Yet another Hacker News

Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom

29 points aanet 1 hour ago 7 comments

aanet 1 hour ago | parent

Book: Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom

by Robert Hutchinson

ultrasounder 57 minutes ago | parent

https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!

IvanK_net 44 minutes ago | parent

Am I the only one who thinks that the classic music notation is 3x harder to learn than the basic music theory (without the rules of notation)?

I think that you can learn music theory (to play an instrument or to compose music e.g. in a "piano roll tool" / MIDI editor) much faster if you skip the classic notation. And I think that it is even better to learn the notation AFTER you understand the music theory.

I even made my own guide to music :D https://www.jampea.com/learn

bonzini 28 minutes ago | parent

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4 explains why music notation is the way it is. There are very good reasons for it.

The parts that are really weird (like the C clef) have mostly been obsoleted, unless you play the viola I guess.

song_synth 3 minutes ago | parent

love that video, it made me lol so hard the first time I saw it :D

Classical composer and software engineer here. One of my goals is to help update score notation. I use something called "harmonic coloring" which is like a reduced MIDI notation: You color a note by its functional role (harmonic value) rather than an arbitrary hue in 0-11.

What this view shares with MIDI: Long rectangles representing the applied durations. How it is different: Occupies a minimal amount vertical space.

The color palette I'm using is intended to support people with colorblindness. The shades/hues of a color encodes the functional harmony. The root key signature (origin) is always the same color; and chords some distance r away on the circle of fifths is the shade/hue at that offset r.

There is a similar concept described in the Tantacruel video towards the end.

You can explore it here on Monic Theory. (mobile view should be fixed within 48 hours)

https://monictheory.com/project-templates

Hunpeter 12 minutes ago | parent

This is a bit off topic, but since you mentioned your guide: I hope this doesn't come off as hostile, but the guide you linked contains a number of inaccuracies and oversimplifications - it's kind of naive in an endearing way, but also leaves the reader with the impression that it covers all there is to music. I guess what I'm saying is it's fine to restrict yourself in what you include in the guide, or even simplify things, but it should be clear that the topic (i.e. music) is far richer and more complex.

Eduard 21 minutes ago | parent

didn't find a single audio file; only links to unaffiliated YouTube videos which want me to watch ads first.

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”