This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books.
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.
It's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.
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
The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing.
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.
I would not call it harsh. The author don't even bother to assemble sentences themselves. And a title "Music Theory for Programmers" imply it is comprehensive even at an elementary scale.
The title does not imply it's comprehensive. If anything, a title like that suggests that it's only scratching the surface. If I read an article like "Haskell for C# Developers" I would not expect to be an expert in Haskell at the end. I would expect to have enough intuition to begin actually learning the language properly
That's sound design theory, not music theory. They're not the same thing.
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.
I agree. As a (hobbyist) musician and a (professional) programmer, I would not classify this web page as “music theory” given its widely accepted definition.
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 with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a chromatic scale”) allows a programmer to understand not just the how but the why for the basics of western music.
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.
I think what he means as music theory is the next step after what this (blatantly AI-written, but passable) article talks about. This is the part that you take for granted, but it certainly is music theory in the same way that Peano's axioms are number theory even though you don't use them explicitly.
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.
Spoken like someone with absolutely zero grasp of music theory or modern electronic music. I almost want to congratulate you for the worst-informed comment I’ve read today.
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve.
More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the thing you’re doing with others.
Music's theory is something you really need to understand at an unconscious level. All the study of how the notes relate and frequencies, that's very interesting and it may help you understand things better, but the real question is not, can you do all the math to figure out why this note and that note work together, it's can you hear it with your ears and play the correct harmony note for whatever purpose the music leads.
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.
> I doubt there is any composer that actually is relying on music theory for their compositions.
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.
You have it backward. The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Music's theory describes what we already know works, not how to make things work.
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.
Definitely gatekeeping. I'm no wiz by any means, but I've done (and still do) a fair amount of paid work (gigs, studio recordings, teaching, etc.) and I would not describe Grade 5 ABRSM as "very basic"
When I see my friends who are into music play and talk about different instruments, it actually feels like magic to me. I tried to learn Violin some years ago but I could never understand why the note was correct. I do know that if I had learnt Keyboard instead, I would know where the correct notes are but I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is. Any pointer as to what I can do? Because I dont think learning music theory is going to be enough for me.
At many western music schools, if piano isn’t your first instrument, it is compulsory to study piano as a second instrument. The reason for this is that it really helps when understanding harmony. You also do ear training, which is meant to solve the problem I think you’re describing. I expect you would find ear training resources on youtube or something now but I did it the old-fashioned way where you start by listening when people play major / minor chords, all the intervals, learn to recognize inversions etc and then move on to doing transcriptions of music you like. I have box files full of transcriptions I did when learning. But Levine (for example) includes some ear training advice.
That second point is spot on. The one thing I remember vividly - and that still helps me most - from all those years of classical piano training is the ear training. I don't have perfect pitch, but I remember A440 vividly (thanks to my electronic metronome) and the training left me with a strong sense relative pitch that helps me figure out pretty much any melody and chord progression relatively quickly.
> I am still not able to recognize a sound and understand what note that is
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).
Isn't perfect pitch just when you can tell a note without having a reference tone?
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's nothing magic in it. Any two pitches that have a rational number ratio with a small denominator sound "correct".
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.
Doesn't look like really a "v2" to me, rather v1 a bit re-arranged. A true "theory" able to explain present music (or even Jazz from the seventies) and also support its creation is still widely lacking, or just a naive variation of what was used for classical music. Tymoczko & co go a bit in a more general/useful direction where the theory eventually can also be used to define algorithms which can "compose" credible contemporary music, but still a long way to go. The latter is like the "litmus test" from my humble point of view whether a theory is indeed useful.
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.
It is presented with a tone of "music theory, the way a musician could never understand it, because they do not know what a sin wave is" which makes it so infuriating.
> 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
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?
Many subject matters are initially so confusing and inaccessible that I have often wished for an audio-visual video lecture series in the following format:
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.
As a non-musician non-Western programmer, the only music book that is making sense to me (still reading) is Robert Snyder's Music and Memory[1]. It's the first book that doesn't trick me by trying to pass cultural artefacts (notes, scales, raga, etc.) as some universal truth, or douse me in medieval pseudo-science (Pythagorean small ratios, etc.)
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.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 are intervals which sound pleasant to the human ear. [1]
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
If you like that book, you might also enjoy David Huron's books on voice leading and anticipation. I have not read the book you referenced, but from the description it seems like a similar approach.
Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing.
How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
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.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
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.
> Let us try an experiment shall we: listen to any music you like and try and match the information the article provided to the complexity of what you are hearing.
Trying now. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
> How much do you see a path from A(rticle) to S(ound in your ear).
Haha well it's easy then please send us the MIDI, Openscore, Lylipond, MP3... anything really, of a composition of yours that will be as appealing as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
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.
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.
It was a really good article up and until it explained the octave, the perfect fifth, and the equal tempered scale. It didn’t do a full explanation of equal temperament—we use it because, with it, it’s easy to change keys.
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 looks good at the begining, but at some point it starts saying "half truths", or stating facts/conclusions with confidence as if that was the main reason, but its just half of it (and maybe not the most important half)...
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.
I did read it, found it mildly informative/interesting, then saw your comment, read the link, and pasted in two paragraphs into Pangram 4... ouch! I guess I'm not LLM-weary enough?
> 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.
“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.”
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.”
It's a very idiosyncratic (and often irritating) style, but I don't find it particularly difficult to understand. It's not meaningless, just weirdly phrased.
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.
> Which is a strange way to teach a system that essentially comes out of physics and arithmetic. There are twelve notes for a reason.
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.
Also his physics explanation is not the best, and you can see if you just ask the next “why” question.
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.
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!
And even saying the 12 notes must have specific frequencies is wrong. It's very common when creating synths for example to detune them to create richer sounds, or play on dissonance to some extent.
When I tried to post a duplicated link HN will just redirect me to the existing one, but somehow everyone else seems to be able to post the same link multiple times.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, I highly recommend setting aside 90 minutes and strapping yourself in for a listen to https://malwebb.com/notnoi.html.
>I can't play an instrument. I have tried more than once, and each time I got as far as being able to make roughly the right noises without ever understanding why they were the right noises. 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.
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.
Pretty good, could use more on the tonic, how it’s defined for a diatonic set of 7 notes. The chosen I IV V primary chords are key for that, but a precious tidbit I learned is any of the notes can be set as tonic, but the I IV V chords are only for major and minor. Like for the notes in C major, it becomes A minor with I IV V chords starting off A, but to set the tonic to F, it becomes F Lydian mode with primary chords I, II, and VII. (Fmag, Gmaj, Emin) The rule for the primary chords of the modes is you find the note that differentiates it from the major or minor scale, and pick the chords that have it avoiding the diminished. Playing the notes of c major starting at f, it’s the sharp fourth b that is different, so the primary triads are f-a-c e-g-b and g-b-d.
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.
I was interested in reading the article but, like so many I find online these days, the white text on black makes my eyes throb to the point of giving me a headache if I don't stop after a few seconds. so I have to give it a miss. I've read that white text on a black background is easier on the eyes, but it's obviously not universal.
This article is quite well done, especially from a programmer's perspective, but falls flat (no pun intended) for me because of my terrible ear for pitch.
> 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.
Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a scientific backing to music, there are also cultural conventions on top that you just have to accept. And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music.
If tasked with this, I would start with an image of a piano keyboard and ask: Why the hell does it look so weird ? Black and white keys in some infernally strange layout ? WHY ?
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.
If you’re a programmer interested in music, do check out Strudel, at least the examples at https://strudel.cc/examples. If you like those (I love them, so much art in a few lines of code), the docs _will_ get you started. Enjoy!
I learned to play guitar by my own when I was around 12. You don't really even need to know music theory to play guitar, as long as you understand the shapes etc.
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.
It's funny though how different people respond to learning music theory differently. I started on guitar when I was 19. I played for a long time at campfire level. When my kids started learning music I also learnt a lot, and now I know scale shapes and modes on guitar, so I can reasonably play to a song I'm hearing for the first time, then figure it out by ear. But I just cannot make the leap to knowing the notes at each position. I can read music, very slowly, to play on piano, but fluency has never clicked for me even though I've put the time in.
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.
Perfect pitch is not correlated with the ability to see written notes and immediately know how to play them on any instrument. It is only barely correlated with the same but for singing the note.
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.
I think it gets significantly harder to learn new things as you age. It could make sense though like its significantly easier to learn a new language as a child than an adult, something simillar could apply to sheet music also i guess where they are naturally more intuined with its language vrs you who has to kinda use a dictionary for time to time because the "normal" way for you to speak has been so different for so long. But for your child, its another form of expression almost. Its really good to get kids into music while they are young imo
Re: not knowing how to play because author doesn’t get the why
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.
No I don't have a "problem with that". And yes, people learn by imitation, which is what I meant by practice. Playing the guitar is a fundamentally different activity than knowing music theory. Becoming good at one doesn't make you good at the other naturally (since you are practicing two different things) and I am worried some people think its the same thing.
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 is clearly interesting and contributing value, but it's also painfully AI prose to the point where it is hard to not dismiss it as likely false information.
Fun interactive examples though.
With another human pass, this could be great.
The first couple of sentences got me hooked because I have had the same difficulty trying to learn music where I dont understand if I am producing the right sound or not. I thought it was fun so tried to push myself to read through but overcoming the dislike of the way AI structures the statements became impossible after a short while.
"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." This has the signature LLM writing style.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.shermusic.com/products/the-jazz-theory-book
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.
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”.
https://ece.illinois.edu/academics/courses/ece402
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.
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.
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.
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.
Disclosure: Musician
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).
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.
I used to think I was pitch blind until one day it just clicked. It just takes practice in my opinion.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Creating melodies by doggedly applying any system is almost guaranteed to feel tired, predictable and boring.
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?
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.
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.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Doesn't HN have a temporal deduplication system?
You can also see duplicates e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=semianalysis.com
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.
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.
Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?
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
lolwut
> 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.
Also reminds me of https://www.languagetransfer.org/music
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
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.
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 :<
> 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.
Hi Claude
> 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.