Music Theory for Programmers

> I V vi IV is the four chords that a genuinely alarming share of pop music is built from.

Axis of awesome made a really cool video about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet.

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...

How come the same article has been posted four times in the past 18 days? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=runjs.app

Doesn't HN have a temporal deduplication system?

This article is quite well done, especially from a programmer's perspective, but falls flat (no pun intended) for me because of my terrible ear for pitch.

> Here are five notes. Every one is double the frequency of the one before it. [...] They are different pitches, and yet they sound like the same note.

Nothing about these notes seem similar to me. You could play pretty much any sequence of rising notes and (falsely) claim they're the "same note" and I'd believe it. This is one reason I've always had trouble learning music.

> √2 the awkward one -> 311.13Hz

That one doesn't sound particularly awkward to me. Again, I blame my inability to distinguish pitch.

The only instrument I was able to pick up pretty easily was drums.

I should not have to install a browser plug-in to opt out of Google analytics (that's what proposed as an opt-out option in the privacy policy).

Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?

I learned to play guitar by my own when I was around 12. You don't really even need to know music theory to play guitar, as long as you understand the shapes etc.

Over time, I developed shorthands for understanding theory like i can easily look at a fretboard and know which note it is.

But what bugged me is that you seem to imply the reason why you couldn't learn a instrument was because you did not understand the why. That makes very little sense to me. I know several professional musicians who don't even know what a mode is or what formal notation is. One of them has pitch perfect ear, he can literally hear anything and tranpose that on his guitar. He has no idea how notes work and just writes tabs.

So while this is very nicely from a programmer point of view and an objective explanation of things but learning all this will not make you a better musician is the point.

Practice above all. Dont try to fit all theory into the pratice but understand what you are practicing particulalry using the theory. Otherwise you end up with all theory and no practice experience of using that theory and creativity.

As a perosn who likes code, this is interesting. As a musician who also understands music theory, this is kind of alienating in terms of how it presented. Like if someone just read this article and thought they understood music theory now, they would be pretty unsufferable to actual musicians.

Fantastic post. You took a subject that never made sense to me and made it seem simple.

Very nice, thanks for creating this!

> The system we want, where the octave is pure and the fifths are pure and everything closes into a neat loop, does not exist and never has. Every tuning system in history is a different choice about where to dump the error.