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Music theory thread:
Never in my life have I seen a good explanation of how music works.
The way music is currently taught is a Byzantine morass of disconnected concepts. But it doesn’t need to be that hard.
Here is the ultimate and definitive explanation of how music works.
All sound has only two dimensions: amplitude and frequency.
If a sound is oscillating with a specific discernible frequency, then it will have a discernible pitch, and we call that a note.
The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch of the note.
Individual notes alone have no emotional content, and therefore aren’t music. You aren’t moved to tears by your microwave beeping.
Similarly, you won’t feel anything if you play just a single note on the piano.
It’s only when you get two notes of different pitch played simultaneously that an emergent emotional quality starts to arise.
There will be a mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the note. We that relationship an interval.
Intervals are the emotional phonemes of music — the smallest building blocks that have emotional content.
The most pleasing intervals tend to have the simplest mathematical ratios.
Never in my life have I seen a good explanation of how music works.
The way music is currently taught is a Byzantine morass of disconnected concepts. But it doesn’t need to be that hard.
Here is the ultimate and definitive explanation of how music works.
Kind of an abstract-ish question for the musicians: once you develop some good melodic sensibility, how do you approach expanding from that? How do you figure out chords to go with the melody on-the-fly? Trial and error I guess...
— visa is damp and cold \U0001f327 (@visakanv) January 7, 2021
All sound has only two dimensions: amplitude and frequency.
If a sound is oscillating with a specific discernible frequency, then it will have a discernible pitch, and we call that a note.
The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch of the note.
Individual notes alone have no emotional content, and therefore aren’t music. You aren’t moved to tears by your microwave beeping.
Similarly, you won’t feel anything if you play just a single note on the piano.
It’s only when you get two notes of different pitch played simultaneously that an emergent emotional quality starts to arise.
There will be a mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the note. We that relationship an interval.
Intervals are the emotional phonemes of music — the smallest building blocks that have emotional content.
The most pleasing intervals tend to have the simplest mathematical ratios.