The Musical Knowledge Thread...

[stanron]

Originally Posted by ombudsman

You're talking about the semantics of "theory" and "knowledge" in the abstract. The term theory has multiple meanings - what it is in science is quite different than what it is in common usage - and music theory is another area where it has a fairly well understood if not entirely universal meaning.

As a rule, to musicians, you absolutely can and do know elements of music theory. It's still music theory. I understand if you don't like the term very much, I don't either, but it still means what it means.

I can't argue with anything you are saying here. What I am saying is that once you know something it stops being 'theoretical' and is simply knowledge. For other people the same stuff may not be known. For them it is theory until 'proven' by experience.

[ombudsman]

Originally Posted by stanron

I can't argue with anything you are saying here. What I am saying is that once you know something it stops being 'theoretical' and is simply knowledge. For other people the same stuff may not be known. For them it is theory until 'proven' by experience.

I get what you mean.

Another thing about it that is interesting/confusing is that in subjects outside of art, we tend to think of theory of something (which can then be proven, or not) as being the definitive way of understanding it. And in creative occupations that carries an implication that "this is the way it was conceived and therefore that's what it is".

That's an oversimplification at best because there can be multiple valid ways of analyzing and describing these things. It's possible in the future we may have better ways of understanding why certain things work well or work the way they do in music.

Even to the person that created a piece of music, their own mental process is never going to be entirely knowable or definable. On some level even when you are working in well established conventions you are still making choices just because you like one thing better than the other. Why do you prefer one note over another, when both are perfectly valid for the style and the conventional wisdom of music theory ? You can never really know. Any answer you can give is incomplete.

You may think you know the answer and then find another reason later that makes more sense to you. You may think it's about the note, and then realize that it was actually partly because of a harmonic on your particular instrument on one of the notes that you liked, which does not sound that way on another instrument. And maybe it's that harmonic relative to it's own fundamental, or maybe it's that harmonic relative to the note played before it, or the one after it.

Sound is infinitely complex and we hear it through a convoluted filter of culture, expectations, opinions, and variable body mechanics. We'll never know the "why", all we have are imperfect ever changing mental constructs that enable us to relate things together and to other people (sort of) but which hurt even when they help.

[stanron]

Got it. I've been wondering whether to add maths and science to your list of 'convulated filter' as Pythagorus combined maths and experiment to give us the just tempered scale. Of course we guitarists can't use just temperament but it probably is somewhere near the start what we know as music theory. But then I remembered that African music, which grew up isolated from western Europe, and has that strange third note. Is there maths or science behind that? I don't know.

[ombudsman]

Originally Posted by stanron

Got it. I've been wondering whether to add maths and science to your list of 'convulated filter' as Pythagorus combined maths and experiment to give us the just tempered scale. Of course we guitarists can't use just temperament but it probably is somewhere near the start what we know as music theory. But then I remembered that African music, which grew up isolated from western Europe, and has that strange third note. Is there maths or science behind that? I don't know.

Certainly physics describe these things and relate to what we do in all kinds of ways.

Most tunings have a relationship with the harmonic series. I consider it optional to look at it in terms of math/numbers; they accurately describe the ratios between fundamentals and harmonics, but you don't have to know what those relationships are in order to hear them and respond to their character.

We hear harmonics constantly, you could argue that every piece of music you've ever heard in an acoustic space has harmonics, so you've never heard anything that wasn't in a mixture of just intonation and some other temperament (usually with neither being a perfect implementation, due to inharmonicity and the inherent challenges in tuning real world instruments and measuring tuning). Or if the music was intended to be in just intonation, fine, but musical instruments are still far from perfect as far as pitch is concerned, and we can't decide what harmonics they produce (other than when we limit ourselves to sine waves and headphones, and I'd bet that's imperfect too if you have enough precision to tell). So music made in JI has fundamentals tuned to the harmonics of one fundamental (at a time), but every note also has it's own fundamentals of which some are unrelated to the nominal scale of the piece. No matter what tuning system we say we are working in, the results are never purely within that system.

The way I look at it is that all methods of intonation are conceptual but cannot be perfectly implemented, while infinite microtonal variations with lots of harmonics on top of the fundamentals are reality that we've always been hearing no matter what our intentions.

Equal temperament is not that old, harmonic (-ish) thirds and other intervals show up all over the globe and are a factor when singers and some types of instruments play together in pretty much any culture to this day, and there is no perfection in any of this stuff. All of this is true no matter whether it is understood, described, or looked at this way.

I'm not sure the math/science way of looking at it is an actual perceptual distinction as such, because music doesn't sound different if you don't know what you're hearing and why. Just like the way we respond to the sound of chord changes in a tune long before we know how they work or what they are called.

We each parse and evaluate the sounds differently according to the way we think, and that can give surprisingly divergent results for sure, but the "why" is a very tricky question that is never going to have a conclusive answer.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by mc1

besides the pre-chorus, i wonder when the chorus became popular.

Folk songs have had choruses for centuries. Even if they did often consist of "too rye ay, fol-de-diddle-dee" or something...
It's a natural impulse in a popular song to have a repeated section with a memorable hook. Audiences like it, song sellers like it...
"All together now..."

Originally Posted by mc1

those beatles were inventive in so many ways.

Indeed. They got it all from 50s rock'n'roll and popular standards of the 30-50s, of course. The list of songs they covered from 1957-62 is mind-boggling in its spread of genres. They'd have to have been remarkably dumb NOT to have become prolific songwriters after all that.
They were unique only in that breadth of influence, which made for a unique mix of styles, coalescing into their own sound.

Originally Posted by mc1

here is my contribution: the band ABBA did not alway use that form for its songs. hth.

Uh-huh...

In fact, boringly, they probably never did. AABA, yes... and other variations with C sections...

If you want songs in ABBA form, the nearest I know is certain folk tunes, where the 4-line melodies are often in that form.
Eg, She Moved Through The Fair.

[mc1]

i'm quoting this from a different thread about the tune greensleeves:

Originally Posted by JonPR

...

Here's a 3rd arrangement (again in A minor), where the first section uses F natural in the first phrase, but F# in the bridge.
http://violinsheetmusic.org/title/g/greensleeves/
...

now, why is that a bridge? seems like a chorus to me.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by mc1

i'm quoting this from a different thread about the tune greensleeves:



now, why is that a bridge? seems like a chorus to me.

Actually, looking at it again (including the full lyrics) you're quite correct: "bridge" is the wrong term, and chorus it is.
That's because when the form is repeated, the lyrics of the first section ("verse") change, while the second section doesn't. That - aided by its bright relative major opening - makes it a true chorus.

In fact the form breaks down further into 2 bar phrases (assuming 6/8 time), with the following form:

VERSE
A - B
A - C
CHORUS
D - B
D - C

IOW, it's only the first halves of each line that distinguish verse from chorus.

I'm guessing this is an old folk form, or at least a song form typical of the time it was written.

[mc1]

thank you, jon.