alt Hacker NewsI think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
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There is no "objective" foundation to music.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
B D G I K
A C EF H J LA
We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?
The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".
My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.
Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun
Do you have much experience reading musical notation?
I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.
Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.
To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.
If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:
He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.
>We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Do you mean trying to teach all children perfect pitch even though society has no expectation of that? Unlike knowing at least your primary colors which is expected of everyone. I suspect that could be unnecessarily stressful for many.
Or do you mean as some kind of metaphor or analogy? If the latter, I think it would be quite confusing as there are aspects of vision and hearing that are quite different. Pitch classes have no analog in vision that I can think of. Color vision is roughly 3 dimensional but sound is not. The aspects of timbre don't map to color.
I think that understanding music theory does require work. It emerges from physics and physiology and a very long history including a bunch of culturally specific things. Did your ancestors make music with long skinny strings or pipes with nice integer-ish overtones? Here are some tuning systems for you (among them the set of C-D-E-F-G-A-B you mentioned). Did they use bells or gongs with decidedly non-integer ratio overtones? Here's a set of different systems for you!
Anyway, if you have a mapping/analog/metaphor you think is useful between music or sound and color I would be interested to hear it / see it!
None of this is objective. The construction of our scale is subjective, other countries use different scales. Even with this same scale, there are multiple different tuning systems. There is micro-tonal music. Musical keys are arbitrary too. We teach the way we do because it is a culmination of musical history, our particular western musical history, and it's own arbitrary decisions that western musicians have made over the past hundreds, even thousands of years. If you like, there is also solfege, which replaces letter names with just sounds, "do re mi" etc, Also what makes you think colours are objective? Different languages have words for a single colour that map onto multiple other words in other countries, does not seem very objective to me, unless you are talking about notating colours as hex or RGB number values, or wavelengths (which we don't do in natural language)
You think music— essentially expressing ideas and emotion through sound— isn’t approachable enough to children because the notation lacks a solid foundation in math? I very much disagree. In fact, I think teaching children to experiment more with musicality well before they’re introduced to things like notation and formal theory would do far more to pique their interest. I happily played guitar for a decade before I learned to read music.
>For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge might be easier for some people.
Haven't heard about CDEFGAE up until I was in my mid 20s trying to learn guitar (after 7 years of music school and musical calsses in regular school)
I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.
We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.
For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).
Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p
Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.
Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?
Sounds like you don’t understand scales if you’re confused about why we have 7 note names.
Also, in your own color analogy: we have a small number of main color names, then a bunch of in betweens.
I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.
I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)
You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.