I have never yet found anyone who agrees with me, but I believe the terminology around music theory is horrible. I mean that it is unnecessarily confusing. Most people that use it have no problem, but I believe they developed their overall understanding almost independent of the terminology, so now just use it as descriptive in its context, and do not at all notice how bad it is if you are trying to use the language as your first point in comprehending the underlying notions.
I'm surprised you've not found more agreement. I studied music in university, and have run a music-theory centered website since 1998 or so, and I definitely find the terminology to be rather bad.
It sounds mathematical in some ways (there are certainly numbers in there); but when you look closer it's inconsistent and/or just plain weird.
When you start writing code working with scales, intervals, triads, seventh chords, etc., the oddities really become obvious. The base unit of movement is the half-step; but the full-step is almost a useless concept -- a major scale is a seemingly random pattern of half and whole steps, major and minor intervals included in it. Whole notes refer to note duration. A whole tone scale is about the intervals between pitches. Looping the pitches from G back to A, but most starting counting at the C (for the simplest major scale).
There are historical reasons for the oddities; but it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better... it's much like language that way, though. Think of all of the inconsistencies in English -- yes, we'd be better off in many ways if we could just fix all of the broken bits (e.g.: the past tense of "lead" is "led", but the past tense of "read" is written "read"... but pronounced "red"). But we can't -- because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. etc..
>>>> But we can't -- because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. etc..
In addition to the amount of existing literature, there's also the matter of developing the skill to read it. I'm tethered to "standard" notation because I developed fluent sight-reading ability as a kid, and I continue to practice it. I daresay that learning a new notation system would be virtually prohibitive at my age.
Every town has a cadre of musicians with similar skills, which in turn creates an incentive for composers and arrangers to continue using standard notation. And some notations are considered to be useful for one thing but not another. For instance, tabulature is used for teaching the electric bass, and documenting transcribed bass lines, but nobody can sight-read tab well enough for it to be an alternative to standard notation for performance use.
I actually had such an experience not too long ago. I play mostly jazz, which has its own notational traditions. But a bandleader hired me, who had her repertoire written out using the Nashville Number System. Though her charts were simple, my brain had to work in overdrive for that entire gig.
I'm not so sure "it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better..."
I read about a thing called hummingbird notation - uses the same clefs, but changes noteheads, staffs and sharps/flats. Your opinion may differ, but here is a group of folks who spent a lot of time coming up with a "system" and it does not strike me as an improvement.
The trouble with notation systems is that the primary thing they need isn't to be easy to learn, but rather to have a ton of people who have learned it. I've seen lots of alternative notation systems, particularly in pedagogy, and from my experience people tend to hack up their own systems for jotting down ideas or composing, but mainstream staff notation is very adequate and has an insane amount of momentum.
Yeah, its the same with QWERTY, the only way you could replace the existing system is if the new system was so much better in some way that it replaces it by default. Mobile phone keyboards are the only thing to come close to replacing qwerty, and most of them just re-implement it anyway.
There's a thing called "Integer Notation", which is (from what I've seen) used a lot in the more mathematical regions of musical theory.
It's pretty much what you'd expect, zero-based integers that represent semitone intervals. Sometimes they write chords in curly brackets, like {0,3,7} for the major triad.
Integer Notation also happens to be pretty much equivalent to the 0-127 based MIDI notes--in the sense that it's also zero-based integers representing semitones.
My main gripe is that intervals should be zero-indexed instead of one-indexed. A double octave is known as a fifteenth. Wouldn't it be nicer if the octave was called a seventh, and the fifteenth was called a fourteenth?
There's also a concept known as inverted intervals, which are formed by moving downwards instead of upwards. The inverse of a major third is a minor sixth, because that's the interval you get (modulo octaves) by moving down a major third from your root note. The inversion n is given by 9-n. With zero-indexing, inversions would be given by simple modulo seven arithmetic.
I still don't see it being much better in practice. It's pretty rare to use ordinals to refer to intervals greater than 2 octaves. There is really virtually no cognitive load required to hear "major tenth" and realize that it's a major 3rd plus an octave.
There's virtually no cognitive load if you already know music theory. That's a very important distinction - music theory in its current state is completely undiscoverable for no good reason.
How undiscoverable? I grew up in a fairly music-oriented family and played a lot of instruments as a kid, but didn't formally study music theory. It wasn't until I read parent that I realized "fifth", "third", etc. are 1-indexed ordinals, and not some inscrutable scheme involving fractions. Everything suddenly makes way more sense.
I feel fairly confident that sane terminology would greatly ease this problem.
Pretty irrelevant but that reminded me of this scene from Cannibal the Musical [0]. The whole video is worth watching, especially if you've seen the rest of the movie but I only linked to the music theory argument. The movie is one of Trey Parker's earlier works and is quite entertaining [1].
Coming from a family of musicians and artists, it's all pretty foreign to me. And I used to take lessons, and occasionally sit and work my way through a beginner guitar book. I've always heard music theory to be pretty obtuse and challenging. I'm sure if I put in some hours to understand the fundamentals it'd make a lot more sense, and read it at home with a little dedication it'd be a bit easier. It's truly interesting.
I was just trying to show that changing the indexing from zero- to one-based makes no difference in this case. The same-octave interval will always be the multi-octave interval mod 7, regardless of whether you call the tonic 0 or 1.
Granted, but I was replying to a post stating that "it" is not better in practice, where "it" is using 0 base, mod 7 arithmetic.
Anyway, yes, you've shown correctly that mod 7 arithmetic is useful, proving half the great-great-somethingth-parent's point. Now, the remaining interesting cases are the inversion case and the multiplication case, where 0 based is simpler (for me) than 1 based.
Also, the idea of using the word "octave" for "mod 7" is already pretty broken, and is what caused me my initial hesitation.
There is some cognitive load, but it is certainly no more than it would be to hear "Major 9th" and realize that it's a Major 2nd plus an octave, as it would be in the zero-indexed case.
It's really no more than a matter of semantics, Any interval mod-7 gives you the number of the scale degree on which the interval lands within the current octave. This doesn't change if with zero-indexing.
A Major 10th mod-7 is a Major 3rd regardless of zero or one-based indexing, the only difference is which notes in the current key you're actually talking about (in the key of C it would be E or D for one-based and zero-based indexing respectively)
I don't know that it's any easier to remember "the tonic is 0" than it is to remember "the tonic is 1"
You seem to be missing the point. An octave is a difference of seven scale steps, just like a second is a difference of one scale step, and a unison (a "first") is a difference of no scale steps.
The fact that this interval of seven notes is called an "octave", named after the number 8, is entirely because of our 1-based system that double-counts the note you start on.
If we had a 0-based system, it wouldn't be called an "octave". It would be named after the number 7. Let's call it a 7-interval, to avoid confusion with actual music terms.
In a 0-based system, you could say, for example, that two 2-intervals make a 4-interval because 2 * 2 = 4.
In the 1-based system we really have, you have to say "two thirds make a fifth", and the mathematical connection is not obvious.
> How would that be better?
The 7th, 14th, 21st, etc would all be octaves of the root. Currently it's the 8th, the 15th, 23rd, which is much less intuitive.
Minor nitpick: 22nd would be an octave not 23rd... mod-7 still works, its just that you get a 1 back because the root is currently defined as scale degree 1
The same can be said of almost any field. Algebraic rings have little to do with rings in real life, tensors have little to do with the muscle in my calf, and so on.
What do you suggest? We could invent new words - great, instead of an octave we now have a zargablub. Not terribly helpful.
Or we could give concepts more explicit names - instead of octave, we now have interval-between-two-pitches-with-logarithm-base-two. But all the experts will soon abbreviate this to something else, and soon enough we'll have the same problem we started with.
Or we could try to find a modern word that explains the concept better than the legacy one, but that means that all material from before the change is going to become very hard to understand unless you know all synonyms for a given concept. And since language is always evolving, in 50 years people will complain that your once modern and easy to understand word is now obscure terminology.
Really, what do you suggest? Jargon is hard for the newcomers, but there's a reason it exists- it enables experts to communicate clearly and non ambiguously about specific concepts and ideas. It's infinitely better for things to be hard to get acquainted with in the first 6 months, and then you get to used it, than to have a field where no progress is made because no one can communicate.
It's kind of like software, actually - these days, it's all about ease of use and being able to pick up an application and use it in 5 seconds flat without having to read a manual. Which is fine if your software is Snapchat or Instagram, but terrible if you're building a synthesizer or video editor or statistics package. In some cases, it is worth having something that's hard to learn but is very powerful once you've gotten past the initial hurdle, because while you will only be a beginner for a short while, once you are past that you will be an expert for the rest of your life. (these ideas are developed in Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface)
Jargon doesn't have to be complicated. You praise jargon as "infinitely better", the alternative being "no progress" but there's no room for improvement? The jargon we use is not some perfectly designed DSL, it's a catalog of concepts accumulated over decades and centuries. It's not master planned, it's organic sprawl. And I think it's fair game to critique.
Also, it's totally fair to raise an issue without having a solution or suggestion. And the lack of one doesn't make the issue less valid.
>The jargon we use is not some perfectly designed DSL, it's a catalog of concepts accumulated over decades and centuries. It's not master planned, it's organic sprawl.
Organic is usually better than "master planned". Evolution et al...
Also, it's totally fair to raise an issue without having a solution or suggestion
Sure it's fair, but is it helpful? I guess in some way it is helpful to raise awareness of the issue but then what? We all stand around with our hands in our pockets, whistling away.
Defenders of jargon usually pick examples in which a better substitution would be hard to find, yet unnecessary jargon abounds. Then there's necessary jargon but which is in conflict with jargon from another field. Sigh.
I have as much of an instinct to dislike jargon as anybody, but when I am writing code (in Haskell usually,) I find that naming things proc, process, process', preprocess'', etc., to not be any less confusing...
So there is a certain usefulness to it, and I comfort myself by knowing that our words are mostly all arbitrary anyway.
As a mathematician by training (who has done mathematical research), I can confirm that creating names for new objects and concepts is no easier in mathematics than in programming. Creating the right notation (when it is necessary to do so) can be even harder.
> I have never yet found anyone who agrees with me, but I believe the terminology around music theory is horrible.
I'll be your first, then. Agreed.
> ... I believe they developed their overall understanding almost independent of the terminology, ....
That certainly happened here. E.g., that (say) 2^(4/12) is pretty close to 5/4 is an interesting fact that requires no knowledge of music terminology to grasp. That we call a pair of notes whose frequencies are roughly in this ratio a "major third" is just trivia to memorize.
> That certainly happened here. E.g., that (say) 2^(4/12) is pretty close to 5/4 is an interesting fact that requires no knowledge of music terminology to grasp. That we call a pair of notes whose frequencies are roughly in this ratio a "major third" is just trivia to memorize.
For musicians, this is actually precisely opposite. Performing and composing musicians absolutely never use the ratio of fundamental frequencies. They constantly use thirds and think of them as the third note in the major scale, which is the most common scale.
Do you have an example of something you think is horrible? This particular article is extremely technical or "low level," and is beyond what most people would call "music theory," so I wouldn't make too many conclusions just from this article. Most people use "music theory" to refer to music notation systems and some theory about composition, harmony, and rhythm, but seldom diving so deep into the physics and psychology behind interval and pitch perception.
Personally, I find most music terminology to be fairly decent, but I grew up with it, so perhaps I'm the type of person you describe. There is some ambiguity in terminology, some of which is inherent in the dual usage of certain harmonies (is it an A minor 7th flat 5, or a C minor 6th?), and some of which is simply the historical result of competing notations (is it a diminished 7th or a minor 7th flat 5?). However, I think most of the terminology is at least somewhat self-hinting, and the weird random names are few enough to be memorized or looked up when needed (like all the Italian words to notate dynamics and tempo). It certainly doesn't seem particularly worse than the terminology used in, say, computer science or computer programming.
A big part of the problem is that most music theory was developed to describe preexisting practice, without a whole lot of knowledge about why tonal music is pleasing. The result is a music theory that's highly layered, with the layers corresponding roughly to the major quantum leaps in theory all mixed together, rather inconsistently. We could go back and fix it, but that would require a grand unified theory of harmony, something which hasn't quite emerged, although we've made some big steps on the past decade.
The other reality is that we tend to teach theory from a perspective that explains simple music and progresses to the more complex, and then chronologically. This may be helpful for practicing musicians, but it does little to explain how the fundamental tonal concepts for together (scale structure, harmonic progression/voice leading, timbre, and tuning).
> We could go back and fix it, but that would require a grand unified theory of harmony, something which hasn't quite emerged, although we've made some big steps on the past decade.
I'm intrigued, got any more info or links on what sort of big steps have been made in the past decade?
>Most people that use it have no problem, but I believe they developed their overall understanding almost independent of the terminology
Not really. At least in Europe, and at least for the last couple of centuries, musicians learned and developed their understanding of music through studying its formal theory and terminology.
The only exception was autodidacts, which through common in folk music traditions, was not common in urban environments in Europe for classical or contemporary popular music.
Slightly OT, speaking about wrong terminology, also the blood types are pretty confusing. It's 3 bits, isn't it? So why calling one bit +/- and the other two A/B? (fine, besides historical reasons...)
