[kazinator]

Two wrongs won't make a right.

A much better idea is to represent intervals internally in such a way that unison is zero.

The jury may be out on how to enumerate items in a sequence, but a delta offset must be zero-based. That is simply not negotiable.

Western music theory is crazy.

Come on: every seven diatonic notes, we get another octave? What? And then we need a "rule of nine" for inverting an interval?

[mpdehaan2]

I completely concur with Western music theory being crazy.

I would love to be raised by aliens where music was cleanly lined up with decimals or base negative three integers or ... anything.

There's all the string vibration stuff that leads to 4ths and 5ths though, which as I think fundamental to how we got here, but even little things, like "starting at C" for octaves... it's all weird :)

The "whole whole half" thing is a mess, and then you get semitones and notes that are missing on the keyboard, etc. Fun times!

[flak48]

As someone with very little music theory knowledge is there a better alternative to getting into music theory to be able to write music, than the western system, that can be recommended?

Like how it would feel to grow up learning in metric instead of imperial units for example?

Sorry if I didn't understand what you and GP were trying to say

[mpdehaan2]

Not sure if that is exactly the answer, but frustration with sheet music is kind of why guitar tab also exists... except I don't play guitar.

The Roman numeral analysis is somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

If you really want to read things faster than key signatures, there are a bunch of music books you can buy where everything is transcribed to C.

Anyway, that's kind of all the point of just typing in the scale degrees in Warp... not having to worry about what notes are in what scale, and being able to quickly "draw" out the pattern, which is problematic in most DAWs.

[main_gi]

Hey there, I'm currently writing an alternative to music theory that is informed by my own self-taught composing. In the western system the 7 note system is used because of the diatonic scale (you may have heard it as the "Major scale", this is usually an inaccurate term and half the time "diatonic scale" is correct). This 7-note system is relied on for almost all the terminology in western theory, which means there is a lot of fudging to make the notes fit, as the diatonic scale is not actually equally spaced apart. That's the reason there is a "minor" and "major" third and not just one "third".

In addition all these terms are one-indexed because zero was not invented yet, so "unison" in western theory, which refers to two of the same note being played, gets the number 1 (uni-). The same goes for the minor/major second, and so on. This is what causes all the terrible addition problems.

The diatonic scale's strong relevance in music theory is not completely unjustified because almost all consonant (or "good sounding") music is made in it, but it's not very helpful to have to deconvert these terms to any other scale.

I visualize all scales as 12-note equally spaced scales and strongly recommend anyone else to do the same. It's known as the chromatic scale. In this system a unison is just 0, a minor second is 1, major second is 2... and so on. You'll see this system used in "music set theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Generic_and_s... - look at the semitone number to see the amount of equally-spaced spaces between the notes. Although, the word "semitone" is also a poorly thought out choice due to the diatonic scale (it implies a base unit of "2" instead of "1" since semitone corresponds to 1). Music set theory terminology is much better than western theory IMO, but I think a lot of music set theory buys into too many mathematics-based hypotheses (when it tries to draw equivocations between scales), so I find it has its own issues.

[flak48]

Thanks, you gave me some great starting points to delve into this. Had never heard of music set theory, will take a look