[mnemonicsloth]

I'm trying to decide if I should go down this rabbit hole. The math looks easy enough, but I know nothing about music. Nothing. And I'd love to learn, of course, but I can see myself buying a keyboard and plinking out some of these transformations and that seems like a long time to go without a payoff.

What's your musical background?

[fenomas]

I've been down this rabbit hole for a few years, except making procedural music with code rather than physically playing an instrument. No musical background at all (I started by googling "chord" etc).

My take is, the basics - the math behind chords and chord changes, summarized on the left page of the PDF - are embarrassingly simple; you can know everything there seems to be to know in a weekend or two. However for the application - using those basics to create or understand music - I'm still not entirely sure there's anything to know.

That is, one can find scads of sources online similar to the right-hand page of the PDF, which analyze the structure of some phrase or composition. But it all seems to pretty much boil down to giving names to things; there don't seem to be any generally applicable principles. The closest thing we have seems to be voice leading rules, but they're very much "doing X sounds good except when it doesn't" sorts of things.

[mnemonicsloth]

Can you recommend any sources?

What kind of setup do you use to do your development?

[fenomas]

No particular sources, but topic-wise what made things click for me was roman numeral notation and secondary chords. Or rather, implementing the math behind those things made me feel like I understood what was going on, and that's the nomenclature/data structure I stuck with. But the notation in the PDF is equivalent - it all boils down to having an array of numbers and then either reindexing the array or adding to the elements modulo 12; everything beyond that is just nomenclature.

The only thing difficult about it is finding sources that just explain the (extremely simple) math without tons of opaque terminology. E.g. here's the second sentence of wikipedia's definition for "secondary chord":

> Because tonic triads are either major or minor, you would not expect to find diminished chords (either the viio in major or the iio in minor) tonicized by a secondary dominant.

Blech. For years I've meant to write a bare-bones "music for programmers" article but haven't done it yet. There are other such articles around but I never saw one I was enthusiastic enough about to bookmark.

For dev setup, if you're a browser/JS person I recommend Tone.js, which is a very short path from zero to "here's an array of integers, play quarter notes for their midi values". I outgrew it at some point and now roll everything by hand, but I probably shouldn't have.

[sigstoat]

> The math looks easy enough, but I know nothing about music. Nothing. And I'd love to learn, of course, but I can see myself buying a keyboard and plinking out some of these transformations

read musictheory.net, get musescore, and then you can start experimenting with some of this. don't need a keyboard.

if you do decide to spend some money on hardware, the r/piano folks have some information on the terminology of such things https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/wiki/faq#wiki_choosing_a_keyb...

> without a payoff

no problem, just redefine payoff and you're all set

[WalterSear]

You may be interested in the twelve tone you tube channel, fwiw - particularly the earlier ones where he discusses the fundamentals.