I've recently tried it on 1:1 calls with ML/backend engineers and on a workshop at our local hacker space for 20 people and I've got so much positive feedback that I've decided to share it here. If you follow this tutorial closely, it'll help trying to generate both a plain HTML app and a React app with pretty solid results for a little amount of time.
My life has changed 2 months ago since I've discovered the Cursor IDE. I love this product and I'm trying to share that as much as I can. I stopped writing React on my own and I only code using English/Russian now, and much faster.
Disclosure: my codebase is 10k LOC in modern React+TS, your 100k Rust mileage may vary.
that's a great point. i'm making my alternative https://rawl.rocks/ which does exactly that: a relative color-coding, starting from the tonic
aside from that, I make a library of structures used in Western music (in the header). I've started saving structures a week ago, so there isn't much content right now
the main emergent property of my system is visibility of structures. chords, chord progressions, parallel / relative modulation symmetries suddenly make sense and are viscerally perceivable
and I hope my visualizations are directly useful in a context of speaking about music theory to people without sheet music experience (or, dare I say, without 10 years of such experience)
the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure. it's good for sight reading because people use it (like QWERTY or Chinese characters), but it's a suboptimal way to make underlining structural laws, patterns and symmetries of Western music visible
> the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure
Can you expand on this? I’m a hobbyist that’s learned how to sight read, and one of the coolest things was when I stopped seeing individual notes and began to see structure, as in chords and progressions. I’m not sure how sheet music would obscure the structure because that’s all I see in it now.
Basically, you can somewhat see chords in sheet music. Like, you can easily see a C major chord in a treble clef.
1) How many milliseconds does it take you to understand that the entire bar you're looking at is just a C major chord arpeggiated in different octaves?
2) What if it's a bass + treble clef? What if it's an orchestral score?
3) How fast can you verify that a treble clef is active now? That it's not a C-sharp major or a C major chord?
4) Do you actually care that it's a C major chord or rather should you care that it's a I chord (a tonic major chord)?
5) If you care about relative chords (Roman numerals), does it mean you should learn 7 to 12 times visual cues of what's going on now?
These are just the beginning questions, where the end questions that I care about are:
101) What are the backbone structures making a list of midi pitches played suddenly a tango? A ragtime? A malaguena? A Bulgarian horo?
102) What are differences between styles (languages) of specific composers? How do I rapidly see what's different between Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo? Between Chopin and Schumann? Between (tonal) Copland and (tonal) Debussy?
103) How do I imitate any of those or any fusion of those? How do I make sure that I don't miss any structural feature when I analyze and decompose their style and their pieces?
Thanks for the response! I think it would be cool to see if a different notation lends itself better to these questions, but I do believe that the classic notation we already use satisfies most of these questions. I feel like reading a natural language has a lot of similarities. When you first learn to read, you often identify individual letters, then syllables, then you begin to read words, and finally one day you can compare the stylistic similarities between two different authors.
Music has a lot of the same steps and it just takes time to get to the different stages of comprehension. At the stage I’m at now, it’s fairly easy to look at sheet music and determine if it’s ragtime or swing or jazz. I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up more nuance as time goes on too.
But, I think it’s cool that you’re exploring different approaches! I don’t want to take away from that, I just wanted to put out a challenge to the presumptions your making that classic notation is insufficient in some of these areas :)
Btw I'm very happy to do a demo over Zoom. Every background is differnt, so I benefit a lot from sharing various aspects of what I know during these calls and thinking how to bake this knowledge into the platform. Reach out: cxielamiko@gmail.com, or preferably t.me/vitalypavlenko
I've spent last two years doing college-level piano studies (pre-conservatiorum, i.e. nominally Year 8-9, was more like Year 4-5 because I lacked any childhood piano background).
Sadly, my program wasn't great in many aspects. A huge portion was devoted to perfecting the playing of pieces by heart (I did some Mozart, some Bach and some Beethoven). While I've learnt a good deal on interpretation, expression and fingering when I meditated on what I'm forced to do, I'd much better spend more time on writing out tons of jazz improvisations using some rules given, learn some idiomatic patterns on a keyboard and the like. So I quit.
Now, for the last seven months I don't have any piano teacher, and I feel so much freedom every time I play the instrument. I don't play anything that I've tried to learn from sheet music. I hate the whole process. Rather, I gradually develop my own improvisations. Not in an intricate and highly restrictive bebop jazz idiom. Rather, something quite tonal and functional, yet with scales, interesting harmonies, stretching the boundaries and the like.
My greatest joy is that I've noticed I subconsciously started building large forms from it, on the spot. I previously lacked enough attention. I feel like I'm an LLM with a loss of my previous listener's experience doing random stuff for many epochs.
I'm curious to hear, what's your request to your teacher, and how happy are you with what are you doing at classes?
My request to my teacher is that he teach pieces that I find interesting. Currently, I am working on pieces by Chopin and Milhaud. I am very satisfied with my classes. I find that they help me to take my mind off of my job, which can be very boring and monotonous at times.
Thanks for asking! I went to music theory specifically because I didn't want to produce anything before I analyze enough music (like, thousands of compositions). That is, I didn't want to talk music and do marketing on my compositions until I learn it on a level of B2, at least.
I personally felt very dumb from all guides on how to start making music in an hour. I felt like I've given a nice caligraphy pen (and a helium balloon) to say something, yet I haven't read even anything in the language that I'm gonna be talking in. Should I, at the bare minimum, understand any structural context of what was done before me? How prog rock was done, on a level of notes (or timbres)? Bulgarian folk songs? Turkish improvisation? That kind of stuff.
(I admit it's a nerdy and very corner-case road. I come from a background of learning many languages as a hobby, so I understand why I'm broken the way I am. I appreciate it when people can "just" compose, unlike me.)
> because I didn't want to produce anything before I analyze enough music
Just wanted to say be careful with self limiting thoughts. I never saw myself even as a musician because I am largely self taught.
It wasn't really until I was having a chat with a great musician/composer that I have tremendous respect for. He made a comment that I was a great musician when we were talking about the topic of "being a musician". Those few words from him made a huge impact on my life.
I think what I'm trying to say is: write stuff, produce stuff. You don't have to publish it or you could publish under pseudonym if you like. The fear of failure has held me back an awful lot and it's still crippling sometimes.
Thank you! For me, it's not a fear of failure. It's a fear of meaninglessness. I feel like the culture where people generally running around and reaffirming each other that "studying anything from the past isn't necessary because that's not how creativity works" is toxic.
finding meaning in my own music has been a journey.
Once you learn how all the tools and patterns around music work, what do you want to do with it is the natural next question.
For me finding genuine emotion, feeling, and story that can be inscribed in a song has been a huge challenge. Moreso as I got older, my younger ego would love to share every emotion, thought, and color. My older ego is more reserved and feels less of these emotions and thoughts are worthy of encoding into song.
Tldr no synesthesia (everyone is different), no "physical" idea, rather an attempt to do meaningful metaphors for I, IV, V chords and minor/major opposition.
"in this article they try to find connections between the basic parameters of sound and colors at the level of existing unconscious sensations. in particular, the “pitch” parameter (height, note) - the only parameter that interests me - is very roughly scaled by them as higher pitch and darker pitch, with a spread of four octaves. my task is to find 12 colors in order to use all 12 within one octave, and to create from them a script in which the complex and variable structures of Western music are visible. i.e. they become visible if you look closely and compare
my task is not about the basic sensations of people from high or low notes. I simply show the height of the notes along the vertical axis: high notes at the top of the screen, low notes at the bottom. I need the color to:
- show semantically the same note in different octaves in the same way (C of the first octave = C of the second octave)
- make horizontal bundles of three or four colors (chords) catchy. There are only about 20 main chords (but there is also a long tail of rare ones)
Let me give you an analogy with natural language. Let’s say the Russian language doesn't have a script yet, and here we come linguist missionaries, and we are trying to create an optimal alphabet for the Russian people. Of course, research can be carried out about which letter is more similar to the vowel [a] or the vowel [u] in the Bouba/kiki sense. but the best alphabet is one that respects the statistical properties of vowel usage in that language. in particular, it correctly reflects that in this language there are only two vowel sounds (Abkhazian) or as many as twenty (Danish). if there are twenty of them, then we better have twenty contrasting letters (or not?)
and as a result, Georgian “u”, Hindi “u” and Arabic “u” are not similar to each other at all, and for some reason all three writing systems work perfectly
I have two main requirements for my system:
- so that the most frequency structures from the Western musical tradition are striking (I did this as much as possible)
- so that 12 colors are the most contrasting, incl. for people with different forms of vision color deficiency"
Btw I really think that the world's obsession with learning to hear intervals before hearing harmony qualities (minor triad, major triad, dominant seventh, diminished), and before hearing harmonies within a key (I or i, V, pre-dominants, VI or vi, V/V) is a wrong order to master things. I still can't solidly tell apart a minor sixth from a major sixth, but so what? The more important skill to me is to focus on a chord that currently sounds, so that I can interact with the real tonal language (homophony) of the last 2.5 centuries. This way I can eg. play by ear the melodies with chords that stuck in my head (including from way in the past).
We switched from polyphony and intervals on top of each other to chord progressions around Bach's time, and since then intervals aren't the main thing, I'd say.
Which one of your resources would be most relevant if I would like to start as you recommend by learning to hear harmony qualities and then to hear them within a key?
I'd recommend to start with HookTheory (either books or free resources). I'm hesitant about their latest ChordCrush, I played with it a tiny bit and I think it's weaker than it might be (too tiktok'ee).
Thank you for the suggestions! I'll think whether I actually conform to the Awesome manifesto. Also, I've always thought that Awesome links should be on a single page and not in the way I splitted them into subpages
Yours is the way I usually see them. You don't have to change anything about your layout. Just add the title, add to an Awesome List of Lists, and you're gold.
Author here. I'd love to hear from HN which resources to study music (theory) might I overlooked so far. Everything counts: from books and papers on theory to ear training exercises to YouTube videos. The higher is rarity*value, the better.
Just Intonation and everything from https://en.xen.wiki/ and related, maybe some of the YouTube stuff from "Hear Between the Lines" is a good start for new accessible stuff.
Music cognition such as Sweet Anticipation by David Huron and everything like that… especially note Music and Memory by Bob Snyder which expresses everything except harmony in a style that avoids traditional notation, and Sounds of Music: Perception and Notation (out of print) by Gerald Eskalin who also wrote Lies My Music Teacher Told Me
For the most part, "music theory" amounts to music-notation-and-style-grammar because very little of it is actual theory (i.e. explanation) until you add real science which means music psychology (because notation patterns and physics patterns are not music, music is a mental experience).
Those 6 channels plus r/musictheory (pre-2018) are basically my entire Music Theory / composition education. A quick note that r/musictheory is not the same thing as it was back then. IIRC there was a big switch/restart some years back, not sure what happened. Still a good Q&A forum today.
Because of the organization and the fact that I don't want to clone it right now, searching it hard .. but I think you're missing Ian Ring's amazing comprehensive study of all possible scales within 12TET: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/
This is not particularly useful to most musicians, but from a music theory perspective, it's one of the best introductions to set theory (the musical version) around.
In my early years as a musician I focused too much on theory.
I didn’t really start to grow until I started to learn as many covers as I could and how to improvise a solo over the changes.
The theory part helps only in that I know how a dim7 chord looks, sounds and feels but most importantly how it is used by composers.
That being said, Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory book is excellent. And get a copy of a Real Book and watch YouTube videos on the voicings used by players and you’ll expand your harmonic palette immensely!
Mathieu's Harmonic Experience. Definitive book on reconciling just & equal temperament and how to develop embodied understanding of the relationships between notes.
Yeah it really is excellent for learning how to feel the different intervals, and how to reason about intervals as a representation of a more fundamental harmonic relationship. It's the best model I've ever seen for understanding and using the knowledge of how 12-tet notes "stand for" many different just temperament notes in different scales.
I've also used the approach in the first few chapters to teach people with no music experience to sing the "ison" drone of byzantine chant. In my experience it's a dead simple and reliable way to introduce people to their latent musicality.
Thank you very much for your work. As someone who constantly struggle to get music theory as an adult (mostly lack of practice I know, but sometimes life takes over) having as many different resources as possible really helps.
I feel you. I started learning piano at 25, and even though I messed with guitar during the middle school, I feel like everything takes ages to learn and master.
I thought music as a set of languages is way easier than it happened to be. A CS degree and passion for linguistics doesn't convert into fluency as fast as I wished, and now I see why I'd need 4 years of music college + 4 years of an actual degree.
My linguistics professor in college warned all students on day one: "if you are an English teacher, you may struggle in this class. If you are a computer programmer, however, you may do quite well."
I love comparing the differences between piano and guitar as instruments for learning music. They have such different strengths and weaknesses. Changing keys with a capo is like using the "pitch shift" button on an electronic keyboard. Since music is only a strong hobby of mine, I have never come to any conclusion on those matters.
I learned a LOT when I received a free high-quality piano (that had been in storage) and decided to tune it myself. That's a rabbit hole I am still amazed by. I got a lot of use out of http://piano-tuner.org/ Piano tuning is such a complex art and science.
My life has changed 2 months ago since I've discovered the Cursor IDE. I love this product and I'm trying to share that as much as I can. I stopped writing React on my own and I only code using English/Russian now, and much faster.
Disclosure: my codebase is 10k LOC in modern React+TS, your 100k Rust mileage may vary.