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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I still don't see it being much better in practice. It's pretty rare to use ordinals to refer to intervals greater than 2 octaves. There is really virtually no cognitive load required to hear "major tenth" and realize that it's a major 3rd plus an octave.

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There's virtually no cognitive load if you already know music theory. That's a very important distinction - music theory in its current state is completely undiscoverable for no good reason.

How undiscoverable? I grew up in a fairly music-oriented family and played a lot of instruments as a kid, but didn't formally study music theory. It wasn't until I read parent that I realized "fifth", "third", etc. are 1-indexed ordinals, and not some inscrutable scheme involving fractions. Everything suddenly makes way more sense.

I feel fairly confident that sane terminology would greatly ease this problem.

> That's a very important distinction - music theory in its current state is completely undiscoverable for no good reason.

I don't doubt that it could be improved, but I don't think it's all that bad, considering how many people do learn music theory.

Pretty irrelevant but that reminded me of this scene from Cannibal the Musical [0]. The whole video is worth watching, especially if you've seen the rest of the movie but I only linked to the music theory argument. The movie is one of Trey Parker's earlier works and is quite entertaining [1].

Coming from a family of musicians and artists, it's all pretty foreign to me. And I used to take lessons, and occasionally sit and work my way through a beginner guitar book. I've always heard music theory to be pretty obtuse and challenging. I'm sure if I put in some hours to understand the fundamentals it'd make a lot more sense, and read it at home with a little dedication it'd be a bit easier. It's truly interesting.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF8oIKLlBsI#t=132 [1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115819/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

> There is really virtually no cognitive load required to hear "major tenth" and realize that it's a major 3rd plus an octave.

Maybe not for you, but it certainly took me a moment to convince myself that that is true.

Just use modulo-seven arithmetic...

Er, yes, I believe that's the point the grandparent was making (and the parent was disagreeing with)

I was just trying to show that changing the indexing from zero- to one-based makes no difference in this case. The same-octave interval will always be the multi-octave interval mod 7, regardless of whether you call the tonic 0 or 1.

Granted, but I was replying to a post stating that "it" is not better in practice, where "it" is using 0 base, mod 7 arithmetic.

Anyway, yes, you've shown correctly that mod 7 arithmetic is useful, proving half the great-great-somethingth-parent's point. Now, the remaining interesting cases are the inversion case and the multiplication case, where 0 based is simpler (for me) than 1 based.

Also, the idea of using the word "octave" for "mod 7" is already pretty broken, and is what caused me my initial hesitation.

There is some cognitive load, but it is certainly no more than it would be to hear "Major 9th" and realize that it's a Major 2nd plus an octave, as it would be in the zero-indexed case.

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