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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

A for effort, but as a programmer and musician, simultaneously makes me a little sad as an example of the all-too-frequent phenomenon of programmers trying to model a domain without spending enough time actually learning the nuances of the domain first.

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Nuances? Try basics. Worse, the author makes a number of general statements about music that I would have known to be wrong as a 6-year old with 1 year of experience in playing piano.

Who am I kidding? This is the age of crapping some mangled mis-information out onto a blog or web page in the hope of raising one's profile and securing a job with the next hot startup creating $10k robots delivering $5 pizzas or whatever.

The author clearly and good-humoredly declares that he comes with no knowledge of music or music theory at all, and is clearly documenting his process of coming to grips with enough of those basics you may have known as a 6 year old with 1 year of experience, and is attempting to do so in order to do something interesting. So perhaps 'wrongness' is far less important to this than 'interestingness' and, though I am a multi-instrumentalist myself and know music well, I'd like to thank him for attempting to learn what he needed to to attempt this interesting thing. I really enjoyed the read and intend to have a little play with the data.

Ok, perhaps you are fine with letting little gems like "Musicians never play notes one at a time. They always use chords." slide, but I'm not. If I can't trust the author about the basics and things that I know about, how can I trust their reasoning or thoughts on more complicated matters and items that are outside my own domain? I cannot, and hence don't read further because there is an opportunity cost in doing so, and there are many other interesting things I could be reading or otherwise doing with my time.

Honestly I just feel like you may have wielded judgement too hastily at the expense of your sense of wonder and shared joy in someone exploring territory that is well trodden only to relatively few. Very few people have a solid grasp of musical theory. For most people, scaling what may to you be barely the foothills of knowledge is a great and challenging experience, and I think it should be celebrated.

And sure, perhaps you and I can easily distinguish the subtle difference between 'Musicians always use chords' (obviously wrong) and 'Musicians always work, individually or together, within a key, which is an abstracted but well-defined set of tones that can be combined in time series or simultaneously to produce an inexplicably pleasant experience in the listener, by some neurological magic that has never been adequately explained' (non-obviously correct) but y'know what, I actually am willing to let little gems like that slide because they're adequate approximations of the truth that allow good folks to proceed on a journey that may one day lead them to, just maybe, have the arrogance required to belittle the uninitiated.

For me, the issue was that the writing style, like most articles written by programmers, passed off every thing as fact. Things like "they have the same chord progression" in section 2.a is patently false. This kind of writing is misleading to others, especially newcomers (blind leading the blind)

I do agree though, that to do somethimg, learn something, have something almost correct is better than having learned and done nothing, but as Bill Evans points out in the youtube video about the learning process, it's much better to start with something simple, concrete, and which you know as true then build from there, than start approximating (incorrectly) lots of things at once. So it's a case by case basis, but it's not merely gratuitous arrogance that motivates people to call other people out on false statements.

> Very few people have a solid grasp of musical theory.

This is just like saying that very few people in the world have a solid grasp of computer programming... Do you know that there are hundreds of university departments in the world where the only thing people do is, wait for it... having a solid grasp of musical theory!?

How is that not 'very few people' in a sample that includes the population of the Earth?

Not everyone if the world is trying to create a computer model of music. The minimum a person with this interest can do is to contact a specialist in music theory (of whom there are thousands as I mentioned).

Thank you so much for this encouragement.

The whole music investigation was a side-project, compared to my main efforts on Pingtype (a Chinese learning site). https://pingtype.github.io

I got interested because my friends at the KHOP prayer room gave me the song sheets in PDF format. They have the chords written, and the key on the top right. I thought it would be interesting to figure out which songs go well together so I could make some playlists. Even though I can't play music, I listen a LOT - all day in the office, and while I bike to work.

The fact this side project got more upvotes than my language-learning interests, and your encouragement that the data might be useful, is a sign to me that I should keep on with this and maybe learn to play. There's a piano in the house I rent, but I don't know what to do with it. It seems like now might be a good time to start learning.

Someone did a side-project in a new domain without studying it for a few years. Outrageous.

Good enough.

Also - the notation in question is confusing and overcomplicated, and ignoring corner cases makes a lot of sense if you don't care about outliers.

It's not like that notation handles all kinds of music well anyway.

Yes, exactly. The well temperated musical tuning [0] is "good enough". it's an approximation. Some pitches for notes sound almost the same and that's why they today are represented with the same key on a piano.

> For some reason I don't totally understand, some have 2 names (e.g. C#=Db, D#=Eb, F#=Gb, A#=Bb).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

Some famous music for the well temperament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

> A chord is 3 notes played at the same time.

It's not like you have to dig too deep to discover four-note 7th chords, diminished/augmented, inversions, etc...

In the article:

"There's also 7th chords, Augmented chords (+), and Diminished (º) chords. As far as we're concerned, there's a lookup table that lets us turn these chords into notes."

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