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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

It took me a while to realize that "because that is the convention" was the answer to a big chunk of my confusion about music notation. A weirdly helpful answer, but so often nobody bothers to even tell you that, so you just assume you must be missing something when you can't see where these things are coming from!

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It's a bit more circular than that. The music you were raised with sounds good to you, which means you want to understand how to make music like that hence the dominance of 12 tones and major and minor scales in Western music.

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)

> The music you were raised with sounds good to you

Speaking for myself, the music I was raised with doesn't sound that good to me.

What is meant here is that there are different musical cultures around the world, and if you grew up in one that, for example, prominently uses quarter-tones/microtones (e.g. a lot of music from Arabic and Indian cultures) then we know that you will have a different reaction to, say, Bach, than someone who grew up in a culture that uses strict equal temperament.

It does not mean "my parents played a lot of <X> and that doesn't sound good to me".

I grew up with Western music, and now Arabic music is one of my favorites. I really don't think Westerners hear semitones differently. Also, a lot of Arabic music is 12-tone, and even if it weren't, they probably appreciate Bach the same way.

No, people don't "hear semitones differently" but ... practicing musicians from one culture will choose to use semitones, quartertones and microtones differently, and a listener with a lot of musical exposure will notice this when listening to music that does and does not involve such practices.

Also just realized, I don't think much Arabic music has used semitones in like 100 years. The classical ones do.

You can re-train your ear of course. But on average a lot of people used to western music feel that classical arabic/indian music with half/quarter tones in it sounds 'out of tune'/wrong.

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.

I think you have to be extra careful with things like the bayati scale besides just being in tune. The quarter-tone has its role but is easy to misuse, like staying on it too long. The opposite is pentatonic where you can spam random notes and nothing sounds too bad, but it's not very interesting, and then blues or 8-note Western scales are in the middle.

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.

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