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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

There are maybe three aspects to music theory:

(1) Theory of how things sound like: Tones, melodies, scales, chords, based on the frequencies of individual sounds.

(2) How to name things.

(3) How to handle the mess of naming things in Western music theory, where things have 12 different names, depending on which note you choose as the base.

This post seems to focus on 3.

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most disciplines, music included, have theory and practice. how things sound is an element of the latter, whereas why things sound the former. this article as the title atates is about music theory and does a pretty decent job IMO

I would be delighted to see a follow up article that explores frequencies and harmonics while sticking with the code demonstrations and incorporating a simple tone generator for the practice side of things

Here I was expecting you to say:

(1) Melody

(2) Harmony

(3) Rhythm

:-)

It would be interesting to go through a modern college level music theory textbook and break it down into which of those 3 things each concept falls into. I can't imagine getting past maybe the first chapter.

> How to handle the mess of naming things in Western music theory, where things have 12 different names, depending on which note you choose as the base.

You are missing the point.

I once listened to a podcast where fourier transforms were used to generate sounds that otherwise don't exist.

Could you maybe share which podcast? Generating “sounds that otherwise don’t exist” does not sound particularly remarkable taken at face value. It’s basically what any synthesizer or audio processor does, and Fourier transforms are also a very commonly used in audio processing.

This podcast. The episode of Joseph Fourier.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00srz5b/episodes/downloads

What I meant by "sounds that otherwise don’t exist" are sounds that are too complex to be created by physical music instruments its easier to simulate them by computer.

> sounds that otherwise don’t exist.

hmmm

Why is that mess necessary? Cant a semantically rich notation be devised to avoid that mess?.

To me, that’s like asking “why are inconsistencies in English necessary? can’t we all just learn Esperanto?” There’s hundreds of years worth of written music, hundreds of years worth of pedagogical material, and millions of people who simply will not “un-learn” the current tradition. Just like English, over the centuries, music notation evolves, but only just does that, evolves.

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