Comment by twerwhhgfdhdd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twerwhhgfdhdd | Hacker News Reader

I have some varied interests - conlangs, local history, retrocomputing, music theory, etc. And a while ago, I noticed I would watch a lot of videos or browse a lot of articles about these topics, but I wasn't absorbing much. Nor was I doing anything with this knowledge. So I changed my focus - I would organize the information I was getting, write my own personal conclusions, and start digging through primary sources (and in the case of applied knowledge, actually try things out).

And it worked! I feel my knowledge of things has deepened, and my interests have been rekindled. It's a lot of fun and very relaxing to do.

Essential to all this is a personal wiki that I keep. I'm using Zim (https://zim-wiki.org) which most of you are probably familiar with. I don't often publish anything there - it's just local files, for now.

Never heard of "Digital Gardens" but based on the reddit group they mentioned in the article, it looks like there is an emerging community of people doing this.

What does music theory mean to you? Is there a mathematical introductory take on the topic? Can it be studied without an interest in music, but rather for appreciation of patterns?

I've seen the term many times before in context I found appealing, but the wiki page talks mainly about the connection to actual music.

When I talk to other musicians, most use the term "music theory" to refer to the technical side of musical composition - understanding scales, rhythmic divisions, approaches to harmony, etc. A lot of this isn't really theoretical per se, at least not in the scientific sense, and I know a nitpicky guitar teacher with a masters degree who insists it's wrong to call this 'music theory' (and I suppose he also corrects people whenever they say the new millennium started in 2000).

And then there's the real 'theoretical' music theory, which does what you might expect: theorizes how music works. What is music? What makes music good? What makes a particular song 'tick'? This can get pretty abstract, and might involve some nifty math. Still not strictly scientific, though there may be some science involved.

If you have a theory as to what makes good music, you're naturally going to write music that tests your theory, hence the association between music theory and compositional practice. They are technically distinct, but most musicians use the term loosely. So that's probably where you're confused.

I would not recommend learning about music theory unless you're interested in actual music. Most of your time learning music theory will be spent analyzing actual music, so if you don't like it you're gonna have a bad time. And personally, the benefit of music theory for me is applying its lessons to music that I write. So if you don't even like music, I'm not sure what the appeal would be.

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