actually end up with a very good understanding of computers by the end of it that actually would make you a better programmer.
But when you're learning an instrument I think perhaps at the start it's better to just accept that "chords sound good because they just do" rather than going off down a complete rabbit hole.
Edit: Also, what you mention about "why" is true. The models attempt to organize observations of conscious experiences into mathematical and logical frameworks, though they cannot ultimately explain the causes for those connections. The causes of the qualia remain mysterious. Musicians tend to be particularly in tune with how their own experiences connect to music, so some are enthralled to explore that connection itself.
Don't know if this phenomenon has a name, but I've thought about it before. Social media is filled with posts of people buying things. Because it's not really possible to make a video showing off something you decided not to buy. Same thing with music and people constantly buying gear. "I'm using the same guitar I've had for 10 years and decided to just sit down and practice for 2 hours this evening like the 2000 other evenings before" doesn't make good content.
Something along these lines, people who would like to improve their musical abilities sometimes procrastinate by doing music theory instead. It's safe and it's introspective. And it's authoritative---a legitimate and difficult subject---so there's the potential to feel falsely reassured that you're not wasting time. In a sense, it avoids the more difficult act of creation. This seems to be especially more likely for those who would have wanted to write music.
I.e., "drink responsibly." Perhaps music theory classes should come with a warning label, like the Mirror of Erised. You can stare into it endlessly and produce nothing.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
But then, please, don't call it "theory".
There is strictly nothing theoretical or indeed, logical, about it.
most popular songs on charts today aren't on the edge of what's new... music theory is a rule set and to break the rules you need to know them. there's a big difference in an illiterate and a jazz musician improvising something for 10 min., as well a music from the scratch by someone who understand orchestration and your unknown local rock artist
You can’t play an instrument because you failed to practice. Playing an instrument doesn’t require knowing theory. It certainly helps with being a musician, however, which is a completely different thing.
That aside, the way the author goes about explaining “music theory” here is exactly how one prevents themselves from ever producing an actual piece of music. Yes, it’s good to understand the mechanics of how sounds and chords work under the hood, but one thing I’ve learned in my nearly 30 years of making and recording music is that thinking is the enemy of creating art. This framework introduces far too much cognitive overhead and gets in the way of what we’re really trying to do, which is communicating emotion. What is written in this article is has been known for a very, very long time, but we still use the more common version of music theory because it abstracts much of this away so that it doesn’t get in the way.
Fun interactive examples though. With another human pass, this could be great.
And now I've realized that the page hosting that is for a JS snippet editor embedding thingy. Commercial stuff.
So this is just a tech demo created with AI to showcase what can be done with their library, and not someone actually caring about the topic :<
It's a decent enough intro to acoustics and digital synthesis, but saying it's music theory is just redefining terms with accepted meanings in their fields.
Example 1: Pianos are tuned with stretch tuning, where the high notes are tuned higher than their theoretical pitches, and vice versa for low notes. That's because of a thing called inharmonicity, where the overtones of short piano strings don't form perfect ratios with the fundamental. Maybe that has something to do with short strings vibrating more like metal cylinders than rods?
Example 2: French horns have a lot of tubing! The valves let you include different lengths of tube into the air column. With a single valve combination, the player can hit the fundamental and all the partials up until their lips can no longer take it. To play a scale or melody, they switch between different horn lengths, choosing the partial that will sound closest to the pitch they're going for. Really, all brass instruments function this way, I just mention French horns because I like them.
Example 3: String quartets tune their chords with each other on the fly. If you listen to a string quartet practice, they'll spend a good amount of time holding and adjusting intonation to each other. So unlike in the equal tempered world of keyboard tuning, strings and most instrumental ensembles are constantly adjusting to make their harmonies sound sweeter. Equal temperament doesn't come into play, unless you add a piano, which sort of forces everybody to uncomfortably conform to the limitations of set it and live with it keyboard tuning.
Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?
Oh, and rhythm is just the same as consonance. Most are octave based, beats on wave peaks of overlaid octaves getting quieter. The 3 based on times like 6/8 are the same but for 5ths and 17ths. (The bottom number 8 is just a BPM hint from old days.) beyond those the intervals get unstable feeling, like 7/4 in Money by Pink Floyd has that cut off feeling, someone took a few from each measure, but maps to a minor 7th interval.
Extreme doubt.
The theory of music is about as useless as it gets if you aren't in some kind of academic program or collaborating with other musicians on a shared composition. It helps with dead reckoning over things you cannot audition, but that's pretty damn rare.
You'll get better a lot faster if you just try to follow along with a YouTube video in the style of Guitar Hero scrolling down your screen.
TFA does acknowledge that it only really covers western music.
But on top of that, the other musical cultures you mention are in fact remarkably similar to western musical culture at the level TFA is describing.
They differ significantly in terms of what they do with e.g. dividing the octave into 12, but they all make heavy use of the 3/2 ratio and other similar concepts.
If you want to get really different, check out Byzantine musical culture. They have no octave equivalence (!) and their notation is 100% relative (i.e. they write melodies down as sequences of intervals, not sequences of absolute notes). Even so, they still use 12 tones per octave ...
This is in line with hundreds of years of authors "explaining" music by starting with Pythagoras for their bona fides, then using that credibility to rationalize whatever opinions they hold about musical aesthetics.
To counter: these guys[1] play I-IV-V-I for nearly the whole song. They don't even change it between the verse and chorus. Someone here tell me the one important exception and the term from music theory that describes that exception.
Primers should start with the music excerpt that the author loves, and work backwards to the theory that helps explain what's going on. Otherwise it gets pretentious fast.
> Here are five notes. Every one is double the frequency of the one before it. [...] They are different pitches, and yet they sound like the same note.
Nothing about these notes seem similar to me. You could play pretty much any sequence of rising notes and (falsely) claim they're the "same note" and I'd believe it. This is one reason I've always had trouble learning music.
> √2 the awkward one -> 311.13Hz
That one doesn't sound particularly awkward to me. Again, I blame my inability to distinguish pitch.
The only instrument I was able to pick up pretty easily was drums.
At least for me the solution was to grind ear training for a few weeks/ months 10 minutes a day.
I'll certainly never reach the heights of this skill but a bit of persistence to overcome lack of natural talent did propell me forward.
Which takes you very quickly to equal temperament and perfect fourths and perfect fifths. This tells us where the notes C and F and G are located on the chromatic scale, but then the rest are pretty arbitrary eh. Semitones from C to C go 2-2-1-2-2-2-1, but there is nothing heavenly ordained by this particular arrangement. E-to-F and B-to-C are a collective choice.
If I had been presented with this kind of explanation fifty years ago, I might have been less skeptical of the entire enterprise.
Sorry man, if you approach things from that angle then no wonder music is a mystery to you.
The issue with "deriving from first principles" is that it very much depends on what you consider "principles" and which you pick. Take two people who want to derive sth "from first principles" and they will arrive at wildly different things. Because they start very differently. That's why this "ignore everything that came before" approach (different name for "from first principles) is so flawed and limited. There is so much insight to gain from the wisdom that came before you that ignoring it isn't going to help.
> the simpler the fraction, the better it sounds
That's comically wrong. If everything was just an octave, you wouldn't even have music.
Sorry, I stopped reading there. It's as if a physics student tries to derive medicine "from first principles" by starting at atoms and thinking hard. It doesn't work and won't fix your appendix.
It might not help develop a cure for your appendix, but it does or can help understanding why certain cures work, or why some are preferred over others.
ps. background in biochemistry and biophysics
An entire civilization (China) completely missed having a proper scientific awakening and the following industrial revolution about a 1000 year ago exactly because of that kind of dumb thinking.
Great idea!
Also reminds me of https://www.languagetransfer.org/music
and there's one more 15 days ago, but really - it seems a link needs to be posted several times to take off.
@dang
Now dispell the "this is just the western tradition": do Klingon music theory https://youtu.be/1LjcBv-OWtQ
I would write songs on my guitar when I was in college. A friend who was a guitar theoretician stopped by and listened. He said something like, "Odd, you went with a G7 instead of an Am. In that triad you should have played the Am." (Or, you know, some kind of foreign language like that.)
I mean, it sounded fine my way. Although for a moment I questioned why thew G7 and tried an Am… briefly. I was afraid suddenly though that if I learned music theory I would have to start writing songs the right way.
Hi Claude
This is... Not a good comment.
And unlike you, I don't believe I need to explain why I'm writing this.
> There are twelve notes for a reason
Twelve pitches, actually. (Strictly, twelve pitch classes).
Note != pitch. A note is a sound having properties of which one is pitch.
There are "notes as the name of certain pitches", and "notes as things musicians play". The former is a relatively simple concept, the latter much less so. I do see that the vast majority of the wikipedia article is concerned with "notes as the name of certain pitches".
The article doesn't say that. If it did, it would be incorrect.
Notes aren't pitched. Notes aren't pitch names.
Notes have pitch.
When someone plays an "A" they have more choices than just its pitch, and the result is also a note.
"Dog" is the name of a pet often found among humans. So is "cat" and so is "mouse". They denote a specific pet, though precisely which pet they denote may not be clear.
When someone chooses a "dog", they have many more choices than just it being a dog, but the result is still a dog.
Names of things, and the things themselves are different, but when we write and talk about them, whether we using the name or attempting to describe the thing itself is not always clear. When I say "it was an "A"" to refer to the sound someone made, I may be trying to refer to every aspect of the sound in a rather anemic way, or I may be trying to denote its pitch. In English, the use of "A" to denote a pitch is widely, formally and colloquially, capturing that "there is a note we call A". The fact that the sound itself had other properties besides those captured by this pitch designation doesn't change that. When a teacher tells a student to play an "A", nobody would sensibly quibble and say "I don't know what to play". They would say "my teacher told me to play an A and I did". The fact that the language used by the teacher named only the pitch and did not convey any information about dynamics or articulation wouldn't stop any sensible person from agreeing that the teacher told the student to play "the note we call A".
Not true. There are multiple pitches named A. One (or more) per octave, in fact.
That's why A is termed a pitch class.
Almost nobody else would ever say that "A is a pitch class". Just like nobody would ever say "a Chihuaha is a class of dogs", even though that's just as true. They'd point to a particular Chihuaha and say "that's a Chihuaha".
I'm really done splitting hairs here. I thought that we were discussing important things, not semantic details. Performed notes are more than their pitch, but the names of notes are considered by almost everyone to be notes.
This is a music theory article, remember.
> Almost nobody else would ever say that "A is a pitch class". Just like nobody would ever say "a Chihuaha is a class of dogs"
Not like, because pitch doesn't work at all like dogs. Dogs don't come in anythink like octaves or enharmonics e.g. C# Db.
lolwut
1. runjs promoting itself using music REPL as an example
2. author used LLM to fit a few music related ideas into the web audio API
3. they tried it with math two years ago: https://runjs.app/blog/equations-that-changed-the-world-rewr... They are clearly targeting js developers, which is one of the largest coding community
4. "The naming is not arbitrary, and the harmonic series explains why.", stop wasting tokens. Just say what it is please.
Oh boy, couldn't agree more, this has been a lifelong frustration for me as well:
I've always been completely stumped by the utter lack of curiosity most musicians seem to have about that.
There's a convention, just learn it, why IHN would you want to ask questions about this?
Who cares about things like first principles anyways.
> The system we want, where the octave is pure and the fifths are pure and everything closes into a neat loop, does not exist and never has. Every tuning system in history is a different choice about where to dump the error.