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- Hacker News
- > On the piano there are 88 notes.
88 keys (usually) and unlimited notes.
by chrisjj - I suppose a 1 key piano can have unlimited notes, at least until the key wears out.
- Tangentially related: what would be the equivalent of this, but for learning how to play piano? "Piano learning for the 21st-Century middle age guy".
Any help is appreciated! Including a device, or a service, that could be particularly useful.
- Not really a device or a service, but I'd recommend learning the names of the notes and then just tinkering around. If you notice some patterns or wonder about specific things that come up in the course of that, look it up. If your hand starts to hurt, look up what to do differently. Etc. You'll manage it quite well with that method.by AlecSchueler
- The fact that the equation 440 * 2^((n-49)/12) is nowhere to be found makes me strongly disagree.by nomel
- The history around how 440hz came to be the standard is pretty interesting in itself.by treebeard901
- I've also been recommended to Open Music Theory, as a beginner to theory. Has anyone compared the two? https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/front-matter/int...by casey_lang
- How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.by waffletower
- Indeed. Like so many books of this type, better title would be "Our Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom".by chrisjj
- '21st-Century' in the title is doing the work of distinguishing, not describing. An open-licensed textbook with homework is the actual novelty, and that's worth putting in the title.by salt_pine
- SVG illustrations, too? Delicious! This is how an online textbook should be done. Bravo.by sedivy94
- I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.by SeanLuke
- "Oh no, math degree... Where is 2+2=4?"by sambapa
- Analyzing jazz voice leading would be extremely difficult without understanding the basic rules of harmonic analysis from the common practice period it evolved from and built on.
It sounds like what you're looking for is closer to a general survey of music traditions for listeners.
Jumping straight to jazz theory would be like skipping all chemistry prerequisites to get to Organic Chemistry first because it's more relevant for modern biochem/human medical treatments than stuff like molarity or stoicheometry.
by qlte - > And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian)...
To me, that above ^ looks like the biggest gap.
To be fair, the book doesn't claim to demonstrate theory of the "world music" (sic, a phrase as bad as it sounds).
My (brief and shallow) understanding is that most scholars of music in the western world just do not have enough knowledge to talk intelligently about non-western genres. Exceptions exist, of course, but they are quite rare.
[Other reason is that there is a lot of gate-keeping. I've seen that in Hindustani/Carnatic classical studies, FWIW, which is one my areas of interest]
by aanet - I know a lot of people with music degrees. This is a widely acknowledged problem. It doesn't have a simple answer, especially as academic music programs are shrinking. You can't teach everything except at a survey level. You have to find faculty who can teach new topics at a college level. And students who are prepared to dive in. Music students tend to already be damn good musicians by the time they start college.
If programming is an analogy, it's said that once you've learned your first language, you can learn any other language in a jiffy. Also, a lot of higher level learning is "learning how to learn." Maybe it's better to have a standardized "first language" that students can learn in depth, and then let them move into other areas at their own discretion.
I don't have a college degree, but for me, classical music lessons were a great preparation for learning jazz, and I've picked up pop, rock, and folk music on my own. In fact, on the instrument that I play, the double bass, gaining proficiency and experience in jazz without that background is a brutal learning curve.
by analog31 - I have a BA in Music Theory, I think maybe you should consider again. First off, Jazz relies on the same fundamentals and extends them, everything from Classical music is somewhat relevant in Jazz. So if it's only Jazz theory exclusive to classical, it'd be an advanced book indeed.
Second, it literally has a chapter on Popular Music and another on Jazz Theory, and "Classical" is not found in its chapter titles. So I don't think your critique is accurate.
Third, history and time matter. "Theory" came first in "classical" contexts, with codified rules pre-dating even Bach. Jazz was a much later invention that built upon these and other traditions. Both of the Jazz theory books I used in my BA in Music Theoryhad many elementary topics already covered in Classical contexts.
- Very cool but what does this have to do with "21st-Century Classroom"? Is that just a meaningless phrase to make it sound modern, not old-fashioned?by tantalor
- Could just be because it is the 21st century and this was written for classroom use.by bwanab
- It has embedded youtube videos of examples. I certainly didn't have that in my 20th century theory text books and it would have been very helpful!
This resource looks excellent
by iainctduncan - I guess the 21st century classroom is the free online classroom you connect to from your portable deviceby Dfiesl
- It's a new presentation, an online hypertext, and uses YouTube publications of 21st Century music as example.by gowld
- If you subtract the "meaningless phrase", the title of the book is just "Music Theory". Do this for every book written about music, art, mathematics and you'll just have a lot of books with identical and quite dull titles.by colonwqbang
- There is a whole paragraph in the preface about why he titled it “21st-Century Classroom”. The first sentence contains one very good reason: it’s a full year college music theory textbook with an open license.
The other reasons cited are:
“This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so.”
by dahart - I can't recommend enough Absolutely Understand Guitar[0], it's free and taught me music theory than any course I've ever tried.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg1L-sBIxnY&list=PLJwa8GA7pX...
by zkanda - https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!by ultrasounder
- Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
by stackghost - Glad I'm not the only one with this complaint.
I've been playing music for 20 years, learned and forgotten plenty of music theory. The only way I actually "grok" it, is by re-deriving the whys, but then that slows my learning to a crawl and I begin to forget the earlier lessons.
The memorization doesn't work well for me. I can read music, I can derive scales and chords, but the memorized knowledge of "this chord is technically the same as this one so we'll start calling things other things but it all means the same thing" gets me totally lost.
by MSFT_Edging - I'm starting to read the course at the beginning, and a depressing aversion to explaining why and not only what seems apparent, probably motivated by a desire for brevity and informality that also causes serious defects. For example:
- 1.3 grand staff: "Note that middle C is always clearly notated in either the upper or lower staff and never floats between the two staves." It doesn't tell that the choice of which staff the notes belong to indicates which hand should play them.
- 1.4 accidentals "... are characters that can be placed before notes to raise or lower them." Not to reuse staff locations to distinguish the notes one needs to use.
- 1.5 Enharmonic notes: "When two notes sound the same but are written as two different notes on the staff, the written notes are said to be enharmonic." This is totally wrong, not merely maddening, but before discussing scales any decent explanation is impossible.
- 3.3 Scale Degree Names: in the middle of chapter 3 (minor scales) because there's no f** definition of what a scale is.
- 6.1 Introduction to Triads: "A triad consists of three notes stacked in consecutive thirds. A triad is also called a chord as well as a harmony. (Harmony also refers to chord progressions.)"
It's sad because many other places benefit from the concise and elegant treatment, for example:
- 5.5 Augmented and Diminished Intervals: "Augmented intervals are one half step larger than perfect or major intervals and diminished intervals are one half step smaller than perfect or minor intervals."
by HelloNurse - You might enjoy this unfinished project of mine: https://fakestory.acjay.com/
It's the culmination of years spent chasing an explanation of where all this stuff came from.
Highly informed by Tymoczko, who was mentioned in a sibling reply, and a bunch of other thinkers on the topic.
by acjohnson55