Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it.
In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world.
The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of something like regular expressions.
And it's several orders of magnitude easier than actually learning to play your instrument. Which also millions of people manage to do.
I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it.
"I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the 7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."
It's no different than an article about some Rails or Node.js technique, which appear on HN frequently. That is, lots of jargon and techinal foundation that the reader is assumed to know, but within that context some instructive text.
Music education is in general great at telling people what notes to play, but rather worse at supplying much intuition for why certain patterns of notes work together.
You can look at a diagram that will tell you what notes go together to make a particular 11th chord, say, but it tells you nothing about why that's a useful way to combine notes.
The blog post is aimed at people who know some of the "what", but who could use a clue as to some of the "why".
"""I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps?"""
No, just anyone who already knows a bit of music theory. Not even a great deal of it. Something that can be learned in a week, tops.
Tons of articles on HN have titles like: Djikstra's algorithm, advanced types in Haskell, currying and memoization in Scala, A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus, and similar content.
Is someone expected to understand those without knowing the underlying naming schemes, theory, basic domain knowledge etc?
Or do people seeing stuff like "^[ab](foo)^[k])/i complain that:
"that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" computer science theory. Gibberish.Goobeltygook$"?
There a logic behind regular expressions, and there's a logic behind chord/interval notation. And the second is a lot easier, too, and it's used because it's succint and it works.
"""Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it."""
The naming scheme used in the article takes like 10 minutes to grasp --and requires no great background in music theory. 7th, 13th etc are like numeric indexes.
As for dominant / tonic, those are are like music theory 101. Similar to knowing what "Objects" and "Interfaces" mean when discussing OO programming.
Any idea how elitist this sounds? It's not at all "just like" an article about Dijkstra, Ruby on Rails or mathematics or whatever.
Usually such articles are praised on how well-written they are, even allowing for people not familiar with the background getting the gist, somewhat.
> Or do people seeing stuff like "^[ab](foo)^[k])/i complain that:
> "that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" computer science theory. Gibberish.Goobeltygook$"?
> There a logic behind regular expressions, and there's a logic behind chord/interval notation. And the second is a lot easier, too, and it's used because it's succint and it works.
That's a very good example, because IMO it demonstrates my point. If anyone would have written an article like that about regular expressions, written in the same way, with:
Regexes peppered inline throughout each sentence, repeatedly mentioning how this is probably the most basic stuff ever--up to the point of actually apologizing for stooping down to the level of what must probably be "regex theory 101". Then someone would have remarked "that pretty much explains why people have a hard time 'getting' regular expressions. Gibberish. Goobeltygook", then nobody would have disagreed with them. Because everybody knows that a badly written article about regexes very quickly becomes to look like unreadable gibberish.
And in case you didn't catch that, this article actually apologizes for "probably being jazz theory 101". What? Have you ever seen a comp.sci/math article being apologetic about saying
"I know this is probably graph theory 101, but we define a graph as an ordered pair G = (V, E) comprising a set V of vertices or nodes together with a set E of edges or lines ..."
Of course not! It is considered good style to repeat the basics, and in fact IMO, I consider it bad style to be apologetic about it (because it's condescending to that part of your audience that made good use of the quick refresher).
Everybody knows that regexes can quickly look like unreadable gooblygook, even if you're familiar with them, and any article that wants to discuss something fundamental about regexes, is going to have to take some special care to not make it look as such. In some sense, same goes for set theory or mathematical formulae in general.
That still doesn't mean the hypothetical regex article would be so much clearer to the layman, but it would seem much more approachable, in some sense.
I thought I knew some very rudimentary things about music theory, but apparently not enough to make the leap to "get" and string together what this guy is talking about in pure jargon (and believe me I spent more than the "10 minutes" everybody says it would take). To me, that tells me the article is simply badly written. A similar exposition about monads in functional programming, is more like what I'd expect in a 1-on-1 comment thread (when it's perfectly ok to use as much jargon to succinctly get your point across) than a blog article intended for the general public (when regardless how obvious or simple, it always pays to step down and explain from basics, even if only to reinforce the audience that already knows them you're talking about the same things).
In fact, the only other computer science topic I've seen this sort of attitude, is the security/exploit/disclosure/hacking scene. That's where people routinely bash on eachother for repeating the basics and that "this is nothing new" because hacker X already did sploit Y in 2005 which was kinda similar (regardless that writing/warning about it again is a good thing).
You use the term "article" as if it was supposed to be a well-written piece intended for a particular audience. It wasn't. It's a personal blog post recording a light bulb going off for me on one particular aspect of chord naming.
You're right. I shouldn't have attacked your blog article like that, and I apologize.
I maintain, however, that people without sufficient background in music theory have a right to complain (on HN, not on your blog) it's quite incomprehensible. And that it could have been written to better accommodate for that. Not that you have any obligation to, as you said it's a personal blog post where you can write whatever you want, however you want :)
Though personally, if you would put in a few links to some simple introductory articles--maybe the other commenters were right and it just takes 10 mins of reading the right definitions of notation, maybe I just read the wrong things before or forgot the important parts--that would have definitely triggered me to explore some more of the subject matter, and you can't disagree that would have been a good thing ;-)
Strongly disagree, there is a vast array of articles covering a vast array of subjects on HN. Part of the joy of browsing it is finding articles on subjects I know little about and then doing some work to get my deficient knowledge up to scratch to gain the most from them. You sound like a university professor that insists you start from the basics in every essay so that anyone can read your work. If you want to read 1 music theory article with no reference to anything else then you need to start at music theory 101. BTW if you do want to understand what is going on here read something about building chords with thirds (and get to the point where you get that a third on a third is a 5th if everything is diatonic) - for the record i h ave had no formal training in music theory and have learnt everything from the internets from articles far worse and self contradictory than this. Now im going to go back to reading things about haskell and startups - things i know very little about btw and have to work to understand. Why would you want to read about things you already understand?
Actually, the part I found difficult about music theory, is that that there are tons of stuff you're supposed to remember.
They are not difficult to understand, and they are even easy to derive from some basic rules.
But you do have to remember them, not derive them at will, to be able to think musically and play fluently.
I think that's my problem with Chemistry too, as opposed to Physics. There was always tons of stuff to remember when studying chemistry, while just remembering a few basic rules and deriving everything else was possible in Physics (I talk about High School grade material, of course).
This is exactly why Math was Good for me in High School and History was Terrible. And the thing is, with an understanding of history a lot can be derived, or at least worked out, yet history class was all about memorizing names and dates and the relationships and flow of history was often something that felt coincidental to what was being taught.
Id say by the time you are playing fluently with these ideas you are no longer remembering them ... its further than that you body knows and executes them.
Music THEORY isn't "all about the ears" at all, though.
It is the conceptual framework & vocabulary you use to talk about music, not perform it.
If kids love performing and listening to music, they'll want to talk about it. And initially they'll be limited to things like "I love that thing it does near the middle when the bass is going baBONG baBONG baBONG then everything suddenly get really quiet and strange".
That's obviously ridiculously imprecise, right? And aren't you curious to know what "strange" means in this context? Suppose you want to write a piece of music that sounds "strange" like the piece you liked, but more so? So even piss-poor black kids end up with a thirst for a subject that looks pretty dry to the unmotivated.
"""Some do end up learning theory but many great musicians don't."""
We're talking about music theory in genres where it is important, i.e where the music is involved and advanced. Three minute fifties rock-n-roll tunes is not where this happens.
Little Richards is great, but not in the musically advanced way Charles Mingus, Miles Davies, etc are great. He's great for the raw fun/energy/danceability impact of his music.
You're making a huge mistake when you say that. This sort of snobbishness is really bad for art. Great art is always connected to the lowly and the popular. Disdain for that which is not "advanced", imagining barriers between high and low, is associated with nothing so much as creative exhaustion. It's the mentality not of the artist but of the critic, and the second-rate critic at that.
It's ironic that you would pick a couple of jazz musicians to illustrate this, since for most of its formative history jazz was derided as a vulgar form. Only in later stages was it championed by the priests of "advancedness". This is a sign of decadence. When the Davises and Minguses appear, that is the late-blooming of a genre, and by the time the scholars move in, the muses for the most part have moved on. (Which is not at all to say that Davis and Mingus aren't great artists.)
An awful lot of performance involves skills that are NOT addressed by music theory -- basically everything that distinguishes a mechanical MIDI performance of some piece from an real performance by a professional is not part of foundational music theory.
There's also a great deal of ground that music theory formalizes that long-time musicians will grasp intuitively (but be less able to discuss, of course).
Yeah, but I also mean that they also seem to pick the theory/names just fine -- i.e not just playing complicated stuff by ears, but also understanding how everything is called and how it works.
In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world.
The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of something like regular expressions.
And it's several orders of magnitude easier than actually learning to play your instrument. Which also millions of people manage to do.