Thinking About Music Theory
August 6, 2022 4:04 PM   Subscribe

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- Brandon Blatcher



 
A pitch is a really just a very fast rhythm.

Likewise, rhythm is just a really low frequency pitch. I've always wondered if it was possible to make 'subharmonic' chords by including the rhythm frequency as a 'note' that is part of the chord.
posted by eye of newt at 5:04 PM on August 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


Perhaps he's misquoting Wilkerson, but as someone who took music theory to university level, nothing in the blog post is new to me. The more sophisticated texts I read explaining harmony all covered harmonic sequences, ambiguity, blah blah. Simpler texts don't because they're aimed at teaching you the artistic conventions of so-called common practice, not at explaining how they came into being. Maybe they should, and reading the blog post that precedes this one, it seems like the author is pretty exercised about the pedagogy aspect? I find the framing in this one pretty misleading.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:38 PM on August 6, 2022 [16 favorites]


But we like harmonies that are not so consonant, too. How does Wilkerson account for that? He attributes it to our inborn love of narrative, likening a sequence of chords to a story.

I may be wrong about this, but don't cultures differ on what is considered "consonant" or "dissonant"?
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:42 PM on August 6, 2022 [6 favorites]


I see a lot of people who seem to think "music theory should tell me how to make good music or things that sound good. Or maybe how to identify it".

And I just don't get it. It's cool to study what people love: we do that, and it's called sociology, ethnomusicology, and music history.

To me, music theory is ultimately like mathematical theory and physical theory: it's an ongoing method of frameworks and analyses of what we observe in the natural world and the abstract world of pattens. It (attempts to) give us a way to discuss things when we want to talk about what sounds good, or what is this characteristic, etc.

I think this is all very interesting stuff, down to psychoacoustics etc, but I'm not sure there's any lack as implied with some of the framing.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:48 PM on August 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


"Rhythm is the physical, harmony is the cerebral, and melody is the emotional part of music" - Helen Hobbs Jordan (from the John Oates memoir).

True dat harmony comes out of sympathetic relationships between fundamental harmonics, and that it's very mathematical in its nature. Seems obvious? (I'd like a "harmonic-series" keyboard, I think Glenn Branca made one?) It's funny that Wilkerson didn't like the Circle of Fifths, because it can get interesting.

We have Cicadas starting here now, they're the best at making complex overtones.
posted by ovvl at 6:09 PM on August 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


The more sophisticated texts I read explaining harmony all covered harmonic sequences, ambiguity, blah blah. Simpler texts don't because they're aimed at teaching you the artistic conventions of so-called common practice, not at explaining how they came into being.

Could you recommend any of these texts? I run into a wall when trying to read about it because I just do not care about the conventions of the common practice period. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with how I listen to music.
posted by solarion at 6:14 PM on August 6, 2022


And I just don't get it. It's cool to study what people love: we do that, and it's called sociology, ethnomusicology, and music history.

Ok, but: there is something profound and fundamental here, something that speaks to the human apparatus on a visceral level. There is a something akin to a language here that bypasses what we think of as language, that we cannot parse, but that we deeply, profoundly feel.

There is, somehow, a language here for speaking to a part of our apparatus that we don't understand, in terms that seem to share a grammar with the waveforms and quanta that make up the nouns and verbs of the universe we can perceive . That's not just "cool" or "interesting, I guess"; it suggests that there is something more substantial and important in play.
posted by mhoye at 6:15 PM on August 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


Sure, that's all cool too! Maybe 'cool' isn't the best word choice. I love that stuff and see great value in studying it, and love to read about it too.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:27 PM on August 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


This is a fun read, and kinda interesting in how it deals with extended chords. However the trouble with trying to reinvent harmonic theory from first principles using the overtone series is the ancient Greeks, and the Babylonians before them (and probably other cultures whose traditions are less well preserved/communicated) got there first. If anyone’s looking for a primary source Aristophanes is a good starting point. I’ll try to come back later and add some more recent refs for harmony/harmonic overtone theory.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:48 PM on August 6, 2022 [10 favorites]


Music theory is ultimately a language to talk about what we do when we create, perform, listen to and appreciate music.

It might to be better to talk of music theories because different traditions use different languages and theoretical frameworks. You could get into the vast array of world music traditions but even in western music there are different languages for jazz and traditional western music.

The idea of a universal language to talk about music is appealing and possibly even sometimes useful, but it will always stumble at the next counterexample which hasn’t yet been discovered or created.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:07 PM on August 6, 2022 [11 favorites]


"This theory is further re-enforced by the fact that there is one Major Scale whereas there are many Minor scales." -- this seems really Western-centric, or even modern-Western-centric. There are many different scales, and I don't think any of them is primary in (say) Indian music, or even premodern modal music.
posted by zompist at 7:10 PM on August 6, 2022 [18 favorites]


Helmholtz also did a lot of work in music theory from acoustics, and archive.org has it to read.
posted by away for regrooving at 7:15 PM on August 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


Likewise, rhythm is just a really low frequency pitch. I've always wondered if it was possible to make 'subharmonic' chords by including the rhythm frequency as a 'note' that is part of the chord.

Yes.

Albert Einstein implied that matter can be like energy, so rhythm can be like pitch, I reckon?

A synthesizer with a LFO (low frequency oscillator) can make ratchet/growly noises around a drum roll speed (approx 720 bpm?) or faster, which turn into grumpy undertones. So, yeah, you can make undertone drones which reflect the fundamental key tone. But most music producers don't really love that sound, because it's kinda weird, and most audiences don't like it. Maybe sounds like fun for experimental music?

("chords" don't work (sound right) for low frequencies. The elemental thing about the harmonic series is that cats and dogs don't get along when they're locked together in the basement. They can get along better when they're running around freely in the upper floors.)
posted by ovvl at 7:15 PM on August 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


I may be wrong about this, but don't cultures differ on what is considered "consonant" or "dissonant"?

You’re not. Like zompist alludes to above, the article gets a lot more accurate if you assume there’s a ‘western’ before a lot of words.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:16 PM on August 6, 2022 [6 favorites]


I may be wrong about this, but don't cultures differ on what is considered "consonant" or "dissonant"?

Sure, but for musicians and audiences to find some things dissonant and other things consonant and beauty in the tension between the two seems to be common to a lot of musical cultures.
posted by straight at 7:19 PM on August 6, 2022


A synthesizer with a LFO (low frequency oscillator) can make ratchet/growly noises around a drum roll speed (approx 720 bpm?) or faster, which turn into grumpy undertones. So, yeah, you can make undertone drones which reflect the fundamental key tone. But most music producers don't really love that sound, because it's kinda weird, and most audiences don't like it.

I feel like this is totally a thing at raves but forgive me if I can’t elaborate… for reasons.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:34 PM on August 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


A pitch is a really just a very fast rhythm. Chords are very fast polyrhythm. Just as rhythm is fundamental to music generally, so too should our theory of rhythm be fundamental to our theory of music generally.

I will keep this in mind at Sunday Brunch piano tomorrow.

Reading this, I tried to understand how standard jazz theory regarding substitutions fits into this theoretical ordering of harmony

And of course the multitude of non-Western modalities/modes is not part of this guy's bailiwick.
posted by kozad at 7:42 PM on August 6, 2022


However the trouble with trying to reinvent harmonic theory from first principles using the overtone series is the ancient Greeks, and the Babylonians before them (and probably other cultures whose traditions are less well preserved/communicated) got there first.

I favorited this but I can’t emphasize enough how spot on it is. It’s been done. Done in ancient times and elaborated endlessly since then. There’s not much more to learn from this program.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:46 PM on August 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


"chords" don't work (sound right) for low frequencies

(Which traces ultimately to the shape and functioning of the cochlea, which makes the width of "critical bands" at low frequencies stop having width proportional to the center frequency: they bottom out at about 25 Hz wide. So the consonance and roughness of mixed harmonic series stop being transposition-invariant.)
posted by away for regrooving at 7:50 PM on August 6, 2022 [11 favorites]


Musical acoustics history in three oversimplifications:
1) the ancients knew about harmonic vibration and just intonation.
2) Helmholtz (19cen) added non-linear interactions: difference tones.
3) Fletcher (20cen) added cochlear modeling.

Boom.
posted by away for regrooving at 7:53 PM on August 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


To be clear, I don’t want to claim that psychoacoustics can’t contribute perspective to music theories, but to claim (as I’m not quite sure TFA did!) that it’s a unifying scientific framework for music theory is a bridge or two too far.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:08 PM on August 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Couldn’t finish this; way too many computer-brain analogies, especially the “science” framing. Also, given the focus on harmonics, it’s odd that they point out that western scales aren’t built on just intonation. There’s nothing inherently “natural” about 12TET. But some nice observations about how western-trained ears hear harmony, if nothing mind-blowing.
posted by q*ben at 8:10 PM on August 6, 2022 [4 favorites]


This theory is further re-enforced by the fact that there is one Major Scale whereas there are many Minor scales.

There is definitely not only one major scale. There are harmonic major scales, even the double harmonic major scales, major pentatonics, etc.

"Major" scale generally just distinguishes scales with a major third vs minor third.
posted by tclark at 8:13 PM on August 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


So, I there's a a couple of big problems that happen when people talk about music like this. The first is that there is no singular Music Theory. Not even the we're talking about Western music traditions. Like, yeah we're all using the same building blocks, but it's like trying to use the way journalists think about their writing to describe poetry. I mean, nouns are gonna noun and major chords are gonna major, and you can use ideas from one to influence the other, but you'll be missing something key if you only look at something using framing meant for something else.

This gets compounded by looking at music as a physical phenomena. People don't experience an octave as "This is vibrating at double the speed of something else", nobody experiences the band getting softer as "the change in pressure between the highest and lowest was more greater and then it got smaller." I mean, that's an objective description of what they're experiencing, but it's not what makes it music. You can apply those descriptions to the sound of car engines as easily as notes from a musical instrument, and barring some very specific circumstances, nobody is going to hear two car engines as music. So yeah, you can talk about the physics of music, but there's nothing there separate from the physics of noise, what makes music different is the sensory organs gathering the signal and the brain interpreting it those music. We actually do have a science of music that's separate from the science of sound waves, music cognition, and I suspect that's what most people are trying to engage with here. I suggest the Cadence Podcast, link, if you're interested in that.

While I'm at it, I know the idea that pitch is just fast rhythm and rhythm is just slowed down pitch have a great "WOAH" factor to it, but it's just not true. Like at all. If you're on a boat, and in the middle of the ocean if you're in the ocean, and you're in the lower part of a wave, you're still experiencing the wave. That's true for pitch too. Just because you're in the negative pressure section of a sound wave does not mean that you're not hearing that pitch. The pitch is the entire cycle, not just the parts of it with positive pressure, and by definition it doesn't involve silence. At it's most basic rhythm is a description of when changes in sound waves(either in volume, pitch, or maybe timbre) happen, and silence is one of the states that can be part of that change. They are two temporally bound phenomena sure, but they aren't the same thing by any stretch.
posted by Gygesringtone at 8:16 PM on August 6, 2022 [26 favorites]


To paraphrase Adam Neely, usually when people use the term "music theory," you can very often just substitute "the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians."
posted by tclark at 8:31 PM on August 6, 2022 [16 favorites]


I like the idea that AI is finding new variables in physics that, when plugged in, give very accurate results—but the physicists involved have no idea what the variables represent. The AI however seems to have an idea of what it means inside of itself, —and that's the thing we are going to have to reverse engineer from the AI's processes. Because, after all, it's just a lot of code, isn't it? It's not like neuroanatomy or activating genomes, it's code we can read, that humans made... but what IS it the AI is doing? Not just with the code, but being able to use it to create models that can predict very difficult physics maneuvers, in ways that the physics canon hasn't yet. [and the connection to this topic is that Music Theory is physics + math + neurons.]
posted by not_on_display at 8:38 PM on August 6, 2022


actually, there are other music theories based on harmonics - the lydian dominant chromatic concept of tonal organization - i've read george russell's book - i'm not 100% sure if i completely understood all of it, but instead of having a kind of music that resolves from the dominant to the tonic, we have a music that isn't meant to resolve at all

some say that it's equal temperament that actually caused this resolving to the tonic

i'm not totally sure i understand all this - and i wonder how much the overtone series being liked by people is conditioning by the real world - would it be possible to accustom people to other inharmonic timbres?

it's really hard to explain some of the scales of arabic or indian classical music with overtones, especially when we start dealing with microtonal scales

i've read harry partch's book, too - genesis of a music - between him, george russell and lots of other musicians, there's a nice collection of rabbit holes to get lost in

there's really no way you can say - "it has to be this way because of the overtones" - because one can come up with radically different interpretations of those overtones - all you can say is, "you could do it this way and people have been known to like it like that"

it's a little complicated for rock and roll ...
posted by pyramid termite at 8:41 PM on August 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


Can science make a better music theory?

no




[I will now read the linked article]
posted by philip-random at 8:50 PM on August 6, 2022 [5 favorites]


After Modernist Cuisine took off I really agree with professor Herve This' idea, which is that molecular gastronomy is a science proper, whereas modernist cuisine is the art and craft of applying that science to cooking well, across all cultures and cuisines. So I see very much the same distinction that terms such as music theory and musicology are used to capture different aspects of music.
posted by polymodus at 9:38 PM on August 6, 2022


rhythm is just a really low frequency pitch
🎶 the rhythm is the bass / and the bass is the treble 🎶
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:19 AM on August 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


If anyone’s looking for a primary source Aristophanes is a good starting point.

I’m guessing you might mean Aristotle, who wrote about music in the Metaphysics and “On the Soul”, rather than Aristophanes, who wrote comedies with lots of dick jokes
posted by Pallas Athena at 1:36 AM on August 7, 2022 [16 favorites]


agree with i_am_joe's_spleen that this is not new for those that study music theory. when i was actively teaching music, i taught my preschool music students these concepts (alongside ways to reconcile this with staff notation). i personally didn't (and don't) believe in teaching music theory with a keyboard as a primary reference, because it doesn't make intuitive (or logical) sense. it's easier (and more sensible) to teach from a pitch spectrum framework. shepard tone visualizations and demos are a beginner-friendly way to ease kids into engaging with frequencies/undertones/overtones and the math behind them. it also makes sense to teach harmonics, consonance, etc when teaching harmony theory (because how else do you accurately explain why certain things sound "good" or "bad" to western ears, to little kids?)

(otoh, it also probably helped that all my kid students had some exposure to string instruments. learning theory using a keyboard as reference is just... not very ideal for understanding fundamentals.)
posted by aielen at 1:56 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Music theory is a kind of linguistics, so I was hoping for content talking about birdsong patterns and repetition, singing with the crowd for in-grouping, and signalling and echo of messages.

(Maybe that sits on the "how we talk about a thing" side of the divide between "this is the thing" vs "this is how we talk about the thing" so I've added this note to say so. This is 'how western music theory talks about the the thing', and it's not encompassing all of the thing.)
posted by k3ninho at 2:01 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


nobody is going to hear two car engines as music

Their loss.
posted by flabdablet at 3:27 AM on August 7, 2022 [14 favorites]


As a keen amateur drummer, the connection between sound perceived as rhythm and rhythm perceived as sound is something I've spent quite a lot of hours exploring.

Something I've noticed, especially when playing with guitarists who are on my wavelength, is that sound - chords, tone, progressions - directly affect the ways in which my body allocates patterns of tension, and that in turn affects both the rhythm and sound of what comes out of the drum kit.

I'm not convinced that trying to tease these effects apart is actually useful. What's far more interesting to me is remaining so totally locked into experiencing the present moment that sound and rhythm just integrate in a way that makes conceptual teasings-apart of them actively unhelpful.

The trick I've been playing on my analytical brain for the last few months to help keep this achievable is persuading it to attempt to analyze what it's perceiving in the frequency domain rather than the time domain if it absolutely can't be persuaded to leave analysis aside for the time being.

Both domains are mathematically equivalent in the sense that any information expressed in one can be mechanically transformed into an expression in the other, but it seems to me that quite a lot of bodily processes are regulated in ways that make more (literal, physical) sense to me if I use frequency-domain concepts like tension and pitch and resonance to think about them even for stuff that happens at well below the lowest repetition rate we'd generally think of as "sound".

In particular, attempting to stick with a consistent internal representation of what I'm hearing rather than making a fundamental analytic separation between time and frequency at around 10-20Hz is so far proving pleasingly less distracting. What this feels like it does from in here is smearing my perception of the present moment across a wider slice of time, which gives me more room to move inside it and smooths the process of progressing through it.
posted by flabdablet at 5:36 AM on August 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


But I still suck at playing drums, so take all of the above with the appropriate dose of salt.
posted by flabdablet at 5:42 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Topic-adjacent note: We all know about the famous fact-checking ensemble at The New Yorker. Well, apparently the fact-checkers do not include any musicians. I read this explanatory parenthetical note this morning (in a current article about developing sounds for electric vehicles so we know they are there).

(In a musical C octave, the high C is twice the frequency of the low C.)

As many of you know, a high C is twice the frequency of the middle C. The high C is four times the frequency of the low C.

Oh, and by the way, speaking of Ancient Greeks and music, it's Pythagoras you want to check out, not Plato, who is full of what appear to us moderns as loony ideas about music...and the shiny new technology of writing stuff down.
posted by kozad at 5:48 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


(In a musical C octave, the high C is twice the frequency of the low C.)

As many of you know, a high C is twice the frequency of the middle C. The high C is four times the frequency of the low C.


Pretty clear to me that the New Yorker is talking about the two C notes that occur within any given C octave, regardless of which particular octave that is. The "high" they're talking about is relative to the the lower note in the octave in question rather than referring to a specific keyboard position.

The point they were trying to make would probably have been less muddy if they'd left out the note name altogether, and just said that for any two notes an octave apart, the higher of them has twice the frequency of the lower.
posted by flabdablet at 6:09 AM on August 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


Haha, oops thanks for catching my error Pallas Athena, I actually meant Aristoxenus, who yes is kind of handing down and annotating Aristotle. Sorry, all three are filed in my brain as ‘that Ancient Greek guy starting with A’, I need to renovate my mind palace.
This is a book available on archive.org on the subject.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:11 AM on August 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


flabdablet: You're right. I guess they got their facts right, technically. The clunky (to me) phrase "In a musical C octave" kinda threw me. I've never heard it put that way before.
posted by kozad at 6:15 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Don’t apologise for posting thoroughburro, this got a quality discussion rolling.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:15 AM on August 7, 2022 [10 favorites]


I need to renovate my mind palace.

Naw, you're good. Few of the columns and friezes want a bit of dusting is all.
posted by flabdablet at 6:17 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


don't cultures differ on what is considered "consonant" or "dissonant"?

Never mind cultures, individuals disagree about this.

I could happily listen to these guys doing this for hours at a stretch - have done, in fact - even though there are quite a lot of you who would probably prefer fingernails on a chalkboard.
posted by flabdablet at 6:22 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm simultaneously really into people using geekery and technology to find new ways of doing stuff, and really annoyed when people use geekery and technology as an excuse to ignore the extensive theories, wisdoms, and traditions that people have formed about a thing for literal millennia. Because those people were also using something akin to empirical research, they just happened to be using different toolsets and different ways of "processing data." And it's a shame that there's a mindset along the lines of, "well, if it didn't come in the specific Excel format I'm used to, it was probably a lot of superstitious hokery."

An architect that I like a lot, whose work is highly mathematically rigorous but has also involved tremendous analysis of historical building methods, has this weirdly intense grudge with Rene Descartes. Descartes, he argued, ushered in this mechanistic mindset of the world whose hidden, too-often-unchallenged superstition is: "If you can't precisely model it, it doesn't exist." Suddenly "science" refers to a specific form of testing and hypothesis that works great for certain things and less-great for others, and it is held to stand in opposition to "non-science," which is all savagery by comparison. (I am drastically simplifying his argument, but hopefully not dishonestly so.)

I feel like there's a parallel between this and the tech world's idea of "disruption," where people with no experience in a field are expected to come in and deliver "data-driven" solutions to problems and, oh yeah, while we're here, why don't we throw out everything else that anyone else has ever tried? It's a conquerer's mindset, for all it presents itself as the voice of reason.

Douglas Adams gave a talk to an atheists' conference once where he talked about Bali using a religious calendar to determine the schedule for its its rice harvests. Scientists in the 70s apparently presented a more "scientifically rigorous" method for them to handle their rice-growing, they tried it, and... whaddaya know, it threw a lot of things drastically off-balance. Things which the scientific model hadn't anticipated, since all models are inherently limited, but which the religious calendar had been designed to take into account. His point wasn't that science is bad and God is good—it was that science is capable of dogma too, because it has the same issue with ignorant and over-simple faith in capital-T Truth that religions are susceptible to too.

Anyway, I'm just popping in to recommend my favorite book on harmonics, Harmonic Experience by W. A. Mathieu. Mathieu was a fascinating guy: he arranged and composed for Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton, founded Second City, and also spent a lot of time obsessing over various Eastern music theories; Harmonic Experience is an attempt to reconcile his experiences with the various schools of theory. And one of the things I like about it is that it's got a lot of profound insights, but it doesn't do a lot of brashly declaring that This Is The Way Sound Works. It's extremely inquisitive, even though I also think it's extremely wise. And that's the kind of intellectual-cultural fusion that I really enjoy: the sort that brings scientific methodologies to things that are too complex to fully reduce to scientific equation, using it to lend clarity and insight and discover new avenues for exploration while also going, "Look, at some point, you might just have to take this thing I'm doing and keep pushing forward for yourself, because there's no way we're anywhere but at the very beginning of this mystery."

Also I'm relieved to learn that "Aristophanes" was a typo, because for a moment I was prepared to have my mind fully blown by the dude that wrote The Frogs.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:26 AM on August 7, 2022 [21 favorites]


I agree that the piece seems low quality. Just a vague sketch.

What about timbre? To my mind, Sun Ra's music gets its interest more from changes in timbre than from rhythm or melody. For that matter, a lot of classical music is partly timbre-driven.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:27 AM on August 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


It occurs to me that there are two functions to music theory-- to help people create good music, which it is somewhat useful, and to help people avoid making bad music, for which it isn't very useful.

Here's another angle. How much theory is there for ornamentation? As I understand it (not very much), classical ornamentation is notes of equal length, while folk ornamentation may have notes of unequal length or accents.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:34 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


Speaking of timbre and harmonic overtones, one of my favourite schools of modern classical/experimental music is the Spectralists, a bunch of people whose common thread is the idea: 'Y'know what's cool? Harmonic overtones!'. This video give a good explainer/intro. Gerard Grisey is my favourite of the bunch.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:37 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I think some of the sound/rhythm discussion may be going too far afield, and in some cases conflating rhythm with percussion.

Rhythm is a structured succession of strong and weak elements. A recurrence of dotted eighth+sixteenth on every beat in common time is a rhythm, but rhythms don’t have to recur. A single measure in which no note value is the same could be said to have a rhythm. There doesn’t actually have to be an audible expression of a rhythm for it to exist (it could be a rhythm contained in the mind of a musician as he/she performs something else). A rhythm could be said to exist on paper. Rhythms can be expressed through sound, but they don’t have to be.

Sound is the propagation of certain vibrations through a medium. These can create the psychological phenomenon we process as “sound” through the compression and rarefaction of fluid in the cochlea as a result of those vibrations. Sound cannot be said to exist on paper, only the idea of potential sound.

I mean, sure, I get it—rhythm consists of stronger parts and weaker parts which can be expressed through sound as louder and softer parts. And acoustic waves are built out of recurring louder and softer parts. So if you play a rhythm and speed it up enough you eventually get something that sounds like a sustained tone. But you already made sound by playing the rhythm. All you’re doing is speeding it up enough to sound like a unified single tone, which has more to do with the limits of human perception than the music of the spheres.
posted by slkinsey at 6:43 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Reading this, I tried to understand how standard jazz theory regarding substitutions fits into this theoretical ordering of harmony

If you squint it looks like it might be a way to come at them sideways, but it doesn't really work as described in the post. WHY it doesn't work is pretty interesting.

So, here's a little background about tuning vs. temperament that I need to get into. I promise it's relevant. This is a massive oversimplification that compresses thousands of years of history and regional variations, but it holds mostly true across what we consider western music. Also I'm not going to get into the math, but it's easily findable if that's your thing.

A tuning system is exactly what it sounds like, a system for tuning. So say you're tuning a piano, and you're doing it by ear. So you get the first pitch from a pitch pipe/tuning fork for the first note. Great, you tune that note, and you tune all the octaves to exactly double the frequency, and octaves are a musical universal, btw there's something in the human brain that recognizes octaves. Plus you've got one other interval that's really easy to pick out: The fifth. O.k. so you go up a fifth, tune that notes, tunes the octaves, etc. And you go around like that till you're back where you started. And look, you've got a 12 tone scale. But the math works out so that the gaps between those 12 notes aren't the same size. Which means a few things, but specifically it means that a melody that you start on D doesn't sound the same as if you start that same melody on F. So by extension, the C major scale doesn't sound the same as the A major, and the further in the cycle of fifths the tonic of the key is from the first note you tuned, the less recognizable the scale is . This sort of tuning (and there's different ways to go about it, I gave the simplest), is what the article's talking about with the overtone series.

But that's not what we do anymore, because as modern Western musical notation and composition techniques evolved, composers wanted to be able to move between keys easily. So people have developed ways to cheat the pure mathematics of octaves are 2:1 ratios, fifths 3:2, fourths 4:3, etc. Those are called temperaments, and are compromises between having pure sounding fifths, thirds, and octaves and being able to play in all 12 keys. It was such a giant thing when the first one of these saw wide use that Bach went nuts and wrote a cycle of pieces in all 12 keys, twice. The one we use is called equal temperament. The space between every half step is equal. This means that any key sounds the same as any other, but also that the octaves/thirds/fifths on the piano aren't quite true. On non-fixed pitch instruments and singing people will often fix those intervals by moving them back into the whole number ratios on long/important chords to get them to "ring".

If you want to hear the difference, I'd look here, link to a video of the same piece played in equal temperament and pythagorean tuning.

So, here's where we get into jazz theory. Simplifying a lot: in pop and classical theory, the interval that establishes the flavor of the chord is between the third and the root, and the context that the establishes the harmonic function of the chord is it's relationship to the Tonic of the key. In modern jazz, the interval that establishes the flavor of the chord is between the 3rd and the 7th, and the context that establishes the harmonic function is the chords on either side of it. So with the 3rd and 7th are important is because in some chords the interval going from 3->7 and from 7->3 is the same. That means you can swap a D,F#,A,C chord with a Ab,C,Eb,Gb (F#). That doesn't work in non-equal temperaments, because D and Ab are far enough apart on the circle of fifths that those chords sound different. Now the other bit that's important for jazz chord substitutions in that those harmonic functions imply sets of 13 notes, and every chord can have different harmonic functions that give multiple sets of 13 notes with the performer deciding which to use. Not only that but different chords can imply the same sets of 13 notes. So, often times the performer will substitute one of those chords for the one in original to alter the harmony of the piece. There's rules about when and how that's generally done, but that's the very general thing that's going on. That doesn't work in a tuning system with unequal half steps. There's all sorts of guidelines to use when figuring that out, but that's essentially what's happening with jazz the two big flavors of jazz substitution.

So I mean, while there is truth to the idea that jazz uses harmonic ambiguity to enable chord substitutions, it's not ambiguity based on the pure overtone series of the notes involved, in a truly overtone based system, that ambiguity doesn't exist for those combination of notes. The reasons jazz substitution work are based on the ambiguity created by deviating from those pure relationships.

I don't know, I've been going back and forth about the idea described in the blog post, because it's not exactly wrong, but I just get the feeling there's way too many spherical cows being assumed in it. It's kind of hard to tell from a pretty brief second hand account though.
posted by Gygesringtone at 6:47 AM on August 7, 2022 [14 favorites]


...nobody is going to hear two car engines as music.

Someone has never been to a drag race and experienced two top-fuel supercharged hemis burbling angrily at the line. Or, y’know, the start of the Indy 500 (of course, that’s 33 engines at full pitch, so maybe that’s more akin to a symphony?)
posted by Thorzdad at 6:52 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


... also just to bridge the gap between Aristophanes and Aristoxenus, the oldest surviving complete composition from Ancient Greece: the 'Song of Seikilos'. A popular drinking song someone had inscribed on their tombstone.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:52 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I need to renovate my mind palace.

I’ll just take a trip to the ol’ mind palace…
posted by zamboni at 7:01 AM on August 7, 2022


Part of the utility of a musical theory is the abstraction it provides, and the "notes on a staff" abstraction has proven to be extremely useful and productive. But nobody is actually claiming that notes on a staff provide either a necessary nor sufficient description of music as a whole, and so this article seems to be arguing with a bit of a strawman. The challenge is that finding a good abstraction for something like "timbre" turns out to be much harder, and you basically find yourself in deep mathematical waters before you can say much of anything systematically. The notes on a staff abstraction hits a real sweet spot between simple and comprehensive that is hard to beat.

Also I like to think of rhythm and harmony as being unified in the same way the time and space are unified, in that they are conceptually equivalent but perceptually distinct.
posted by grog at 7:05 AM on August 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


I asked a related question on Metafilter last year; some interesting answers and follow up resources.
posted by Nelson at 7:06 AM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


don't cultures differ on what is considered "consonant" or "dissonant"?

I think it is probably more accurate to say that different cultures and individuals at during times and under different contexts can vary widely as to what is considered “more pleasing” and “less pleasing.”

Dissonance is a physical phenomenon. The more the overtones of one note (or actual/implied set of notes) interfere (or would interfere) with those of another, the more they are dissonant with one another. But the extent to which the actual or implied presence of acoustic interference (aka interference beats) is perceived as pleasing or not can vary widely based on musical context, style and genre, culture, history, individual preference and more. Jazz is full of dissonant tones that I find very pleasing, for example. There are sounds in the western classical tradition that we know were received as shocking at the piece’s premier but today are considered nothing special in that regard. This is for a number of reasons, but not least because we are not listening with the same ears as the contemporaries of Orlando di Lasso, but rather with ears that have heard things such as Tristan und Isolde, Le Sacre du printemps and Pierrot lunaire, not to mention the oeuvre of, for example, Led Zeppelin.
posted by slkinsey at 7:08 AM on August 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


nobody is going to hear two car engines as music

Their loss.


some years ago, I heard one of the members of Zoviet France describe noise as "just sound that you don't want to hear".

If we want to talk first principles, maybe this is where the discussion ought to start, with music being the sound that we do want to hear. Subjective? Absolutely. Impossible to apply metrics to? Absolutely.

Which affirms me in my original impression of whether science could make a better music theory ...

No. Absolutely not.

Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve on what we've already got, in particular the exclusionary mess that is western music theory.
posted by philip-random at 8:08 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


As a builder of generative music systems, both analog and digital, I would just say that music is sonic events occurring through time. Sonic events include silence. These events can be human directed, not human directed, found, produced, pleasant, unpleasant, etc. It’s music when I choose to listen to it as music. All music, everywhere, is in the mind of the listener.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:24 AM on August 7, 2022 [7 favorites]


you tune that note, and you tune all the octaves to exactly double the frequency, and octaves are a musical universal, btw there's something in the human brain that recognizes octaves. Plus you've got one other interval that's really easy to pick out: The fifth.

Any object that vibrates is never going to do so at exactly and only one frequency, because even if its own structure is super simple it's inevitably going to couple to nearby objects that don't resonate at exactly the same frequency as it does. So a frequency-domain analysis of the vibration is always going to reveal components at multiples and submultiples of the dominant vibration frequency.

Any asymmetry in the way that a vibrating object's motion is constrained is going to generate harmonics at even multiples of the dominant frequency, and any constraints to its motion that don't exactly conform to Hooke's Law are going to generate harmonics at odd multiples. The strongest of each of these will generally occur at twice and three times the dominant frequency respectively.

So if you have a vibrating object making a sound, and you add another, softer sound at exactly twice or exactly three times the frequency of the first, the brain is going to have trouble teasing those two sounds apart. The second one is going to get interpreted as a harmonic overtone of the first, and the brain will perceive the result as harmonic distortion affecting the timbre of the first sound rather than as two separate sounds.

As you make the added sounds louder, at some point the brain's audio processing subsystem is going to go "hey, wait a minute, that overtone is louder than its fundamental, that must be two sounds!" and again the first harmonics for which this potential ambiguity occurs are at 2x and 3x the fundamental frequency.

An octave is the musical interval between a fundamental and its second harmonic (2x overtone) and a fifth is the interval between second and third harmonics (2x and 3x overtones). So the frequency ratios for an octave and a fifth are 2:1 and 3:2 (= 1.5) respectively, and these intervals are important exactly because the brain has less to go on in order to distinguish between separate sounds and plausible timbres of a single sound when it's those intervals that are involved.

In fact if you hear two tones that are a fifth apart, sometimes the brain will even perceive a "phantom" fundamental underneath that pair in an apparent attempt to unify them; this effect has been used deliberately in the design of certain small speakers to make their bass response sound better than it actually is.

O.k. so you go up a fifth, tune that notes, tunes the octaves, etc. And you go around like that till you're back where you started.

Going up in pitch by successive octaves generates frequency ratios of 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 16:1 and so on; by successive fifths, ratios of 3:2, 9:4, 27:8, 81:16 and so on. So all of the octave steps generate frequencies that are an integer multiple of the starting point, while none of the fifth steps ever do. It doesn't matter how far you keep going up by fifths, you'll never land on exactly the same pitch as any you'd reach when going up by octaves because no power of three is ever exactly divisible by any power of two.

Going up by four steps of fifths gets to 81:16 which is pretty close to an integer at 5.0625, but it's not close to any of the powers of 2 that form the octave series. It's not until we've gone up by twelve fifths, to 312:212 = 531441:4096 = 129.746+, that we get close to somewhere reachable via octaves at 27 = 128.

And look, you've got a 12 tone scale.

Going up by twelve fifths is almost but not quite equivalent to going up by seven octaves. The circle of fifths isn't a perfect circle, so instead of going up by a fifth for the thirteenth time we cycle our 12 tone scale at the seventh octave instead.

To generate the note frequencies within the scale, we need to come down from the twelve resulting notes by some amount of their own octaves - that is, divide their frequencies by some or other power of 2 - until they land in between the starting point and one octave up from there.

But the math works out so that the gaps between those 12 notes aren't the same size.

Specifically, the ratios between successive notes in such a 12 note scale works out to either 37:211 = 1.06787+ which I will call W for Wide, or 28:35 = 1.05350- which I will call N for Narrow, and the pattern ends up as W, N, W, N, W, N, N, W, N, W, N, N.

With five wide and seven narrow intervals making up the scale, multiplying all these ratios together yields W5 × N7 = (37:211)5 × (28:35)7 = 37×5:211×5 × 28×7:35×7 = 256:255 = 2, which is the octave our scale has to span. So that checks out.

Incidentally, if you step up to a black key for every wide interval in a circle-of-fifths scale generated from F, and a white key for every narrow one, you get the traditional keyboard instrument layout. So neither that layout nor the choice of twelve notes with which to subdivide each octave are as completely arbitrary as they first appear: both fall out of the harmonic arithmetic by which the very idea of a scale is constructed in the first place.

Which means a few things, but specifically it means that a melody that you start on D doesn't sound the same as if you start that same melody on F.

It also means that an instrument that's been circle-of-fifths tuned starting at F is never going to be precisely in tune with one starting at E, because the wide and narrow interval pattern of the one can never be made to line up precisely with those of the other.

So people have developed ways to cheat the pure mathematics of octaves are 2:1 ratios, fifths 3:2, fourths 4:3, etc.

Getting a 4:3 interval from a 12-note circle-of-fifths scale requires two wide intervals and three narrows: W2 × N3 = (37:211)2 × (28:35)3 = 37×2:211×2 × 28×3:35×3 = 22:31 = 4:3.

That "etc." is doing some surprisingly heavy lifting as well. You'd think from the 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 pattern that the next two most recognizable (and therefore named) intervals would occur at 5:4 and 6:5, and in fact these are intervals between the successive notes available from wind instruments that rely on resonance at multiples of their tubing's generator note, or from harmonics tones played on stringed instruments, but in fact those "mathematically pure" intervals simply don't occur inside a 12 note circle-of-fifths tuning because 5 is a prime number and all the circle-of-fifths stuff is based on powers of 2 and 3.

In a circle-of-fifths tuning, a major third is constrained to be equivalent to two each of wide and narrow intervals, or to one wide and three narrows (can't be three wides and one narrow, because that would require two wide intervals to be adjacent in the scale and they never are). Those work out to 1.265625 and 1.24859+ respectively; the pure harmonic 5:4 would be 1.25 exactly. Likewise, the choices for a minor third which harmonically should be 1.2 exactly are 1.185+ and 1.201+.

The one we use is called equal temperament. The space between every half step is equal. This means that any key sounds the same as any other, but also that the octaves/thirds/fifths on the piano aren't quite true.

Equal temperament comes from giving up on integer and power-of-integer ratios altogether and saying OK, we still want a twelve note scale but we want all the intervals exactly the same: this wide vs narrow nonsense has to go. The way to do that is to make all the scale steps equal to the twelfth root of two, which is 1.05946+. Note that this number falls right in between the wide and narrow intervals of the circle-of-fifths scale.

This temperament preserves octaves exactly, but it means that instead of a fifth and a fourth being exactly 1.5 and 1.333+ they work out to 1.4983+ and 1.3348+ respectively. We also get major and minor thirds at a consistent 1.2599+ and 1.1892+, which are slightly closer or slightly further from the "pure" harmonic thirds than the circle-of-fifths scale can offer depending on exactly which thirds we're talking about.

On non-fixed pitch instruments and singing people will often fix those intervals by moving them back into the whole number ratios on long/important chords to get them to "ring".

Even on nominally fixed pitch instruments, the centre frequency of any given note will often depend on its instantaneous volume; listen closely to a guitar chord ringing out, for example, and it it will drift a little sharp as it fades.

The other thing to be aware of is that when notes that are very close to but not quite harmonically related get sounded together, the brain can interpret the result as being in tune but pulsating in volume at a rate that depends on the frequency differences between each note and the other's harmonics.

The bottom line is that the whole idea of scales as prescriptive is fundamentally a crock. They're a useful notational guideline to be sure, and the fact that the circle of fifths does end up generating a twelve note scale capable of making a very good first approximation to any of the first few harmonic intervals is interesting, but describing any scale as "impure" or "non-mathematical", or complaining that singers and drummers are "no good" unless they sound like they've been autotuned and/or time-quantized are poseur's moves, not musicians', and any instrument that can't be pitch-bent has no soul.
posted by flabdablet at 11:12 AM on August 7, 2022 [14 favorites]


At it's most basic rhythm is a description of when changes in sound waves(either in volume, pitch, or maybe timbre) happen, and silence is one of the states that can be part of that change. They are two temporally bound phenomena sure, but they aren't the same thing by any stretch. - Gygesringtone

Or as my high school band director used to say "Drummers, you only have two notes: on and off!".
posted by readyfreddy at 11:28 AM on August 7, 2022


Fuck that guy. Fuck him right in his tin ear.
posted by flabdablet at 11:45 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


As an aside to the whole "nobody is going to hear car two engines as music" thing, there is an old rumor that the drums at the beginning of "Hot for Teacher" is Alex Van Halen trying to reproduce the rhythm of his hot rod or motorcycle's engine at idle.
posted by indexy at 11:52 AM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


There are bits of John Bonham's "Moby Dick" with similar underpinnings.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 AM on August 7, 2022


any instrument that can't be pitch-bent has no soul.

There's a mob of pianists out here who would like a word with you.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:12 PM on August 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


You can pitch-bend a piano if you play it hard enough.
posted by flabdablet at 12:19 PM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


J J Burnel, of the Stranglers, on his solo album, Euroman Cometh, used a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle as the rhythm track on the song Triumph.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:36 PM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


I suspect he is both less blinded by traditional theory than suspected here, but also more focused on finding a somewhat more universal, but still necessarily artificial, framework for beginner education.

This is actually a good point worth considering. I got the feeling from reading the blog that this is a smart person coming from a specific background of academic music studies trying to synthesize some new ideas, and like the linked post in particular is trying on a new (to them) idea on for size. So I've sort of tried responding in kind here, and since I don't necessarily think this approach works for a lot of modern music, I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why. I bet you can actually find some genres that it does work for though, bluegrass seems like a good candidate, for a variety of reasons. It might also be interesting to consider some shorter binary/ternary formalized dances in that light. The further I am from my initial gut reaction, though the more I think the harmony via acoustics could be a good tool in analyzing some pieces of music. However, I still don't think that it's a universally useful one, or even one that works particularly well for explaining music as a thing experienced by humans.

But yeah, you're right, we're having these abstract conversations and nobody has actually bothered to ask the really fundamental question of "better for what?". Part of what I was driving at with my original comment was that there are so many things that we could be talking about when we talk about MUSIC as a thing without any further specificity it just kind of leads to confusion. So by falling prey to that myself I ended up focusing on finding fault rather than having an open curiosity about the idea.

Also, just because it seems to have caught everyone's attention, the whole thing about the car engines is not that people can't enjoy the sound of them, or that they can't be involved in music. They're just a handy example of something that vibrates at a steady and fast enough rate to have a recognizable pitch, but that people don't normally use the same bits of their brain to deal with processing the pitched sound as they do for music. There really is a switch that happens where our brain decides to move something from "sound" to "music", this auditory illusion of Dr. Diana Deutcsh's is my favorite demonstration of this, link. If you listen, you'll probably be able to hear why.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:03 PM on August 7, 2022 [2 favorites]


used a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle as the rhythm track on the song Triumph.

meanwhile Todd Rundgren opted for guitar for that bit in Bat Out Of Hell
posted by philip-random at 1:16 PM on August 7, 2022


You can pitch-bend a piano if you play it hard enough.

Now I want a whammy-bar pedal for my grand.
posted by hypnogogue at 1:40 PM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I’ll stick to posting stuff I have more expertise in

I think a lot of really interesting discussion has come from the seed of this article being posted, so please don’t worry too much about that! For my part I will try and avoid the “bah this claim is wrong and bogus for these reasons!” knee jerk response, and concentrate on digging into things that are interestingly related. Even if the article isn’t doing everything it claims, and there’s a lot of historical prior art that amounts to something similar, that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to think about, especially if it’s the first time someone is encountering an analysis like this.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:48 PM on August 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


I found some of his other blog entries a lot more interesting than this one.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:43 PM on August 7, 2022


You can pitch-bend a piano if you play it hard enough.

Now I want a whammy-bar pedal for my grand.


There's a custom whammy mod for a Clavinet...

A decent digital synth can fake an okay piano voice pitch bend.
posted by ovvl at 3:10 PM on August 7, 2022


For that matter, a lot of classical music is partly timbre-driven.

And modern pop music is almost entirely timbre-driven.

Radio stations routinely have contests where people identify 10 songs from 1-second snippets. They're mostly not using rhythm or melody or harmony, they're using timbre. Only one recording of one song has that snare sound with this guitar tone and that synth sound. What really makes a pop song sound fresh? When that very first bass note sounds different from anything you've ever heard before. It's often the texture of the singer's voice that catches your ears rather than the melody or rhythm of what they're singing.

It's a lot harder to do that kind of thing with classical music, and it's less reliant on timbre. You don't typically take interest in a classical pianist because you've never heard a piano with that tone before.
posted by straight at 4:15 PM on August 7, 2022



It's a lot harder to do that kind of thing with classical music, and it's less reliant on timbre. You don't typically take interest in a classical pianist because you've never heard a piano with that tone before.

Depends on the instrument. For classical violin soloists, a lot of it (maybe almost all, nowadays, tbh) is about timbre. This is also why a good violin can be extremely expensive, and why soloists often play loaned violins worth millions of dollars. Each violin has a different, nuanced voice. And a skilled soloist is able to coax their own particular signature sound as well, shaped very sensitively and in great detail.
At higher levels of playing, it’s arguably the violinist’s timbre-related skills that can distinguish them from other violinists (nowadays more and more people are playing Paganini, younger and younger - the mechanical skill playing field (in terms of hitting intricate notes quickly) has been evening out). Timbre-related skills are down to bow control (pressure, angle, velocity, attack, release - and the chosen variation/blend of all this and more while bowing longer continuous strokes, etc) and the top/professional soloists know how to shape every nuance of their sound in this way.

I don’t disagree with you about timbre being important to modern pop music (and I work in the pop music industry as well) - that’s why good producers with a distinctive sound are so much in demand - but I’d say that’s equally the case for classical string soloists. The top soloists have their own signature sound as well - not just directly from their instruments but also their technique.
posted by aielen at 6:18 PM on August 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


The pedagogical questions are super interesting. Is Western music theory worth teaching? If so, how? Is there a better way to teach it? Or is there a music theory out there waiting to be discovered/rediscovered/popularised that's better for describing/understanding/composing the kind of music people like now? As someone who teaches music theory, often to folks who listen mostly to hip hop, this is stuff I've wrestled with and have Opinions about.

Is Western music theory worth teaching?

In my opinion, yes and no. There are things it's good at describing, there are things it's terrible at describing. It's pretty good at dealing with the harmonic/tonal system that grew up with it. It's okay at dealing with rhythm and dynamics, but unnecessarily confusing when it comes to any kind of syncopation, or complex variations in amplitude. It's super vague when it comes to timbre, texture, and melodic contour. Like it or not, it's entangled to some extent with all musics that derive from, respond to, or have had significant run-ins with the Western tradition, particularly the harmonic aspect, so there's an obligation to make the origins of those things understood. You've got to acknowledge what it sucks at though, because if you don't acknowledge it's a problem with the system, it implies there's a problem with the music the system's being applied to. Case in point: rap vocals (pre-autotune) generally have microtonal melodies which Western theory isn't built to deal with; it has okay tools for talking about the rhythmic aspect, vague tools for talking about the phrasing and articulation aspects, and can't handle the pitch aspect at all (unless we're talking about dusty corners of niche 20th century art music practice), so a lot of people conclude rap vocals are not melodic, which is just wrong. Rap vocals' melodies are difficult to describe using the tools of mainstream Western music theory, and thankfully there are some dedicated people out there starting to work out some appropriate tools for the task.

If so, how?

As a few people have mentioned, any theory of music is just a system for describing and preserving a bunch of cultural preferences. If you don't make that explicitly clear in the process of teaching it everyone is being done a disservice. Students regularly have questions along the line of 'why is X aspect of Western music theory done in that seemingly arbitrary way?' The answer can either be a dismissive 'because that's the way it's done', or the more truthful answer can be 'because X group of people at X point in time thought it was a handy way to symbolise perfection/piety/novelty/coolness/fanciness/accessibility/prestige/cleverness/insert-other-concept-of-good in a way recognisable to the patron class/target audience of the time for X reasons'. It's a product of a weird history of accumulation, and that history helps the quirks of the theory make sense, so be honest about it. I have some longstanding respectful disagreements with colleagues about this.

Is there a better way to teach it?

Probably, the above is the backbone of the best approach I've been able to come up with. The other thing I think is a good idea is to re-organise the priorities/order of teaching the ideas, to start with what's immediately and easily useful in the context of music people listen to and make now. So, start with the (unfortunately kinda vague) things that are applicable to most contemporary music – contour, phrasing, timbre, texture, structure – then get into the weeds of the tonal and rhythmic theory/notation systems.

Is there a better music theory out there?

Maybe? Probably? I hope so? The harmonic series is an interesting starting point for trying to create a universal system because it sort of works in some ways. Like, if you compare the pitch dimension of a few music systems across a few cultures (I have a pretty good understanding of Western music, a very basic understanding of musics of a few more cultures) it seems like the harmonic series has had an influence of some kind. Octaves and something in the neighbourhood of fifths often turn up as significant in some way, bundles of intervals that are similar to the pentatonic scale and the overtone scale (both appear in the harmonic series – the major scale can be thought of as a distortion of the overtone scale) seem to turn up pretty often. What various cultures do with that stuff, and how important the pitch/harmonic dimension is in relation to all the other dimensions of music, varies a lot. I find that really eye-opening and exciting. Personally, what I suspect will happen is that because Western music theory's great strength seems to be the ability to bolt on more bits as the cultural winds change, eventually some more conventions will emerge that are useful for consistently dealing with the primary musical concerns of our era (timbre, texture, rhythm, microtonal melody), and those will be added to the system, to then frustrate more generations of musicians a couple more centuries down the road when they ask 'but why???'

I'd love to have a read of that dissertation as well.
posted by threecheesetrees at 7:03 PM on August 7, 2022 [4 favorites]


> nobody is going to hear two car engines as music


Back when I worked in a physics lab, sometimes I'd realize the Orb CD had cut out and I was listening to the vaccuum pump.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:53 PM on August 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


Students regularly have questions along the line of 'why is X aspect of Western music theory done in that seemingly arbitrary way?'

one of the things i liked about schoenberg's theory of harmony book is his answer to this question is "this is the way that people have done it and these are the rules they've worked out to do it - this is not the only way to do it and no one really has to do it this way, but if you want to know what this is about, this is how it works"

"because that's the way it's done" is not very interesting - why bother to compose at all if what's been done is adequate?

i relate to jazz theory a lot more than common practice theory - also, i'm sorry, but a lot of the old 19th and 18th century music just seems harmonically quaint compared to what's being done now
posted by pyramid termite at 8:26 PM on August 7, 2022


nobody is going to hear two car engines as music.
perhaps not, but I was once stopped at an intersection next to an idling motorcycle that sounded exactly like the opening drum solo of Hot for Teacher, so
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:47 PM on August 7, 2022 [5 favorites]


Case in point: rap vocals (pre-autotune) generally have microtonal melodies which Western theory isn't built to deal with

...which is the basis of the instinctive, visceral objection that so many of us have to the ubiquity of pitch quantisation in so much of today's sales-oriented music. Departures from the Twelve Allowable Pitches are not and never have been "flaws". Their routine elision in post-production impoverishes, not enriches, musical performances as well as reflecting unexamined colonialism and makes me sad when I notice it, which is often because of the way pitch "correction" fucks with timbre.

There really is a switch that happens where our brain decides to move something from "sound" to "music", this auditory illusion of Dr. Diana Deutcsh's is my favorite demonstration of this

My life has certainly been better since the day I worked out how to find that switch and jam it in the On position.

In my case it was Lou Reed who prompted it rather than Diana Deutcsh. I'm currently imagining what the Velvet Underground would sound like with Reed's vocals "corrected" by a producer and experiencing mild nausea as a result. So my plan is to have a smoke and go out for a walk in the bush near my house, where the local birds and frogs will all be jamming.
posted by flabdablet at 11:39 PM on August 7, 2022 [3 favorites]


...nobody is going to hear two car engines as music.

Someone has never been to a drag race and experienced two top-fuel supercharged hemis burbling angrily at the line.


There's no use trying to talk. No human sound can stand up to this. Loud enough to knock you down.... These are sensations as hard to forget as they are to ignore. Drag racing!
posted by The Tensor at 11:47 PM on August 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I feel like this is totally a thing at raves but forgive me if I can’t elaborate… for reasons.


Lol so much of this discussion is over my head but I'm pretty sure that wasn't about a drum roll.
posted by viborg at 6:14 AM on August 8, 2022


There's no use trying to talk. No human sound can stand up to this. Loud enough to knock you down....

Pretty sure Top Alcohol Dragsters are the loudest things I've ever been in the vicinity of. There's even a band.

Departures from the Twelve Allowable Pitches are not and never have been "flaws".

Yeah, this is the heart of my rejection of pretty much all music THEORY, and not just of the western kind. It's not that I don't think there's a place for studying what's going on with music, applying some scientific method to its analysis. But if it gets to lines being drawn as to what is/isn't Music, rules imposed and (not entirely a sci-fi dystopia) bureaucracies formed to police said rules -- that's just wrong, horribly, cataclysmically wrong. And I do know people who think this way. No, they're not agitating for police measures but they do talk loudly in bars about how RAP IS CRAP and there is NO SUCH THING AS GOOD COUNTRY MUSIC!!! Or a few guys I knew back in the 90s who refused anything in the techno realm that dared to include real human vox (ie: not just samples) or analog instrumentation. Techno fascism writ large.

But seriously. If you really, really must dig into your theory and whatnot, because why not? Science is always going to science, it can't help itself. At least please, start at the start with Musica universalis.

The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later developed by 16th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler did not believe this "music" to be audible, but felt that it could nevertheless be heard by the soul. The idea continued to appeal to scholars until the end of the Renaissance, influencing many schools of thought, including humanism.
posted by philip-random at 8:48 AM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


But seriously. If you really, really must dig into your theory and whatnot, because why not? Science is always going to science, it can't help itself. At least please, start at the start with Musica universalis.

O.k., but why? Like I get that it's old an aesthetically kind of cool, but... like what relevance does it have for modern musicians and composers trying to communicate about the music they're creating? I mean, going back to the question of "what is theory for?" I'm pretty sure at least one of the best answers is "describing musical conventions and communicating with others about them". Like, do you also think we should study ancient philosophic ideas based one incomplete/inaccurate information about the nature of vision when discussing theory for graphic artists?

I mean, I get it academic Music Theory is suffering from Dead White Guy Worship, but that's because academia as a whole has is suffering from Dead White Guy Worship. Also, I'm 90% sure the answer is not "Look at these different dead white guys".

Most of the complaints I hear about music theory as a field misunderstand what's going on. The way it's often taught at the basic levels doesn't do anyone any favors. But like, you know how awhile ago people started. realizing that grammar was descriptive rather than proscriptive? A music theory is the grammar of that music. Any time beat makers get together and talk details? That's a discussion of music theory. Song writers getting together talking about where the bridge is most effective? Music theory. Oral music traditions getting passed down to the next generation? Music theory.

I don't know, I feel like people look for a GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF MUSIC that equally describes the sound waves, the way we organize those sound waves, and the why those sound waves make us feel they do. But, practically, those are three separate areas of discussion. I've found it super useful to apply knowledge from one area to the others, but they're different questions.
posted by Gygesringtone at 10:15 AM on August 8, 2022 [7 favorites]


I love the way this conversation has developed! Re: pitch and timbre, it’s interesting how much these are linked to tuning systems; the choice of tunings on an instrument has real impact on it’s sound and as a culture we’ve changed our expectations on “standard” tunings over time in ways that has strong impact on the timbre of instruments. For an extreme example, La Monte Young’s “Well Tuned Piano” which uses just intervals in lieu of standard equal temperament, makes the piano sounds like an entirely different instrument - glassy and strange. Anyone who talks about equal temperament fifths and octaves as if they’re perfect intervals is missing a big part of the picture.
posted by q*ben at 10:17 AM on August 8, 2022 [4 favorites]


Octaves are octaves in every temperament, surely?
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 PM on August 8, 2022


Not on a piano! I’m getting out of my depth, but as my tuner explains it, in order to get better fifths and other intervals sometime you might tune a “wide” versus a “pure” octave to get better relationships. One note of a piano - commonly A or C - is tuned strictly by octaves but it’s not possible to do this for all notes and have the other intervals sound “good”. Or something like that, hoping a real piano tuner can come in and correct me…
posted by q*ben at 2:57 PM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'll sometimes use the phrase "Harmony of The Spheres" when we're talking about jamming, not in the original meaning of the words, but more like a metaphor for a live performance that sounds right, where all of the individual parts are balanced and mesh together smoothly, the thing we aspire to. Or, sometimes use the phrase more specifically to refer to parts that are improvised harmony drones.
posted by ovvl at 3:26 PM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


An "ideal" string (ideal as in spherical cows) vibrates at whole number multiples of a fundamental frequency. Real piano strings are non-ideal; their harmonics are spaced a bit further apart, so you have to tune octaves a little wider to minimize beating.
posted by mpark at 4:46 PM on August 8, 2022 [3 favorites]


Back when I worked in a physics lab, sometimes I'd realize the Orb CD had cut out and I was listening to the vaccuum pump.


Relatedly: wen I was sixteen, I burned a copy of Einstein on the Beach onto a blank CD for listening to as I drove. I listened to it aggressively and endlessly.

After a couple of years, it got terribly scratched and started skipping all over the place.

It took me a solid month to notice.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:55 AM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


Back when I worked in a physics lab, sometimes I'd realize the Orb CD had cut out and I was listening to the vaccuum pump.

My wife's breastpump had an awesome rhythm I always wanted to turn into a backing track. I wish I remembered the brand because that thing was straight funky!
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:11 AM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


I wonder if there's some kind of opportunity for microtonal music to exploit the subtle differences between temperaments within a frequency range?
posted by hypnogogue at 9:39 AM on August 9, 2022


My wife's breastpump ... was straight funky

I believe there are some quite good detergents available nowadays that could help with that.
posted by flabdablet at 7:22 PM on August 9, 2022


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