[karlb]

Many musicians much better than me are surprised at how I can play a song just by hearing it on the radio. My breakthrough came from understanding music was realizing that the real “meaning” of a note lies in its position relative to the tonic note (e,g, I-II-II, etc, also written do-re-mi). Suddenly, almost all of the clutter was removed, and the problem became manageable.

Let's consider the three-note tune “do, re, mi”. If that tune were played in the key of C, it would become C-D-E. If it were played in G, it would become G-A-B. But in either case, it's the same tune but with each frequency increased by the same percentage.

Trying to understand music by understanding the letters is like trying to read in a world where every article has been enciphered into a different “key”: e.g., the word "cab" in “the key of A” (the alphabet we normally use) would be written as "dbc" if the article were written in “the key of B”. In the latter case, you could discern meaning only once you realised that the letter “d” represented the third letter of the alphabet. There's nothing meaningful about a “d” but there is something meaningful about a “4th letter of the alphabet”.

Once you start to “decipher” all music into I, II, III, IV, V, etc., the complexity becomes manageable. You can start to learn to recognize the sound of a III note, or of a VI minor chord. After all, there are only eight notes in the major scale.

[ajuc]

I'm not a good musician by any means, never had music education apart from the primary school which was abysmal. I can't recognise pure tones (just the intervals). I still can play any song I hear on guitar or keyboard "good enough" so that people have fun singing to it.

The huge reveal to me was the same - notes doesn't matter - the intervals make the song recognizable. People change notes all the time when singing (jump octaves, start again lower to adjust to others, etc).

So on amateur level it's really just starting on random place on keyboard and guessing which note will sound "right" after that. Everybody hear if the next note is higher or lover, so it's just "was that +1, +2, or +3?" Usually you can guess, if not - start again. Very easy and makes playing instruments so fun.

I never understood why they bother kids with these complicated drawings and hashes and be-mols, if they could've just wrote all songs as "start at this note, and jump by +2, +3, -5, ...".

[entropy_]

Some notation systems do exactly that. For example, the notation used for byzantine chanting: http://www.byzantinechant.org/notation/Table%20of%20Byzantin...

[hammock]

Many (but not all, or even the majority) music classrooms around the world teach students fluency in solfege (do-re-mi), and everyone I've spoken to about it agrees it helps out a lot in the way you describe.

[MereKatMoves]

That's interesting from a personal perspective. I was taught music in the UK where that is specifically not used (or at least wasn't when I learnt).

I took a year out of my Music degree to attend the Sorbonne. French music education places a heavy emphasis on solfege. When I started going to their undergraduate classes it was immediately apparent that the level was several years behind that of the UK (in classes for composition and orchestration most noticeably). To attend classes dealing with similar material to what I was used to as a UK undergraduate, I was attending Post-grad courses. Having just completed my first year on a UK BMus course it was quite an eye opener to see 19yr olds learning material I had been taught at 16.

[robert_tweed]

I wonder if the UK system is better at sieving natural talent whereas the French system is better at teaching? Personally I hated music (in the UK) because we never seemed to get taught anything, we we largely expected to just know things or magically learn through awkward repetition.

Knowing what I know now, I think there are a lot of ways we could have practised music early on that would have helped those of us not born with perfect absolute pitch. Most people have perfect relative pitch (afaik I fall into this group). Perfect absolute pitch and tone-deafness are both quite rare.

It sounds like the French system is optimised for the majority, forcing everyone to practise interval differentiation, including those who don't need it (and the small minority who will never be able to do it).

[MereKatMoves]

Without trying to cite what currently happens in the UK, I think it is fair to say that kids are handed instruments like the recorder at a fairly early age, and those that do well are encouraged to progress. That's a sieving process for sure.

When they get to secondary school, music as a subject is most often just a minor inconvenience in the curriculum to most pupils, and those who have ability are pushed into learning flute/violin etc (at additional cost to themselves and outside of the timetable). In the course of going through the grades of music (performance exams), kids are taught aural skills and theory (grade 5 theory is required to take higher performance grades). This results in a select group of instrumentalists that have learned intervals, harmony and scales practically. Whether any of those skills are useful to a non musician is debatable, so one could say that it is the most efficient way of getting a rounded skill set into the brain of a musical 15-16 yr old.

The French system would, I agree, produce a broader spectrum of musically able people, but in practice it results in a lower level of specific and important knowledge. The UK system produces more complete performers whereas I would say the French system has large gaps which then get filled in at degree level.

Perhaps things are greatly different these days. I know for example that studio production is an option for A level music, and there is absolutely no musical theory knowledge required to produce a studio track. I wonder if A level students are even taught basic 4 part harmony any more.

Music, to an individual, has always been a matter of ability, discipline and perseverance to practice. In education, the solution to nourishing those qualities is never going to be perfect. I do recall the French students I was with were quite annoyed that my education was years ahead of theirs, but with perspective, I'm sure it didn't really matter then, and it surely doesn't now.

[robert_tweed]

It's also interesting to compare and contrast the apparent results. The UK has a fairly long history of producing a far above average number of world-class musicians. France on the other hand seems to have a broader musical culture, or at least, so it seems in Paris during the Fête de la Musique.

[MereKatMoves]

I'm hesitant to afford any particular value to educational practices in this case. Let's take the specific musical skill of composition, which I believe is at the root of musical traditions in any country...

The French have a much richer and deeper musical tradition. For example the 'blood lines' of Renaissance Troubadours and Trouveres, or the French Operatic Style, to name a couple. English 'classical' music tradition had a golden age which had Tallis, Byrd and Dowland but kinda stopped with Purcell and didn't really flourish again until Elgar. Elgar himself was writing in an identifiably English way, but his language was very much based on the Germanic tradition (which been imprinted on the English style by the likes of Handel,Haydn,Schumann and Mendelssohn).

All that time, let's say broadly 1700-1900 the French were much closer to their own 'cutting edge' of musical development, although the Germanic style was still very much dominant throughout Europe. What the French had, was a progressive heritage that had somehow been preserved - Ravel and Debussy (the impressionist style) could only have come from France, which I think would relate to your reference to a broader musical culture.

Of course by the mid 20th Century, in Classical music at least, the French started leaping ahead of the UK again, with Stravinsky, Les Six, Satie and numerous others building a significant new tradition that still exists today through the legacies of Messiaen and Boulez. England had Britten, Vaughn Williams and few others of note.

I think the reason you see a broader base in French 'national' music (for example at la fete) is as much down to the fact that England produced and still does produce exemplary pop/rock with a worldwide market. The French pop culture is insular and that's a good thing IMHO because it maintains integrity and does not to attempt to compete in a global market that is pretty much a cultural vacuum these days.

As for the standard of professional performers, I think there isn't too much difference in numbers produced or quality. Being a pro musician is very hard and the attrition rates are not down to which country you make your career in.

[mkd1964]

I'm a very good musician and have never thought about it exactly that way before but I have to say, that's a very good explanation and way of thinking about it. I think it's a bit abstract for someone trying to learn to read music, but it's absolutely correct.

[andrepd]

The gist is correct, but it's worth noting that, for example, if you played do-re-mi in E it would do E-F#-G#, not E-F-G, to preserve tone/semitone order. That's where the key signature comes in.

[ajuc]

And that shows how WTF the musical notation is.

[andrepd]

o.O why so? And what on earth do you propose?

[ajuc]

C is 0. Each half-tone up is +1.

If you really want to keep it concise you can write it as base-12 numbers.

    C1 C1# D1 D1# E1 F1 F1# G1 G1# A1 A1# B1 C2 C2# D2 D2# E2 F2 F2# G2 G2# A2 A2# B2 ...
    00 01  02 03  04 05 06  07 08  09 0a  0b 10 11  12 13  14 15 16  17 18  19 1a  1b ...

First number is octave. Second number is half-tone in that octave. Translating is just mechanical addition.

EDIT: on second thought making it base-12 just to save some space makes no sense, people are good with base-10, just keep the numbers.

[pkolaczk]

It looks better on paper for an engineer, but not for someone who actually plays an instrument and reads the notation. With most western music, not all 12 pitches in an octave are used most of the time, but only a subset determined by the key and scale. Although the currently used notation may look weird for a newbie, it takes just a quick look at the key signature and you know which pitches will be used in a piece of music. When you know the scale (and practicing scales is just a standard part of learning), then "decoding" a note by counting tones is much easier than counting individual semitones (12 seems just too many). After a little practice you get it intuitively and you really don't count; you just know where each tone (or chord) is in a given scale and what function it has. And then when you suddenly see an additional flat or sharp symbol before a note, you know that this is an out-of-scale note, so it is also easier to play it. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.

[andrepd]

That completely misses the point. Without wanting to sound brash, you know jack about music and you should act accordingly, that is, don't spout ill informed suggestions when you clearly don't play an instrument or studied this mater well enough to give an informed opinion.

Scales have 7 notes, not 12. A musician plays music in a scale, they aren't a computer outputting pitches, they are a person playing notes. Music notation has a reason to be this way: notes in the scale don't have flats or sharps next to them, accidentals do. Reducing everything to a number describing absolute pitches is the right thing to do for a computer to play (see midi). It's not the way to go for a person that actually has to understand the logic and patterns in the music.

[meggar]

What would D Flat be, 0.5? what about D Double flat?

[hiddenkrypt]

Db would be 01. Dbb would be 00. (or 11 and 10 for the octave)

The point ajuc is making is that the flat-sharp accidentals aren't used or needed at all if you just assign numbers to each tone. There's no concept of flat or sharp, unless you want to deal with microtones.

[shiro]

I started music with classical piano and only recently started transposing instrument (bamboo flute), and am trying to get used to movable do solfege. I'm still easily confused when key change occurs or borrowed chord appears. (For the latter there are limited patterns so I should remember them, I guess.)

[jlu]

@karb: mind if I shoot some questions about the "decipher” all music into I, II, III, IV, V" part in email? Thanks.

[ngneer]

Indeed, the scales are isomorphic.