A lot of musicians can 'play' with tones and chords in their imaginations ... even whole compositions. With training those can be written down without the need of an instrument. Beethoven had 40 years of hearing experience, and had lots of ideas (to remember) while he went on walks. So, I suspect his 'aesthetic' was a hearing one ... different from someone born deaf.
ehnto 1187 days ago [-]
Known as audiation, it's very likely Beethoven could audiate all of his ideas very clearly in his head. Even I as a casual listener and occasional player can audiate improvised compositions with no trouble at all.
copperx 1187 days ago [-]
Is audiation universal, like the natural human ability to imagine and manipulate and rotate complex 3D scenes in the mind? I'm thinking it is, because many people say "I can imagine that sentence being read in so-and-so's voice".
computerphage 1187 days ago [-]
Fun fact: not all humans can visualize things in their heads.
I've can't "imagine and manipulate and rotate complex 3D scenes in the mind" and no one's ever told me they can.
I can fake it as in a dream, and I can recall images I've seen of real scenes, but that's not the same thing.
Applying someone's voice pattern is very common.
ehnto 1187 days ago [-]
> I can fake it as in a dream
Can you explain what you mean by that?
I think you might be doing what he says he's doing, ideation happens in the minds eye just like recalling an image. If I picture a cat, I can flip the cat around in my head, or I can put the cat in an alleyway and I picture the whole scene.
ehnto 1187 days ago [-]
I imagine it's "universal" in the sense that it's part of most people's capabilities, but there are disorders that could affect it. One is called Amusia, which is a disorder affecting the ability to perceive music and difficulty remembering music.
There are people who can't imagine pictures in their head, such as your example manipulating 3D scenes in your mind. They couldn't do that. That's known as aphantasia. There are also people without an inner-monologue, so they don't think inside their head. I couldn't find the name of that.
It's an alien world to think of any of those possibilities, I guess you would work around it. I knew a graphic designer with aphantasia, and she was just as capable as the others!
8bitsrule 1185 days ago [-]
My mental imaging was always weak, and it always seemed that 'manipulating 3D scenes' was beyond me. Then I discovered otherwise ... but only after ingesting a certain substance forbidden to all but certain religions. Gotta speculate that many of us have the capacity but just need to get a handle on it.
There are many remarkable (probably widespread) mental phenomena that are completely overlooked/unvalued (at least by most materialist cultures). Partly because they don't have names that are ever mentioned. 'Qualia','synesthesia' (which I had when young and sadly ... lost? before I ever knew the idea). 'Audiation' ... the term's entirely new to me ( I began playing when I was 5) and (says WP) was not even coined until 1975. What else goes nameless, unseen, unheard?
How many kids have such abilities that are completely-overlooked, like the kid some writer (was it Huxley)? saw scratching an advanced math proof in the sand? How was it that Mozart could 'write entire works in his head'? Probably because as a prodigy he was taught the value of such skills. We can only speculate about all the horsepower going to waste - while young minds are stuffed with sugar and advertisements.
Tycho 1187 days ago [-]
“song stuck in my head” seems universal
odyssey7 1187 days ago [-]
> I wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic?
I’ve heard it expressed that when a user interface is designed with accessibility needs in mind, it tends to serve all users better.
A contemporary analogue might be: are design choices that were originally made for accessibility reasons becoming broadly popular with users who don’t have those needs? Personally, I think the answer is yes.
Is it because I’ve become familiar with those patterns? Or is it because those patterns appeal to my senses more easily (hence, more accessible) and therefore it’s easy to come to like them?
Were these more accessible compositions more popular because Beethoven was already an esteemed composer, or because they resonated better with audience members, or perhaps some of both?
vnorilo 1187 days ago [-]
I struggle a bit with the analogy of Beethoven and accessibility. By his day European music had swung from Bach's contrapuntal intricacies towards lighter playful elegance of Mozart's time. To me, Beethoven represents the start of the long climb towards epic, architectural monumentalism in music - which I could accept someone wants to call "deaf aesthetic", although I think Beethoven's particular condition had little to do with.
odyssey7 1187 days ago [-]
His work was epic and monumental at times, though the author mentions some stylistic developments that are more subtle as well.
> If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.
To me the higher contrast between the hands’ parts is analogous to having higher contrast in a visual design. The details of the work are easier to follow, potentially reaching more listeners.
npunt 1187 days ago [-]
Very cool to think about the spatial properties of composition like hand position changing as Beethoven went deaf. It suggests there's broader discoveries to be made in finding the patterns underneath things we thought we already understood.
Also love the author's insight that one can work on the technique of composition before turning on her hearing aids and being able to hear it, using her deafness as a sort of focus superpower.
pmoriarty 1187 days ago [-]
I read somewhere that Beethoven could hear by biting down on a piece of metal (on his piano?) that acted like a bone-conduction[1] hearing aid.
If this is true, then the popular conception of Beethoven being completely unable to hear while composing his masterpieces is mistaken.
I'd love to learn more (or be corrected) from anyone who knows more about this.
I used to put my teeth against the neck of my bass guitar when tuning it sometimes, to hear the notes better (when unplugged, of course). It really works, especially when tuning with harmonics as you can physically feel the "phase" from two almost-the-same-frequency-but-not-quite notes.
You look like an idiot though, get yourself an electric tuner it's like £10.
lostlogin 1187 days ago [-]
I assume there are plenty of examples of people using their senses in unexpected ways to diagnose issues, and it’s always interesting to me. Eg mechanics smelling engine oil, or (closer to home) MRI staff who can listen to MRI sequences and hear problems.
pmoriarty 1187 days ago [-]
This reminds me of a fascinating article I once read about the lost art of diagnosing diseases by smell, and told of a senior doctor in a bygone era advising his students to open all their senses when meeting a patient for the first time.
Apparently some diseases have characteristic smells, but these days medical students are rarely trained to recognize them.
autoro 1187 days ago [-]
There is a case of a woman in England that can smell Parkinson [1].
I think that when I read about it was the first time I really understood that smell is a generic sense that can detect certain molecules and that there is much more information encoded in the air around us.
Dogs can supposedly tell when humans are sick because of this, even before they know themselves.
williamdclt 1187 days ago [-]
There was an HN post recently (or a comment? can't remember) about playing a beep when memory is allocated/released in a program. The claim was that you can hear weird allocation patterns.
Similarly most of us could probably diagnose some faulty hard drive issues by ear
kthejoker2 1187 days ago [-]
My wife told me her external SSD was failing. I asked what the symptoms were and she said it was making a noise.
With all the paternal condescension I could muster I told her, SSDs don't make noise.
She said it's making a noise right now!
I listened - no it isn't!
A fracas ensued.
Later after the armistice was signed, we Googled and discovered the power supply can emit sounds in the 16Khz range when voltage is inconsistent.
And sure enough I've lost that hearing range and my wife hasn't.
I told her that's proof I didn't hear her about taking out the trash - she must've been using her 16KhZ voice!
touisteur 1186 days ago [-]
Power supplies... Phone chargers, ebike battery charger, laptop chargers... So many switching power supplies tend to whistle it's a major pain. Even worse when you're the only one hearing it... Even even worse is that unshakeable feeling that the thing is shit and is going to blow up soon (I played the 'blowing up electronic components' game when a teenager instead of sports or dating or studying).
I can also hear some GPUs around me, and I'm not sure whether it's the draw of the power supply that makes the PC sing or something within the GPU itself.
detaro 1186 days ago [-]
Likely the GPU itself, which has it's own powerful switching converters (to get from the voltage it gets from the PSU to core voltage for the GPU chips)
dehrmann 1187 days ago [-]
> completely unable to hear while composing his masterpieces
I'm not sure how true those stories are, but as someone with only some musical experience, I don't find an experienced composer who continued to compose after going deaf that crazy. I can "hear" songs in my head easy enough, and composers are pretty good at transcribing what they hear onto paper.
corin_ 1187 days ago [-]
I feel that way about the idea of coming up with a simple tune after going deaf, but hearing a full symphony you're composing while deaf is a whole new level.
Then again, despite being a professional singer when I was young and then attempting to study composing I discovered I have no skill for it - so composing even a simple orchestral piece without being deaf seems complex to me.
alisonkisk 1187 days ago [-]
It's not that hard if you have a theory of music like a pro like Beethoven does. It's like writing a program. You aren't picking a note at a time, you are laying down "tracks" with parameters.
black6 1187 days ago [-]
I recall a story about him having the legs sawn off a grand piano so that he could lay with his head on the floor while playing to "hear" the notes.
jacquesm 1187 days ago [-]
Typically they are attached with screws, so no need to use a saw. Also, it would be far more efficient to somehow make a connection to the bridge because that's where the signal is the strongest, the case doesn't carry all that much sound though it does reflect it if the lid is up.
aae42 1187 days ago [-]
sounds like something from Mr. Holland's Opus
idoubtit 1187 days ago [-]
His most famous sonata were published in 1798, 1801 (Moonlight), and 1803. By then, he suffered from tinnitus and knew he was to loose his audition, but he could still hear. He gradually lost his audition during the 1810s and was deaf by the end of the decade.
TL;DR Beethoven wrote his masterpieces sonata at a time were he could certainly hear them.
andrepd 1187 days ago [-]
Many of Beethoven's greatest works were composed when he was fully deaf (most famously his 9th Symphony, but also the Late Quartets, Grosse Fugue, etc.)
darkerside 1187 days ago [-]
This is useful context. His sonatas are truly masterpieces, not to say that his other incredible works are not.
ec123 1187 days ago [-]
His greatest sonata “Hammerklavier” was written when he was almost completely deaf in 1818. I think this commenter’s insinuation that Beethoven’s best work happened while he could hear is largely false. Op 132, op 132, grosse fuge, 9th etc
darkerside 1187 days ago [-]
I think it was more of an argument against there being any correlation at all, which I think is a reasonable one
idoubtit 1187 days ago [-]
I fail to see any interest in this article. It looks to me that someone projected her beliefs on Beethoven, with an oversimplification and little regards to the various influences on Beethoven's composition. He composed music at a time where musical trends emerged (notably romanticism), he suffered big professional failures, he was influenced by other composers... Did Beethoven's music become more complex in his last years because he could not hear? Maybe so, but Bach had no hearing problem yet his later music evolved in a similar way (Musical offering, The Art of the Fugue).
One could build a theory that Bach's piano works were influenced by his reading of the Odysseus, or by his growing taste for coffee. There certainly are arguments that could justify these theories. There are arguments against it, and anyway nothing can be established. Well, as long as some people enjoy writing or reading theories, why not.
gryson 1187 days ago [-]
You don't have to look far to see the interest in the article: a pianist with near-profound hearing loss stating that Beethoven's compositions become more interesting to her the later they were composed, coinciding with Beethoven's loss in hearing.
"More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person."
That, in turn, leads to the consideration of whether Beethoven's later music was defined in some way by his deafness.
johnnyfived 1187 days ago [-]
I didn't read the article (yet) but this seems like a great summary of it, thanks.
dvtrn 1187 days ago [-]
It was interesting watching your thoughts manifest as the comment progresses towards its conclusion; as the final sentence almost seems to resolve the inquiry contained in the first.
Thank you
Sawamara 1187 days ago [-]
Upvote if you are a music composer :D
dvtrn 1187 days ago [-]
Heh not a composer but I do play the tuba haha :) glad you caught the musical metaphors there
noizejoy 1187 days ago [-]
> someone projected her beliefs
You may be right about some projection going on, but your comment ignores the critical fact that she is one of presumably relatively few humans with experience as a composer with significant hearing loss. So her “projection” isn’t based on some random beliefs, but grounded in a relatively rare shared experience with the subject of her study.
In addition, historians and anthropologists routinely project to varying degrees in trying to interpret the “why” of history in addition to the “what”. And the fact that there’s a lot of speculation going on, is my default expectation as reader. No need to write it into every article on historical interpretation.
So I find her observations an interesting avenue of interpreting some aspects of Beethoven’s musical evolution.
TylerE 1187 days ago [-]
Also Beethoven was composing at a time when the piano was undergoing quite a bit of physical iteration.
A typical piano in Mozart's day, just proceeding Beethoven, had a wooden frame, strings made of iron, and a range of perhaps 5 octaves.
The modern concert grand, the design of which was mostly settled on by about 1880, has a cast iron frame, strings of spring steel ("piano wire"), and a rage of just over 7 octaves.
yongjik 1187 days ago [-]
Also, pianos were an evolving instrument and Beethoven could employ wider and wider ranges later because pianos were getting them. A young Beethoven couldn't use these notes even if he wanted to, as long as he wanted his pieces actually played.
mrob 1187 days ago [-]
Beethoven worked as an organist before he began to go deaf, and pipe organs had wider range than modern pianos (as well as playing louder). Despite this he composed very little music for the pipe organ. This makes me think the increased range in his later compositions was just the natural tendency for composers to increase the complexity of their works as they gain experience.
corin_ 1187 days ago [-]
While an organ has a similar interface (keyboard), it's such a different instrument really, in terms of the noise it makes, and various other elements like the length of noise from a key press. He would have had to actually want the organ as the instrument in the piece for how it is, not just for offering a greater range than an early pianoforte.
So it could well be that he would have preferred to use the organ's range earlier but just not wanted that instrument in his music. And that's not necessarily an insult to pipe organs - I think they sound lovely, watching somebody play well can be as enjoyable as almost any other instrument, and I'm a big fan of them in their place. But their place is pretty niche really - there's lots of lovely (but religious) choral works that use one, due to churches historically, and there are nice things written for organ. But it's pretty rare for organ to be the keyboard instrument of choice in orchestral music, chamber music, etc
throwaway2245 1187 days ago [-]
Plenty of renowned visual art appears to be influenced by the artists' unique experiences of vision. Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, for one.
It would be surprising if music was not influenced by the way the composer hears and experiences sound.
glandium 1187 days ago [-]
Relatedly, Rick Beato recently did an interesting video about Beethoven's condition. https://youtu.be/3bA2V0jZMo4
grizmaldi 1187 days ago [-]
Rick Beato has a pretty compelling take[0] on what Mozart's experience may have been like.
I think he's wrong regarding perfect pitch. Relative pitch would be enough to be able to "auditorize" (like "visualize" but for sound) works in his mind.
Having studied music from an early age when as he says his hearing was superlative, he would have internalized the timbre of each instrument through its playable range, and could use that knowledge to choose what (absolute) pitch to choose for various passages. He would not have to "hear" the absolute pitch in his head; melody and harmony are invariant to transposition.
That said, he may have had perfect pitch, but that in itself would not enable him to hear a complex orchestral piece in his head.
BTW none of the Beatles had perfect pitch.
bjowen 1187 days ago [-]
I wonder whether absolute pitch in the sense we consider it today is even applicable to Mozart’s time. Pitch standards are a creature of the 19th century, and before their adoption, pitch varied considerably between cities, orchestras and even buildings.
In that context the timbre of pretty much every non-keyboard instrument would be the only real reference point for how a melody might sound - a bassoon from a maker in Vienna may have been a quarter-tone sharper than one made in Dresden, but they would have had a recognisably similar tone colour when playing eg an E flat.
That’s not to say a freakishly good ear might not have been able to distinguish a Dresden pitch from a Viennese - but as you say, that’s not material to composition. Knowing whether that that E flat will sound confident or mournful would be way more relevant to how it’s used in a phrase and ultimately what key to set the piece in.
danbmil99 1186 days ago [-]
I agree the absolute pitch that orchestras played at may not have been consistent like it is today. However, perfect pitch is not really about Western standards or whether A equals 440. It's the ability to remember a pitch in absolute terms.
As a musician, I have a finely-tuned sense of relative pitch. I can pick out chords and melodies easily, but I don't know the reference key unless I hear an instrument and I'm told what note it is playing.
My son has perfect pitch. This became apparent when we watched the movie "A Hard Day's Night", and he complained that it was out of tune with respect to the Beatles albums he had heard.
I listened carefully to the two sources, and it turned out the movie was about a quarter tone flat compared to the recordings. Only a person with perfect pitch would notice that. The rest of us forget the absolute value of a pitch in a matter of minutes or less.
copperx 1187 days ago [-]
I can imagine complex orchestral works and I'm no musician. It must be incredibly common and orthogonal to absolute pitch, because imagining music is a prerequisite for playing an instrument, and most people can play at least air drums.
1187 days ago [-]
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
Nonsense. A lot of people don't understand that for a composer of Beethoven's training and skill, physically hearing the music is essentially irrelevant. The image we have in our heads of a composer sitting at the piano and noodling almost certainly doesn't apply to a Beethoven or a Bach or a Schumann. It would slow them down intolerably. They could read music and hear it as surely as you and I can see word pictures when we read a novel. They would compose and hear the music in their head and simply transcribe.
rectang 1187 days ago [-]
You're so certain. :(
I studied music theory and composition in college, so at one time I was at least somewhat practiced in reading and writing scores. My impression is that when you hear something aloud it's nearly always different to some degree from what you imagined in your head — and I don't think even someone like Beethoven escaped this entirely. I feel confident that he would have made minor adjustments to many of the late works he was never able to hear — he was known as a "reviser" in his working methods anyway.
My best evidence for this is the weird harmonic rhythm of the second movement of Sonata #32. ("Harmonic rhythm" is a technical term having to do with where we perceive a move from chord to chord.) The harmonies change at odd points. I don't believe that the effect was entirely deliberate — I think he meant for the harmonic rhythm to be straightforward and merely to anticipate with some melodic gestures. He was probably experimenting, but when you do something unusual, that's when feedback is even more important.
When I read that sonata, though, the harmonic rhythm I hear in my head doesn't seem off. The barlines provide a downbeat, and the apparent harmonies from the melodic gestures don't override it.
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
I am certain. I was a theory & comp major too. My girlfriend at the time was in medical school and I studied every bit as hard as she did, at least 6 hours a day not including practicing my instrument.
> My impression is that when you hear something aloud it's nearly always different to some degree from what you imagined in your head
For me and probably you, sure. For Beethoven, I seriously doubt they differed much at all.
The piano sonatas are ridiculously challenging and I'm more than willing to go along with you, but we could be wrong. I like your analysis and never thought about it that way. In general though as a (below-average) composer yes, I'm very certain about hearing things in your head. If I can do it he could do it with infinitely greater depth and efficiency.
About that particular piece, there's also the remote possibility of an editing or transcription disaster. He was not exactly thrilled with his publishers. More likely the former but I think you're right, the intent was probably there in his head.
corin_ 1187 days ago [-]
I obviously can't speak to Beethoven, but I have witnessed a couple of very successful modern composers (of classical music) - just in passing now and then, I didn't sit down and study their methodology, but can definitely vouch for having seen extremely talented and successful composers sat at a keyboard instrument tapping out ideas.
No doubt they, like Beethoven, would be much more able to compose some if not all in their heads than i would be, but it doesn't mean they don't still find useful, at least sometimes, basic stuff that amateur composers do.
brodie 1187 days ago [-]
Is it unusual to be able to play back music in one’s head and hear it almost exactly the same as hearing it aloud?
When I imagine music in my mind, the sonic qualities all seem the same as what I heard or hear, though sometimes I’ll mentally edit the arrangement intentionally or unintentionally.
I’ve also noticed that when I use my voice to sing melodies for compositional purposes, imagining the melody and singing are basically the same thing or have the same end result. On the other hand, using synthesizers and messing with patches usually leads to things I wouldn’t have always imagined in my head.
I’ve never asked anyone about any of this before, so I never realized others might not experience the same things. Sometimes I wish I could switch subjective experience for a day with another person to get real perspective.
Baeocystin 1187 days ago [-]
I have to think it's a common skill. I listen to music in my head all the time, and I'm barely a hobbyist guitarist. If I can do it with enough clarity and precision to enjoy the experience, I'd think pretty much anyone could.
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
Same here exactly. I agree, it’s really fun to experiment with patches.
jeofken 1187 days ago [-]
For anyone interested in getting a hang out of this, here’s is one way.
In computing we have massive amount of logic gates and wires into and out of the computer - from this we can create all kinds of things.
In music, you have intervals between frequencies and you have time intervals between these, ie rhythm.
Traditionally we divide the space between a sound frequency and the double of it into 12 notes, because it’s a great number to divide by. That means a middle A is 440Hz. 440Hzx2=880Hz. That interval is called “octave”.
Middle C on a piano is thus at 261.6256Hz [0].
Of these 12 “raw” simple fractional divisions, you can select a number of notes that played make a certain mood. If you start at C on a piano and hit the white keys to the next C, you will have hit the 8 notes we group as the “C major” scale.
In this group there are 8 frequencies selected. The 1st is middle C, 2nd is D, 3rd is E, and so forth. For this example I chose C major just because all the notes have easy names - so flats or sharps, but that’s just a side effect of the language we use to talk about tone frequencies.
The interval “5th” sounds great. Hit a C and then G and thank God for creating you in a world of beauty. The frequency of G is 1.5x the frequency of C. The major 5th of A is thus 440Hzx1.5=660Hz.
The major 3rd interval is also a beauty; hit C and then E. It’s all about fractions and multiples, and mathematical beauty.
Each interval in each scale (1st, 2nd, etc) have a certain feel to it. The 7th makes you feel tension - almost home! The 5th inspires heavenly joy.
You can try to find a song you know that contains the intervals. IIRC Norway’s pride Take On Me by A-Ha has a chorus beginning with a 7th and then one step - that would be C4-B5-C5. In Norwegian you’d write C4-H5-C5 though, since B is called H in “the Germanic tribes”, maybe so that you can play “B-A-C-H” on your instrument.
Just like if you nerd out on assembly or binary code for a few years, you can read what a processor would do by just seeing a list of numbers, if you do music for a while you can learn to read music without having to have an instrument embody it for you.
Ps I agree with the parent comment - as always when reading something from NYT about a topic I’m not unfamiliar with, I realise it’s a publication somewhat detached from reality.
1187 days ago [-]
petervm 1187 days ago [-]
This is great! Any resource you'd recommend for someone who learned to play the guitar but has no idea what he's doing?
I'd love to learn more about music theory and stop relying so much on memorization. I know there are a ton of resources out there but most of them seem to fall on the extremes – either too big a commitment or too superficial.
This covers most Classical theory in a pretty clear way, it’s cheesy but does a good job. We used this more than the textbook in a music theory class. Jazz and contemporary theory gets a little more fun, but this is a really good place to start.
petervm 1187 days ago [-]
This looks great! Thanks
jeofken 1187 days ago [-]
The problem with guitar is the same as with PHP.
PHP is a programming language where you can write anything. But due to its massive popularity among those who just want to get a website up, it’s easy to get stuck in a memorised copy-paste snippets type of coding, rather than reaching for the beautiful simple shining essence of computation (imo the lambda calculus).
Playing guitar you can find infinite amounts of chord diagrams ready made, and tabs for any song, so that you can make the sounds of some song. But it’s too alluring to get stuck there, and not peel away the layer of this world to see the divine simple essence underneath.
petervm 1187 days ago [-]
Haha :) This is exactly where I'm stuck with guitar and also exactly where I left PHP a lifetime ago. Having moved on to other programming languages and other paradigms outside web dev, I totally understand the analogy.
jeofken 1187 days ago [-]
Looking over my comments there were some errors about guitar tuning though, so for that book I’d need an editor
jeofken 1187 days ago [-]
Thank you. I too was a guitar player of chords memorised for a long time, but took a gap year to study music. I’ll share how to level up so you don’t have to take a year off :).
When I said the tones are divisions by 12 it was a small simplification. On your guitar you can see a physical representation of the difference in frequencies between tones - the first fret is very wide, but they narrow as you traverse the neck. Tell me, how much shorter is the 12th fret compared to the 1st? And after reading this whole reply, tell me how much shorter is the fret of the major 5th compared to the fret of its tonic? It’s fraction magick...
A shorthand for remembering scales my teacher taught me is this. When building a scale we call the first one the tonic, and given the frequency of the tonic and knowing what scale (major, minor, lydian, etc), we can find the rest, like a simple algebra problem.
To find a major scale, the shorthand is “2.5, 3.5”. That means first 2 whole steps, then a half step, then 3 whole steps, then a half step.
A whole step is 2 frets on the guitar. A half step is one fret. That’s how you filter out 8 of the 12 frets to play a major scale on your guitar neck.
So go to your guitar and let’s say we ‘let tonic = loose D string’.
From there on, do a whole step, pluck, and one more time, then a half step, then whole+pluck, whole+pluck, whole+pluck, then half+pluck. You’ve just found the major D scale!
The 4th tone in the major scale of E is A. The 4th of A major is D. Do you now see the pattern of why you tune the next string to fret 5 (I.e 2.5 whole steps)? The guitar is tuned in these 4ths, except for one string which is the B string which is a 3rd of its precious IIRC. Haven’t played guitar for ages.. From now on tune like a pro - start with a A of 440Hz and tune the other strings from there. Just temperament rocks equal temperament sucks ;p. By tuning like a pro and plucking two loose strings and tuning until you recognise “as, it’s a 4th!”, you learn to remember how that interval sounds. You can check by putting your finger on the previous strings 5th fret, but tune only one string (A) after an electronic tuner.
Now you know how to from any tonic find its major scale with the shorthand 2.5,3.5. If you look up a minor scale, what would its shorthand be? Now you can find a minor scale always. What would the shorthand of the pentatonic (meaning 5-note scale) blues scale be? Now you don’t need sunglasses indoors to be cool anymore.
Sadly much music theory online shy away from the math beauty and systematicness of music, because most people have trauma from government school maths class and say “I’m not good with maths”, but the truth is music is simple, fractional, and beautiful.
Let’s learn how to construct chords now. You know how to find a major scale. Let’s say you wanna play a C major chord, something you may have memorised. On the A string, you put a finger on the 3rd fret. Wow! That’s also the tonic of the C major scale! On the next string you hit fret 2. After D comes D#, then E. wait, that’s the 3rd in C major scale!! Holy smokes. Then comes a G right? In C major scale, G is the heavenly, awe-inspiring, 1.5 frequency multiplying, major 5th! And so on. To make a chord, select the 1st (I.e tonic) of a scale, the 3rd, and the 5th.
To make a 7th chord, add the 7th to the mix (for C major that’d be B in English I.e H in Germanic countries where I’m writing from).
I’d love to have (or maybe to have written) a book “music for programmers”. My instrument tutor was a retired physics teacher, that was great...
Ok one more practical tip: start a new instrument. You don’t have to buy but can rent for maybe $30-$40/month. For me it was such a habit to have the guitar and strum some cool chords, that switching to a new instrument where I was a beginner, and there were no websites of “1000 chord diagrams to make you a rock star” freed me to learn the basics. I suggest finding a tutor to meet once a week in a basement, pay $40 cash, and learn with sheet music and all. Homework is your friend here! Instruments I recommend are fiddle/cello (awesomely fun and really gets you thinking about frequencies and fractions as you don’t have the crutch of frets) or flute or clarinet, because they sing so beautifully. My biased choice is to start with the fiddle, and play European classical but also folk (American and European folk both use a lot of fiddle). American folk is so much fun. Good luck and feel free to reply with any question.
petervm 1187 days ago [-]
Thank you so much for this. You may have derailed my Sunday :)
A physics teacher would probably make for a great music teacher indeed. Understanding things from first principles is so powerful. Compressed knowledge. I always try to move towards that but it has eluded me so far when it comes to music. Granted, I haven't put much effort in. I would totally buy that book of yours.
Or anything "for programmers" really :) Not that we're especially dumb that we need our own custom teaching materials but I do think we are more qualified than most to identify systems, decompose them, and explain the relations between their parts. And do it in a gradual way with progressive disclosure, until we're satisfied with our new lego pieces.
palimpsests 1186 days ago [-]
my goodness. I appreciate your personalized take on music theory for its iconoclasm but would never in a million years subject any of my students to learning this beautiful topic in this way. Unless they were perhaps computer scientists / programmers who were having trouble with this material using more conventional, time-tested approaches. But I have yet to see that.
for anyone else reading this just know that music theory in study and application can be approached in a much more intuitive, less “algebraic” manner.
(nothing wrong with algebra...)
jeofken 1186 days ago [-]
Sorry if it’s not for you. I am rather frustrated by music teachers often even not knowing or being interested in the first principle of what they’re teaching, and think I was lucky to have a retired physics teacher teach me music. It is all about fractions, so why shy away from it? Many teachers can tell me about intervals and scales, but not answer why those sounds fit together - like how a 5th is 1.5x the frequency of the tonic. That’s no better than just memorising chords on a piano. I want to see the beauty in its essence!
Good thing this world can accommodate more than one style of learning! Take care
palimpsests 1185 days ago [-]
Thanks for your reply, no apologies necessary, and I am glad you found a teacher that you resonate with!
I have degrees in physics and music. I understand all of this from first principles.
Speaking as someone who has spent tens of thousands of hours in music, with other musicians at many different stages of learning - for probably the majority of music students, this is (initially) essentially useless and potentially even obfuscatory and unhelpful. It can be interesting to learn about later if someone wants to. Does nothing to help people get better at playing their instrument, which is what most people seem to want. Having an interest in acoustics and the physics of music can be helpful in driving someone to play and practice if it simply gets someone to spend more time with their instrument.
In your reply I wonder if past music teachers have emphasized memorizing theory without application - in what I have seen, this is not the norm. The emphasis is on practice and application, developing an internalized somatic memory (e.g. muscle memory & ear training), and technique in order to avoid hurting yourself.
Internalized somatic memory is not the same thing as memorizing concepts with your mind :)
Let me ask you this - it sounds like you are coming from a classical / folk perspective? I’m coming from a jazz foundational perspective, that’s the “form” of music theory education I am referring to. Which is quite common in the U.S. Do you have much practical experience playing / learning jazz or related genres on an instrument? (is this a genre that even interests you?)
nerbert 1187 days ago [-]
This is amazing. Thanks for taking us through it.
tshaddox 1187 days ago [-]
I don’t know. I’m sure the masters can hear music in their heads extremely well, but from what I have read it seems that Beethoven was distressed about his deafness specifically as it related to his profession. I haven’t done my research on how legit these supposed quotes are, but they give that impression:
> Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection
> If I belonged to any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state
betenoire 1187 days ago [-]
But I think being distressed is distinct from the ability to do what the grandparent describes. There is a lot of physical joy in experiencing music, and that was probably lost to him to an extent.
I can imagine writing code with my eyes closed, I can even "see" the architecture and structure of it all in my mind's eye
tshaddox 1187 days ago [-]
I doubt it’s just that. I can imagine code with my eyes closed too, but it would be a wild exaggeration to say that losing the ability to see wouldn’t make it more difficult to do professional software engineering.
betenoire 1187 days ago [-]
right, doing it would be harder because our tools are all visually oriented. But you could still describe the process in great detail to someone who could type it for you, and your expertise is still there. When I play the piano, my hands naturally move to the notes I want to hear, before I hear physically hear them play the notes.
My point is, you don't type code and then look to see if it is right, you type what you know you want. Likewise, he didn't play a note to check if it was the right one, he knew.
(and of course, what do I actually know about beethoven's workflow, but if I can do it to an extent, I'm sure he could)
alisonkisk 1187 days ago [-]
Are you saying you don't need to read or run your code to debug it? You just mull it over and run it in your head?
betenoire 1186 days ago [-]
In the context of the analogy to composing music, yes!
The analogy wasn't the best one, I'm not claiming to be some savant, but absolutely. For a large class of problems, by the time I start typing, I know what I'm going to type.
You can get away with a lot in music that you can't in code. The first example that comes to mind is "ped simile", which means "keep using the pedal in a similar style" without prescribing the exact mechanics. There will be exception for different musical phrases, and the performer will interpret this subjectively. You couldn't ever write code with "logging simile" in your middleware, and expect the computer to subjectively get the logging correct. Computers are much dumber than performers.
A better analogy might have been writing code without ever evaluating it, kinda like you said, and yes. "hammock-driven-development" also comes to mind...
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
Well of course he was distressed. Even in late middle age my ears are pretty sensitive and I would much much rather go blind than deaf. I'm just saying the deafness didn't necessarily have an impact on how he composed, and that like most composers of his stature, he was "composing deaf" as a matter of routine by sitting at a desk instead of a piano.
seamyb88 1187 days ago [-]
> I would much much rather go blind than deaf.
I used to say this too, but I'm sure, whichever you chose, you would regret the decision. Make sure neither isn't an option first...
throwaway5752 1187 days ago [-]
This is an interview with an actual working and deaf composer. Read the article for her actual words on the matter. She talks about things like
"From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart."
and
"I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too."
It's a fascinating article and people should try actually reading it instead of jumping to conclusions about it.
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
Sorry are you implying I didn't read the article?
> As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart
Well that can be said of many composers, even the ones we think of as "old school", like Bach. From the middle of Bach's life onward his music gets increasingly challenging and dissonant. Play some of the alto lines on a flute and it's indistinguishable from bebop to a layperson's ear. Seriously crazy shit.
Also, even though Bach was a also string player (and probably an expert one, because he could play Bach pieces ;) some of the published works end up with errors that are hard or impossible to play. This can’t be attributed to deafness. As with Mozart, Bach and many other composers (maybe not Haydn), Beethoven seems to have got bored with his older styles and kept moving aggressively forward.
throwaway5752 1187 days ago [-]
It really wasn't possible to tell if you read the article or not from what you wrote, the author didn't seem make the point that you reacted to. Also, your post seemed to ignore the great pains Beethoven went through to "hear" through vibration after he lost his hearing. He clearly desired to hear and presumably it added value to whatever mental model of the piece he created. Nobody disagrees he did some of the most staggering compositions in history after he lost his hearing, so clearly you are correct about him composing music in his head. I don't have the knowledge to know if it was something in his deafness, the emotional trauma of losing his hearing, or something else entirely that's responsible. I agree artists of all media (written, visual, musical) seem to become more abstract as they age, and probably that boredom plays some part in it.
mlang23 1187 days ago [-]
Mozart is most famous for the ability you describe.
I am not soooo sure about Beethoven, esp. since there are stories of him using a sort of bone-contact thing while playing piano.
seamyb88 1187 days ago [-]
To be able to write what Beethoven did, and the amount of it, I would say he had this ability too. Can't really say that wanting to hear better while he played is a sign that he didn't. What's a scientific understanding of music if you can't hear?
1187 days ago [-]
jancsika 1187 days ago [-]
> The image we have in our heads of a composer sitting at the piano and noodling almost certainly doesn't apply to a Beethoven or a Bach or a Schumann.
There's a mountain of evidence of Beethoven literally sitting at a piano and noodling. He started his career and was widely known as a professional piano noodler!
Furthermore, his early and mid-period music is dominated by the kinds of themes and figuration you'd expect from a professional piano noodler. Try singing op. 2 no. 1 piano sonata vs. fitting your hand to the keys.
It actually took Beethoven a long time and a lot of work to become proficient at writing things like lyrical melodies and non-clunky, non-pianistic counterpoint (and I'd argue he gave up on the latter and just figured out the best contexts for clunky counterpoint to be most effective).
Schumann also had some material in his symphonies that suspiciously fits the hands rather nicely on the piano. So it isn't so cut and dry as you make it out.
Bach was a bit different. At least for quite a stretch he was writing weekly cantatas where he'd do a performance on Sunday, then on Monday start writing the cantata for the next week. When you factor in the logistics of copying all the parts, practicing with the choir, etc., it doesn't leave much time for composing an entire service of music for small orchestra and choir.
And these are typically around 30 minutes of music, pieces full of sophisticated polyphony. Even if you memorized an entire cantata and time-traveled back to take his place I think you'd still be cutting it close just to copy it onto paper in the daylight you had available. And last I studied this, there was no evidence of a notepad or anything that he used to sketch out his ideas.
Anyhow, Bach and Mozart are the only composers I know of for whom the evidence suggests "transcribing from the head."
Edit: actually, even if the choir were one person to a part, Bach's cantatas are so full of fugal textures and virtuosic solos that it would still be challenging just to write everything down, copy the parts, and rehearse the music. I.e., it's not like writing 30 minutes of single-melody songs, scribbling some tab notation above it and letting the accompanists fill everything in accordingly.
In fact, I might be downplaying it. In addition to what most people think of as baroque polyphony, the cantatas also have a more-or-less simple "chorale tune" flowing either on top of that, or possibly in the organ pedals. And Bach wrote out the organ part that I believe he would have been playing himself.
So imagine a modern Church service with hymns and stuff, and paste that on top of what you think of as Bach's music to get a Bach cantata. :)
tomcam 1187 days ago [-]
Really good response, thank you. If I could edit mine to reflect some of your points I would. The Grove Dictionary supports most of what you say. I think I need to concede that the early Beethoven might not have been able to do this stuff straight out of his head.
I stand firm that the latter day Beethoven would have had no trouble with it (technically; obviously not being able to hear is torture for any musician). I am a moron and a third-rate musician. I was able to compose from a desk after a couple of years of study in my early 20s. He spent his whole workday in music for decades.
jancsika 1186 days ago [-]
> I stand firm that the latter day Beethoven would have had no trouble with it (technically; obviously not being able to hear is torture for any musician).
If "it" means "transcribing from one's head" the evidence-- fascinating, fun to read and analyze evidence-- points in the other direction. Composition didn't come easy to composers like Beethoven and Brahms, and they spent years working on it.
For Bach and Mozart, there is a variety of evidence that all points not only to their ability to "transcribe in their heads," but also to somehow imagining fully-formed phrases, sections, and even full pieces, all while incorporating new musical sounds, in their heads. Their music seems to be more or less sophisticated based on context and requirements, and not so much (or at all) on time allotted to write. There's really no other way to explain things like the triple dance (in 3 different meters!) in Don Giovanni being written in about a day, again with no pre-compositional scribbles. There are many more examples in the manuscripts.
In fact, for a long time scholars assumed a "compositional evolution" with Bach to arrive at a chronology for the cantatas that expressed that evolution. Scholars in the 1950's used forensic evidence to show that long-standing chronology was wrong. Apparently, this caused an enormous controversy because it left Bach scholars with no way to explain Bach's compositional development.
Finally, among other things, this distinction is a reason Beethoven's music dominated in the latter half of the 19th century. As a composer would you rather follow a path of using small, self-contained groups of notes to divide and conquer complex forms, developing slowly and surely toward mastery as you practice? Or would you rather try holding all the music you've ever heard in your head, attempting to re-organize and write variations in your memory, then then transcribe the most fitting parts you came up with for the task and hand and blindly hope what you came up with is at all coherent?
egypturnash 1187 days ago [-]
I mean Beethoven probably encoded a lot of stuff in his music, the man was in the Freemasons. And yesterday I was reading some Mystical Initiation Rituals and realized that they ended with three of the participants humming "VVVV V V VVVVVV" in unison, and thought about a certain symphony he wrote, and
for a moment, perhaps, I was Enlightened
makz 1187 days ago [-]
In this context what's V?
thelightthat 1187 days ago [-]
Ode to Joy if I'm not mistaken, if you were to hum it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
I can fake it as in a dream, and I can recall images I've seen of real scenes, but that's not the same thing.
Applying someone's voice pattern is very common.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
I think you might be doing what he says he's doing, ideation happens in the minds eye just like recalling an image. If I picture a cat, I can flip the cat around in my head, or I can put the cat in an alleyway and I picture the whole scene.
There are people who can't imagine pictures in their head, such as your example manipulating 3D scenes in your mind. They couldn't do that. That's known as aphantasia. There are also people without an inner-monologue, so they don't think inside their head. I couldn't find the name of that.
It's an alien world to think of any of those possibilities, I guess you would work around it. I knew a graphic designer with aphantasia, and she was just as capable as the others!
There are many remarkable (probably widespread) mental phenomena that are completely overlooked/unvalued (at least by most materialist cultures). Partly because they don't have names that are ever mentioned. 'Qualia','synesthesia' (which I had when young and sadly ... lost? before I ever knew the idea). 'Audiation' ... the term's entirely new to me ( I began playing when I was 5) and (says WP) was not even coined until 1975. What else goes nameless, unseen, unheard?
How many kids have such abilities that are completely-overlooked, like the kid some writer (was it Huxley)? saw scratching an advanced math proof in the sand? How was it that Mozart could 'write entire works in his head'? Probably because as a prodigy he was taught the value of such skills. We can only speculate about all the horsepower going to waste - while young minds are stuffed with sugar and advertisements.
I’ve heard it expressed that when a user interface is designed with accessibility needs in mind, it tends to serve all users better.
A contemporary analogue might be: are design choices that were originally made for accessibility reasons becoming broadly popular with users who don’t have those needs? Personally, I think the answer is yes.
Is it because I’ve become familiar with those patterns? Or is it because those patterns appeal to my senses more easily (hence, more accessible) and therefore it’s easy to come to like them?
Were these more accessible compositions more popular because Beethoven was already an esteemed composer, or because they resonated better with audience members, or perhaps some of both?
> If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.
To me the higher contrast between the hands’ parts is analogous to having higher contrast in a visual design. The details of the work are easier to follow, potentially reaching more listeners.
Also love the author's insight that one can work on the technique of composition before turning on her hearing aids and being able to hear it, using her deafness as a sort of focus superpower.
If this is true, then the popular conception of Beethoven being completely unable to hear while composing his masterpieces is mistaken.
I'd love to learn more (or be corrected) from anyone who knows more about this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_conduction
You look like an idiot though, get yourself an electric tuner it's like £10.
Apparently some diseases have characteristic smells, but these days medical students are rarely trained to recognize them.
I think that when I read about it was the first time I really understood that smell is a generic sense that can detect certain molecules and that there is much more information encoded in the air around us.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-47627179
Similarly most of us could probably diagnose some faulty hard drive issues by ear
With all the paternal condescension I could muster I told her, SSDs don't make noise.
She said it's making a noise right now!
I listened - no it isn't!
A fracas ensued.
Later after the armistice was signed, we Googled and discovered the power supply can emit sounds in the 16Khz range when voltage is inconsistent.
And sure enough I've lost that hearing range and my wife hasn't.
I told her that's proof I didn't hear her about taking out the trash - she must've been using her 16KhZ voice!
I can also hear some GPUs around me, and I'm not sure whether it's the draw of the power supply that makes the PC sing or something within the GPU itself.
I'm not sure how true those stories are, but as someone with only some musical experience, I don't find an experienced composer who continued to compose after going deaf that crazy. I can "hear" songs in my head easy enough, and composers are pretty good at transcribing what they hear onto paper.
Then again, despite being a professional singer when I was young and then attempting to study composing I discovered I have no skill for it - so composing even a simple orchestral piece without being deaf seems complex to me.
TL;DR Beethoven wrote his masterpieces sonata at a time were he could certainly hear them.
One could build a theory that Bach's piano works were influenced by his reading of the Odysseus, or by his growing taste for coffee. There certainly are arguments that could justify these theories. There are arguments against it, and anyway nothing can be established. Well, as long as some people enjoy writing or reading theories, why not.
"More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person."
That, in turn, leads to the consideration of whether Beethoven's later music was defined in some way by his deafness.
Thank you
You may be right about some projection going on, but your comment ignores the critical fact that she is one of presumably relatively few humans with experience as a composer with significant hearing loss. So her “projection” isn’t based on some random beliefs, but grounded in a relatively rare shared experience with the subject of her study.
In addition, historians and anthropologists routinely project to varying degrees in trying to interpret the “why” of history in addition to the “what”. And the fact that there’s a lot of speculation going on, is my default expectation as reader. No need to write it into every article on historical interpretation.
So I find her observations an interesting avenue of interpreting some aspects of Beethoven’s musical evolution.
A typical piano in Mozart's day, just proceeding Beethoven, had a wooden frame, strings made of iron, and a range of perhaps 5 octaves.
The modern concert grand, the design of which was mostly settled on by about 1880, has a cast iron frame, strings of spring steel ("piano wire"), and a rage of just over 7 octaves.
So it could well be that he would have preferred to use the organ's range earlier but just not wanted that instrument in his music. And that's not necessarily an insult to pipe organs - I think they sound lovely, watching somebody play well can be as enjoyable as almost any other instrument, and I'm a big fan of them in their place. But their place is pretty niche really - there's lots of lovely (but religious) choral works that use one, due to churches historically, and there are nice things written for organ. But it's pretty rare for organ to be the keyboard instrument of choice in orchestral music, chamber music, etc
It would be surprising if music was not influenced by the way the composer hears and experiences sound.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bA2V0jZMo4
Having studied music from an early age when as he says his hearing was superlative, he would have internalized the timbre of each instrument through its playable range, and could use that knowledge to choose what (absolute) pitch to choose for various passages. He would not have to "hear" the absolute pitch in his head; melody and harmony are invariant to transposition.
That said, he may have had perfect pitch, but that in itself would not enable him to hear a complex orchestral piece in his head.
BTW none of the Beatles had perfect pitch.
In that context the timbre of pretty much every non-keyboard instrument would be the only real reference point for how a melody might sound - a bassoon from a maker in Vienna may have been a quarter-tone sharper than one made in Dresden, but they would have had a recognisably similar tone colour when playing eg an E flat.
That’s not to say a freakishly good ear might not have been able to distinguish a Dresden pitch from a Viennese - but as you say, that’s not material to composition. Knowing whether that that E flat will sound confident or mournful would be way more relevant to how it’s used in a phrase and ultimately what key to set the piece in.
As a musician, I have a finely-tuned sense of relative pitch. I can pick out chords and melodies easily, but I don't know the reference key unless I hear an instrument and I'm told what note it is playing.
My son has perfect pitch. This became apparent when we watched the movie "A Hard Day's Night", and he complained that it was out of tune with respect to the Beatles albums he had heard.
I listened carefully to the two sources, and it turned out the movie was about a quarter tone flat compared to the recordings. Only a person with perfect pitch would notice that. The rest of us forget the absolute value of a pitch in a matter of minutes or less.
I studied music theory and composition in college, so at one time I was at least somewhat practiced in reading and writing scores. My impression is that when you hear something aloud it's nearly always different to some degree from what you imagined in your head — and I don't think even someone like Beethoven escaped this entirely. I feel confident that he would have made minor adjustments to many of the late works he was never able to hear — he was known as a "reviser" in his working methods anyway.
My best evidence for this is the weird harmonic rhythm of the second movement of Sonata #32. ("Harmonic rhythm" is a technical term having to do with where we perceive a move from chord to chord.) The harmonies change at odd points. I don't believe that the effect was entirely deliberate — I think he meant for the harmonic rhythm to be straightforward and merely to anticipate with some melodic gestures. He was probably experimenting, but when you do something unusual, that's when feedback is even more important.
When I read that sonata, though, the harmonic rhythm I hear in my head doesn't seem off. The barlines provide a downbeat, and the apparent harmonies from the melodic gestures don't override it.
> My impression is that when you hear something aloud it's nearly always different to some degree from what you imagined in your head
For me and probably you, sure. For Beethoven, I seriously doubt they differed much at all.
The piano sonatas are ridiculously challenging and I'm more than willing to go along with you, but we could be wrong. I like your analysis and never thought about it that way. In general though as a (below-average) composer yes, I'm very certain about hearing things in your head. If I can do it he could do it with infinitely greater depth and efficiency.
About that particular piece, there's also the remote possibility of an editing or transcription disaster. He was not exactly thrilled with his publishers. More likely the former but I think you're right, the intent was probably there in his head.
No doubt they, like Beethoven, would be much more able to compose some if not all in their heads than i would be, but it doesn't mean they don't still find useful, at least sometimes, basic stuff that amateur composers do.
When I imagine music in my mind, the sonic qualities all seem the same as what I heard or hear, though sometimes I’ll mentally edit the arrangement intentionally or unintentionally.
I’ve also noticed that when I use my voice to sing melodies for compositional purposes, imagining the melody and singing are basically the same thing or have the same end result. On the other hand, using synthesizers and messing with patches usually leads to things I wouldn’t have always imagined in my head.
I’ve never asked anyone about any of this before, so I never realized others might not experience the same things. Sometimes I wish I could switch subjective experience for a day with another person to get real perspective.
In computing we have massive amount of logic gates and wires into and out of the computer - from this we can create all kinds of things.
In music, you have intervals between frequencies and you have time intervals between these, ie rhythm.
Traditionally we divide the space between a sound frequency and the double of it into 12 notes, because it’s a great number to divide by. That means a middle A is 440Hz. 440Hzx2=880Hz. That interval is called “octave”.
Middle C on a piano is thus at 261.6256Hz [0].
Of these 12 “raw” simple fractional divisions, you can select a number of notes that played make a certain mood. If you start at C on a piano and hit the white keys to the next C, you will have hit the 8 notes we group as the “C major” scale.
In this group there are 8 frequencies selected. The 1st is middle C, 2nd is D, 3rd is E, and so forth. For this example I chose C major just because all the notes have easy names - so flats or sharps, but that’s just a side effect of the language we use to talk about tone frequencies.
The interval “5th” sounds great. Hit a C and then G and thank God for creating you in a world of beauty. The frequency of G is 1.5x the frequency of C. The major 5th of A is thus 440Hzx1.5=660Hz.
The major 3rd interval is also a beauty; hit C and then E. It’s all about fractions and multiples, and mathematical beauty.
Each interval in each scale (1st, 2nd, etc) have a certain feel to it. The 7th makes you feel tension - almost home! The 5th inspires heavenly joy.
You can try to find a song you know that contains the intervals. IIRC Norway’s pride Take On Me by A-Ha has a chorus beginning with a 7th and then one step - that would be C4-B5-C5. In Norwegian you’d write C4-H5-C5 though, since B is called H in “the Germanic tribes”, maybe so that you can play “B-A-C-H” on your instrument.
Just like if you nerd out on assembly or binary code for a few years, you can read what a processor would do by just seeing a list of numbers, if you do music for a while you can learn to read music without having to have an instrument embody it for you.
Enjoy music!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies
Ps I agree with the parent comment - as always when reading something from NYT about a topic I’m not unfamiliar with, I realise it’s a publication somewhat detached from reality.
I'd love to learn more about music theory and stop relying so much on memorization. I know there are a ton of resources out there but most of them seem to fall on the extremes – either too big a commitment or too superficial.
This covers most Classical theory in a pretty clear way, it’s cheesy but does a good job. We used this more than the textbook in a music theory class. Jazz and contemporary theory gets a little more fun, but this is a really good place to start.
PHP is a programming language where you can write anything. But due to its massive popularity among those who just want to get a website up, it’s easy to get stuck in a memorised copy-paste snippets type of coding, rather than reaching for the beautiful simple shining essence of computation (imo the lambda calculus).
Playing guitar you can find infinite amounts of chord diagrams ready made, and tabs for any song, so that you can make the sounds of some song. But it’s too alluring to get stuck there, and not peel away the layer of this world to see the divine simple essence underneath.
When I said the tones are divisions by 12 it was a small simplification. On your guitar you can see a physical representation of the difference in frequencies between tones - the first fret is very wide, but they narrow as you traverse the neck. Tell me, how much shorter is the 12th fret compared to the 1st? And after reading this whole reply, tell me how much shorter is the fret of the major 5th compared to the fret of its tonic? It’s fraction magick...
A shorthand for remembering scales my teacher taught me is this. When building a scale we call the first one the tonic, and given the frequency of the tonic and knowing what scale (major, minor, lydian, etc), we can find the rest, like a simple algebra problem.
To find a major scale, the shorthand is “2.5, 3.5”. That means first 2 whole steps, then a half step, then 3 whole steps, then a half step.
A whole step is 2 frets on the guitar. A half step is one fret. That’s how you filter out 8 of the 12 frets to play a major scale on your guitar neck.
So go to your guitar and let’s say we ‘let tonic = loose D string’.
From there on, do a whole step, pluck, and one more time, then a half step, then whole+pluck, whole+pluck, whole+pluck, then half+pluck. You’ve just found the major D scale!
The 4th tone in the major scale of E is A. The 4th of A major is D. Do you now see the pattern of why you tune the next string to fret 5 (I.e 2.5 whole steps)? The guitar is tuned in these 4ths, except for one string which is the B string which is a 3rd of its precious IIRC. Haven’t played guitar for ages.. From now on tune like a pro - start with a A of 440Hz and tune the other strings from there. Just temperament rocks equal temperament sucks ;p. By tuning like a pro and plucking two loose strings and tuning until you recognise “as, it’s a 4th!”, you learn to remember how that interval sounds. You can check by putting your finger on the previous strings 5th fret, but tune only one string (A) after an electronic tuner.
Now you know how to from any tonic find its major scale with the shorthand 2.5,3.5. If you look up a minor scale, what would its shorthand be? Now you can find a minor scale always. What would the shorthand of the pentatonic (meaning 5-note scale) blues scale be? Now you don’t need sunglasses indoors to be cool anymore.
Sadly much music theory online shy away from the math beauty and systematicness of music, because most people have trauma from government school maths class and say “I’m not good with maths”, but the truth is music is simple, fractional, and beautiful.
Let’s learn how to construct chords now. You know how to find a major scale. Let’s say you wanna play a C major chord, something you may have memorised. On the A string, you put a finger on the 3rd fret. Wow! That’s also the tonic of the C major scale! On the next string you hit fret 2. After D comes D#, then E. wait, that’s the 3rd in C major scale!! Holy smokes. Then comes a G right? In C major scale, G is the heavenly, awe-inspiring, 1.5 frequency multiplying, major 5th! And so on. To make a chord, select the 1st (I.e tonic) of a scale, the 3rd, and the 5th.
To make a 7th chord, add the 7th to the mix (for C major that’d be B in English I.e H in Germanic countries where I’m writing from).
I’d love to have (or maybe to have written) a book “music for programmers”. My instrument tutor was a retired physics teacher, that was great...
Ok one more practical tip: start a new instrument. You don’t have to buy but can rent for maybe $30-$40/month. For me it was such a habit to have the guitar and strum some cool chords, that switching to a new instrument where I was a beginner, and there were no websites of “1000 chord diagrams to make you a rock star” freed me to learn the basics. I suggest finding a tutor to meet once a week in a basement, pay $40 cash, and learn with sheet music and all. Homework is your friend here! Instruments I recommend are fiddle/cello (awesomely fun and really gets you thinking about frequencies and fractions as you don’t have the crutch of frets) or flute or clarinet, because they sing so beautifully. My biased choice is to start with the fiddle, and play European classical but also folk (American and European folk both use a lot of fiddle). American folk is so much fun. Good luck and feel free to reply with any question.
A physics teacher would probably make for a great music teacher indeed. Understanding things from first principles is so powerful. Compressed knowledge. I always try to move towards that but it has eluded me so far when it comes to music. Granted, I haven't put much effort in. I would totally buy that book of yours.
Or anything "for programmers" really :) Not that we're especially dumb that we need our own custom teaching materials but I do think we are more qualified than most to identify systems, decompose them, and explain the relations between their parts. And do it in a gradual way with progressive disclosure, until we're satisfied with our new lego pieces.
for anyone else reading this just know that music theory in study and application can be approached in a much more intuitive, less “algebraic” manner.
(nothing wrong with algebra...)
Good thing this world can accommodate more than one style of learning! Take care
I have degrees in physics and music. I understand all of this from first principles.
Speaking as someone who has spent tens of thousands of hours in music, with other musicians at many different stages of learning - for probably the majority of music students, this is (initially) essentially useless and potentially even obfuscatory and unhelpful. It can be interesting to learn about later if someone wants to. Does nothing to help people get better at playing their instrument, which is what most people seem to want. Having an interest in acoustics and the physics of music can be helpful in driving someone to play and practice if it simply gets someone to spend more time with their instrument.
In your reply I wonder if past music teachers have emphasized memorizing theory without application - in what I have seen, this is not the norm. The emphasis is on practice and application, developing an internalized somatic memory (e.g. muscle memory & ear training), and technique in order to avoid hurting yourself.
Internalized somatic memory is not the same thing as memorizing concepts with your mind :)
Let me ask you this - it sounds like you are coming from a classical / folk perspective? I’m coming from a jazz foundational perspective, that’s the “form” of music theory education I am referring to. Which is quite common in the U.S. Do you have much practical experience playing / learning jazz or related genres on an instrument? (is this a genre that even interests you?)
> Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection
> If I belonged to any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state
I can imagine writing code with my eyes closed, I can even "see" the architecture and structure of it all in my mind's eye
My point is, you don't type code and then look to see if it is right, you type what you know you want. Likewise, he didn't play a note to check if it was the right one, he knew.
(and of course, what do I actually know about beethoven's workflow, but if I can do it to an extent, I'm sure he could)
The analogy wasn't the best one, I'm not claiming to be some savant, but absolutely. For a large class of problems, by the time I start typing, I know what I'm going to type.
You can get away with a lot in music that you can't in code. The first example that comes to mind is "ped simile", which means "keep using the pedal in a similar style" without prescribing the exact mechanics. There will be exception for different musical phrases, and the performer will interpret this subjectively. You couldn't ever write code with "logging simile" in your middleware, and expect the computer to subjectively get the logging correct. Computers are much dumber than performers.
A better analogy might have been writing code without ever evaluating it, kinda like you said, and yes. "hammock-driven-development" also comes to mind...
I used to say this too, but I'm sure, whichever you chose, you would regret the decision. Make sure neither isn't an option first...
"From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart."
and
"I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too."
It's a fascinating article and people should try actually reading it instead of jumping to conclusions about it.
> As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart
Well that can be said of many composers, even the ones we think of as "old school", like Bach. From the middle of Bach's life onward his music gets increasingly challenging and dissonant. Play some of the alto lines on a flute and it's indistinguishable from bebop to a layperson's ear. Seriously crazy shit.
Also, even though Bach was a also string player (and probably an expert one, because he could play Bach pieces ;) some of the published works end up with errors that are hard or impossible to play. This can’t be attributed to deafness. As with Mozart, Bach and many other composers (maybe not Haydn), Beethoven seems to have got bored with his older styles and kept moving aggressively forward.
I am not soooo sure about Beethoven, esp. since there are stories of him using a sort of bone-contact thing while playing piano.
There's a mountain of evidence of Beethoven literally sitting at a piano and noodling. He started his career and was widely known as a professional piano noodler!
Furthermore, his early and mid-period music is dominated by the kinds of themes and figuration you'd expect from a professional piano noodler. Try singing op. 2 no. 1 piano sonata vs. fitting your hand to the keys.
It actually took Beethoven a long time and a lot of work to become proficient at writing things like lyrical melodies and non-clunky, non-pianistic counterpoint (and I'd argue he gave up on the latter and just figured out the best contexts for clunky counterpoint to be most effective).
Schumann also had some material in his symphonies that suspiciously fits the hands rather nicely on the piano. So it isn't so cut and dry as you make it out.
Bach was a bit different. At least for quite a stretch he was writing weekly cantatas where he'd do a performance on Sunday, then on Monday start writing the cantata for the next week. When you factor in the logistics of copying all the parts, practicing with the choir, etc., it doesn't leave much time for composing an entire service of music for small orchestra and choir.
And these are typically around 30 minutes of music, pieces full of sophisticated polyphony. Even if you memorized an entire cantata and time-traveled back to take his place I think you'd still be cutting it close just to copy it onto paper in the daylight you had available. And last I studied this, there was no evidence of a notepad or anything that he used to sketch out his ideas.
Anyhow, Bach and Mozart are the only composers I know of for whom the evidence suggests "transcribing from the head."
Edit: actually, even if the choir were one person to a part, Bach's cantatas are so full of fugal textures and virtuosic solos that it would still be challenging just to write everything down, copy the parts, and rehearse the music. I.e., it's not like writing 30 minutes of single-melody songs, scribbling some tab notation above it and letting the accompanists fill everything in accordingly.
In fact, I might be downplaying it. In addition to what most people think of as baroque polyphony, the cantatas also have a more-or-less simple "chorale tune" flowing either on top of that, or possibly in the organ pedals. And Bach wrote out the organ part that I believe he would have been playing himself.
So imagine a modern Church service with hymns and stuff, and paste that on top of what you think of as Bach's music to get a Bach cantata. :)
I stand firm that the latter day Beethoven would have had no trouble with it (technically; obviously not being able to hear is torture for any musician). I am a moron and a third-rate musician. I was able to compose from a desk after a couple of years of study in my early 20s. He spent his whole workday in music for decades.
If "it" means "transcribing from one's head" the evidence-- fascinating, fun to read and analyze evidence-- points in the other direction. Composition didn't come easy to composers like Beethoven and Brahms, and they spent years working on it.
For Bach and Mozart, there is a variety of evidence that all points not only to their ability to "transcribe in their heads," but also to somehow imagining fully-formed phrases, sections, and even full pieces, all while incorporating new musical sounds, in their heads. Their music seems to be more or less sophisticated based on context and requirements, and not so much (or at all) on time allotted to write. There's really no other way to explain things like the triple dance (in 3 different meters!) in Don Giovanni being written in about a day, again with no pre-compositional scribbles. There are many more examples in the manuscripts.
In fact, for a long time scholars assumed a "compositional evolution" with Bach to arrive at a chronology for the cantatas that expressed that evolution. Scholars in the 1950's used forensic evidence to show that long-standing chronology was wrong. Apparently, this caused an enormous controversy because it left Bach scholars with no way to explain Bach's compositional development.
Finally, among other things, this distinction is a reason Beethoven's music dominated in the latter half of the 19th century. As a composer would you rather follow a path of using small, self-contained groups of notes to divide and conquer complex forms, developing slowly and surely toward mastery as you practice? Or would you rather try holding all the music you've ever heard in your head, attempting to re-organize and write variations in your memory, then then transcribe the most fitting parts you came up with for the task and hand and blindly hope what you came up with is at all coherent?
for a moment, perhaps, I was Enlightened