[HN Gopher] Toward a Better Music Theory (2013) ___________________________________________________________________ Toward a Better Music Theory (2013) Author : brudgers Score : 50 points Date : 2022-08-04 15:02 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.ethanhein.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.ethanhein.com) | zokier wrote: | My music theory is very weak, but I have some difficulty | understanding the point of supermode; if it includes 10 out of | the 12 notes, then does it really function as a scale anymore or | would it be just simpler to think in terms of the chromatic scale | and abandon modes altogether? | spekcular wrote: | I have a more conservative critique of traditional music theory, | along the same lines. Forget pop, jazz, and rock - standard music | theory courses don't even equip students to properly analyze | Western art from music the late romantic period, including things | like impressionism. Most voice leading textbooks have very little | material on post 1850-ish classical music, and some have | essentially nothing. They seem to focus on Mozart, Beehoven, | Haydn, etc., or aspects of later music amendable to the | analytical tools they develop for those classical period | composers. | | Here's an exercise you can try. Choose a more harmonically | adventurous French or Russian composer from around the turn of | the 20th century (perhaps Debussy, Ravel, Scriabian, maybe even | Shostakovitch), and get some sheet music for a solo piano piece | off the internet. Grab any of the standard college harmony | textbooks and attempt to write down a harmonic analysis of that | piece. You're going to have trouble. | ybroze wrote: | Maybe -- but the context to understand what Debussy and Ravel | were doing (maybe not Scriabin) is to get the Bach / Haydn / | Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert under your belt. | | Source: I've taught this at university. | sh4rks wrote: | I don't see how the supermode can be useful to anyone starting to | learn music theory. The hard part is figuring out the rhythm, | vocabulary, and phrasing that make those notes sound "good". | | I still think one of the best ways of learning theory (for guitar | at least) is to start with the pentatonic and diatonic scales, | then add triads and "colour" notes. | | I'm curious to know other people's opinions though. | AlbertCory wrote: | Yeah, I don't quite see what the notion of the "supermode" does | for anyone, either. | | Maybe he's going to elaborate it somewhere else? Or just hoping | that someone else does. | diydsp wrote: | it's a useful device like the circle of fifths but i don't | see it displacing existing models. | xor99 wrote: | I think these basic arguments are valuable and musicians should | be focussed on whether a better understanding of music theory | actually produces music with desirable qualities such as | surprisal (e.g. that moment when Dj Screw slowed the record or | groups of monks decided to chant together etc). | | IMO the answer is a big nope. One reason is that music theory is | always explicated in retrospect and contributes little to the | invention of new music or enjoyment. It's useful (not devaluing | it wholesale) if you want to do x in the style of y (e.g. I want | this to sound like Miles Davis!). H/w an accurate picture of | musical performance and general cultural activity surrounding | would never reduce it all to just that. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Trad theory will enhance existing talent but do nothing for | people who have no instinct for music, no matter how much | learning they do. | | It's very directly and obviously useful for certain kinds of | music, especially Hollywood pastiche and some genres of game | soundtracks. | | It's also very handy in some areas of pop. Pop's dirty secret | is that a lot of it is written/arranged by professionals with | some kind of classical background. The lead band/artist are | typically front people for an entire team which includes a | producer, various engineers, and possibly session players and | arrangers. These people don't get a lot of attention, and only | industry insiders have heard of them. But they have a huge | impact on pop of all kinds. | | Vocal harmonies, string parts, and sometimes brass parts have | to be written and arranged, and that's a challenge for anyone | without dot-writing skills. | | But there's also a kind of fluency and ease that comes with | solid training, and that spills over into vocal and | instrumental contributions of all kinds. | | Trad theory on its own doesn't _guarantee_ interesting or | successful music. There are plenty of composition graduates who | have no feel for the art of music at all. | | It also doesn't help with transformative developments and new | techniques. | | But it's far from useless. People with solid theory skills and | some creative flair are in a sweet spot that's hard to beat. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I find it best to think of music theory as a language musicians | can use to describe what they just _did_ , not what they are | about to do. | | That's likely to be true even if/when we improve "music theory" | to cover much more than 18th century European harmonic forms. | xor99 wrote: | That makes a lot of sense! | sseagull wrote: | Pretty much. It helps with giving language and notation to | particular sounds. It condenses sounds to something you can | write down and communicate, without having to think of each | note individually. | | It's like design patterns for music. Not necessarily | prescriptive (it's your music, do whatever you want), but | helpful for reducing music into something more concrete. | | It has helped me a lot in learning (classical) music. It's | also kind of like watching a sport where you understand the | rules vs. one you don't - knowing the "rules" helps you | engage more, and peek into the composer's mind, or give you | ideas for your own compositions. | klik99 wrote: | For me theory is most important as a debugging tool - I write | without considering it and if something sounds "off" in a bad | way theory will often help me pinpoint why. It's also useful | for analysis when I'm trying to capture a certain sound. Either | way it is not a composition tool and shouldn't taught that way | except for exercises to understand theory. | superb-owl wrote: | The author mentions the data is available, but the link appears | to be dead. Anyone know where it might live? | pjbk wrote: | The main problem I see with (occidental) "music theory" is its | historical baggage. Most of it is useful, beautiful by its own | merits but, specially if you have a scientific/logic way of | looking things, much of its structure and nomenclature really | gets in the way. After many years of doing false starts I sat one | day, started from scratch, looked at just the facts (= math), and | then everything fell together: | | - The Pythagoreans dealt for centuries with the known conundrum | of figuring out irrational numbers. I had a computer so I just | run a script for measuring the total error with different | bisecting rational quantizations (up to 256 IIRC) of note | frequencies in the equal-tempered scale within one octave | (2^(1/N) splits). Oh, peaks at 12, 19 at 24 on the low side of | the counter. That is why they settled on 12 notes, middle eastern | has 24 (just double the resolution) and why 19 also sounds good | [1]. 12 seems like the minimum acceptable then. Ok, 10 minutes, | move on. | | - Since we know we can only approximate to irrationals and our | brain tries to makes things even, moving through scales with | increasing intervals (2^(n/12)) will normally accumulate | "tension". Half notes sound spooky. Whole notes are a bit better. | Too bad sound perception is logarithmic (= tempered scale) and | has non-linear compression on both amplitude and frequency | (Fletcher-Munson, etc). Double the frequency is an octave. | Perfect fit, brain happy (2^(12/12)). Try to split an octave in | half? Again, fitting a peg in the only wrong hole available when | using half-note resolution. Welcome to accidentals and the Circle | of Fifths. "Try", because of course you can't: 2^(7/12) = | 1.498307.... Close to 150%, but no cigar. Close enough for a | crippled monkey brain that can only hear up to 20kHz or so. They | even named it "Perfect". Moving up: F to C, G to D, A to E... | | - Music would be very dull and inadequate if we cannot shift | notes up or down. However our brain still recognizes the | patterns. We can even play those patterns at the same time, even | on different instruments. So that pattern with the same scale on | a G sounds good with the other guy playing C (harmonies). What if | the guy playing the C wants to play like the guy on the G? Enter | modes... Oh yeah, cool Myxolydian tunes. And minor scale too - | don't forget that looks THE SAME as an Aeolian. | | - Your new singer cannot hit that low notes. What about now | moving everything up then? Transpose. We have "physical | instruments" like a guitar. Easy, just play the same pattern some | frets up. Done. Poor piano player who has a "logical instrument" | with notes separated nicely in two different kinds based on half | notes and that ugly 1.498307 fraction. Good that he is also good | at math. So that C scale becomes a D. He just replaces on the fly | some white keys with black keys... F# and C#. But wait a sec. | Didn't the Circle of Fifths also moved F to C too? Does it | continue like that for all notes? Yes it does! Transposing has | the same structure as modes the other way around! So what if | instead of moving up we move down, or play the same pattern in | the original C scale? For every raised (sharp) accidental we get | it's complement lowered (flat) one. Of course, since 7 + 5 = 12! | The Circle of Fifth is complete. B to E, A to D, G to C... That G | pattern moved down to C? G major scale (aka Ionian) has one | accidental: F#. The first flat is Bb. C scale with B lowered to | Bb... Yep, Myxolydian indeed! | | - We can also use those interval numbers to name chords when we | play notes together. We can also name the scales when adding and | removing notes, maybe borrowing from other scales. Sounds | pentatonic or exotic. The sky is the limit. | | - Piano player now teases the guitar player. Now it's her turn to | do the math. Looks like "physical" and "logical" instruments are | also complementary. What is easy on one needs thinking on the | other, and vice-versa. Win-win. | | Honestly, that covers like 95% of practical music note theory. Of | course there is much more to it (note, rhythm, history, etc). If | they have just started explaining it like that without all the | mumbo-jumbo it would have made sense since day #1 and I would | have saved many years of my life hitting my head in the wall and | trying to learn things I forgot within a week. Perhaps the main | issue is that not many music teachers are good at math or they | would think their students would get scared if they told them | it's all math underneath? | | [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament | khitchdee wrote: | Equal temperament makes it easier to design simple musical | instruments. Older music and current music in other genres | (e.g. Indian Classical) is based on a harmonic scale, taking | its roots in vocal music. | ybroze wrote: | Read this. | | https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ | AlbertCory wrote: | The title is a bit misleading. I was expecting some polemic about | Western music ignoring indigenous peoples, etc. etc. | | Instead, I kinda liked it. I took some classical piano and my | teacher got very impatient with me approaching some pieces like a | jazz musician would: assigning chords to measures that were quite | obviously melodies over those chords. She was all about plagal | cadences and all that stuff she learned at Oberlin. | | The Bach Prelude in C is especially entertaining to treat that | way. There's one bar near the end that it's almost impossible to | give a chord symbol to. | ybroze wrote: | Yeah, Rameau is the "Louie, Louie" French fellow who was the | "Newton of Music" who gave us the Roman numeral notation, while | the Germans were still doing counterpoint and harmonics. | | I very seriously believe there's a link between that, the | revolutionary attitudes and kinship of the French and | Americans, with the Rock and Roll movement of the 1950s / | 1960s. | ybroze wrote: | Plagality is a pretty deep musical concept within tonality, | though -- you have to deeply grok counterpoint and tonal | harmony first, and then you can start to hear and perceive | different aspects of tonal gravity. | | For plagality, it's the "dark side" of the tritone, | specifically with iio or iv6. | | Start putting together that tritone with the major standards of | viideg or V7, and you're really rolling with the joy of | traditional harmony. | ybroze wrote: | For further reading, this was | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Riemann and harmonic | dualism. | [deleted] | [deleted] | khitchdee wrote: | Based on the standard tuning of a guitar E, A, D, G, B, E and | assuming you use E as your tonic, the scale I, 2, 3-flat, 4, 5, | 6, 7-flat which translates to E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D should be a | base scale. If you strum a guitar open, all the strings fall | within this scale. It does have a flat seventh and a | corresponding flat third. | | If you take out the 2 and the 6, this becomes the Minor | Pentatonic Scale. | someweirdperson wrote: | > It would be better to have some hard data on what we all | collectively think makes for valid music. | | "Valid"? As opposed to "invalid music"? | | > As you'd expect, the tonic I is the most commonly-used chord in | the Rolling Stone corpus. | | If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of | reference and called the tonic? | | > Rock uses plenty of V-I, but it uses even more IV-I. And the | third most common pre-tonic chord in rock is not ii, like you'd | expect if you went to music school; it's bVII, reflecting rock | musicians' love of Mixolydian mode. | | I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference | moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. | | Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just add | unnecessary complexity? | spekcular wrote: | > If it wouldn't be the most used, would it be used as point of | reference and called the tonic? | | Yes. The tonic is determined by what the key is, not what chord | is most used. (It's hard to establish the key without slipping | the tonic in somewhere, but that doesn't mean it needs to | appear frequently.) | | > I-V and IV-V seems to be the same with the point of reference | moved to IV. And IV-bVII-V is I-IV-V. | | I don't think this is right. V-I has the root moving by a 5th, | while IV-V moves by a second. And the second example can't be | right because the relative distances of the roots of the first | and last chords are different (again, a second versus a fifth). | | > Is a fixed point of reference really needed? Doesn't it just | add unnecessary complexity? | | Yes, it's a useful analytical tool. | nateburke wrote: | Do not forget that Bach's music needed to feed 20 of his children | over the course of his life. (10 survived) | | I have a hard time believing that he was intentionally carving | out the rules of eg _Gradus ad Parnassum_ rather than | consistently trying to make music that sounded good with good | timbre given the constraints of his living situation and | employer. | | What seems prescriptive to the children is often originally | descriptive to the elders. | spekcular wrote: | He was definitely aiming for a certain style, which involved | following certain rules. There are surviving draft manuscripts | where he makes edits to follow voice-writing rules like | avoiding parallel fifths, etc. It seems pretty clear based on | this (and his training, and even a cursory study of what he | wrote) that his compositional practice was intensely | theoretical. The dude was not out there freestyling. | | In fact, the places where he broke certain fundamental rules | are so rare that they form a rather short list, despite his | voluminous output: https://www.bach- | chorales.com/ConsecutivesInChorales.htm. | rybosome wrote: | It's interesting that the article refers to "classical music's | obsession with the major scale". I was raised on rock guitar, | where the minor pentatonic scale was king. For that reason I | often thought of keys in terms of their relative minor. | | Whole heartedly agreed that our current model of theory is | excessively academic relative to the music most people are making | and consuming (at least in America). | | All that said, a grounding in theory is still a wonderful thing | to have as a musician. Even if you choose to ignore what you've | learned (and you should sometimes!), it allows you to understand | a lot of music more deeply, allowing you to learn it more | quickly. | jrajav wrote: | I don't think current music theory is excessively academic, I | think it's not academic or rigorous enough. Many institutions | languish in studying harmonic theory to the exclusion of many | other modes of musical analysis. This leaves them equipped only | to study archaic styles of European music and jazz where | harmony was one of the defining factors. The expressive power | and applicability of music theory would be served best by | focusing study on areas that have been underexplored. Those | areas are too numerous to even list, but standouts that apply | to music more recent than mid-century are rhythm, timbre, | movement (as driven by elements other than harmony), | instrumentation, electronic techniques, and cultural aspects of | music like references and interpolation. | polotics wrote: | Totally agreeing with the article, this "supermode" ie in C: all | white keys plus Eb, Ab, Bb, is exactly what my rock band's | noodles have intuitively followed. | eunoia wrote: | In the context of existing music theory that supermode could be | considered Eb/Cm. | | I've been learning a couple pop songs lately that essentially | seem to use this supermode by switching between the major and | minor on verse/chorus. Seems pretty versatile. | adamnemecek wrote: | ybroze wrote: | Coming from this field personally, this feels like typical | Temperley and de Clerq sorts of things. Davie Temperley was in | David Huron's lab once upon a time, I believe. | | The systematic musicology world, especially the portion doing | corpus studies, often is just doing descriptive research. The | article linked is a bit more prescriptive. | | The best book on music theory ever written, IMO, is David Huron's | "Voice Leading -- The Science Behind a Musical Art." Definitely | recommend. | | https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT17M4S/ref=dbs_a_def_r... | ybroze wrote: | This article is about "we should change things because we know | more!" Huron has always been more about "we should know more!" | | For me, I'm with the latter. | ybroze wrote: | This is my corpus study. https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article- | abstract/31/1/32/62590... | jrajav wrote: | I strongly agree with the article's premise! I also agree with | this guidepost for how we should be moving music theory past its | highly entrenched and institutional attitudes: | | > We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that | sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of | music being made and enjoyed out there in the world? | | I would personally add one more leading question: Can we explain | music in other ways than by its harmony and chords? | | A harmonic approach to analysis works fantastic for old European | music, and pretty damn well for jazz too. For rock, it starts to | oddly leave out important aspects of the music like rhythm, | timbre, the way effects like distortion inform the harmony, vocal | delivery, etc. And in the modern era, with all the advances and | innovations made in the last 30 years in the now dominant genres | of hip hop, pop, and electronic music, harmonic analysis is very | poorly equipped to make sense of things in any meaningful way. | | One music theorist who is attempting more competent analysis of | contemporary music is https://www.youtube.com/c/12tonevideos. I'd | love to see more of this. | AlbertCory wrote: | > the advances and innovations made in the last 30 years in the | now dominant genres of hip hop, pop, and electronic music. | | Not all changes are advances. | jrajav wrote: | Those genres are far and away the most popular forms of music | for an entire generation now, and exhibit a high degree of | craftsmanship with techniques never used before them. Whether | you personally enjoy the music or not, an honest academic | exploration of music would seek to understand and explain | what makes those styles of music tick. | AlbertCory wrote: | If you stick to "popular" I'm fine with it. Tastes change. | | It's the word "advances" which I object to. There's a value | judgment attached to that. | cjaybo wrote: | I don't think "advances" implies that something is | subjectively better, but that it builds upon previous | techniques and methods in some way. | | You can dislike synthesizers and samples all you want, | but there's no denying that they opened up new creative | avenues for composers and sound designers. | AlbertCory wrote: | OK. Fine with me. "Your music sucks" is a totally dead | end and I'm not going there. | | What I _will_ say is, arts do not advance linearly, more | or less, like science does. You can 't say that drama has | "advanced" since Shakespeare -- it's just changed. So | "what's popular?" is not a shorthand for "what's good?" | pvg wrote: | Interesting conversation involves exchanging value | judgements rather than pedantipoints. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-06 23:00 UTC)