[Hnrobert42]

I especially like the end of that video where he discusses trying to transcribe regular speech to music notation. It completes a part of my music theory mental puzzle.

Admittedly, I know very little beyond high school band, but the theory always felt arbitrary. Like, whenever I would try to drill down on something like why notes are the frequencies they are, I eventually got to “We don’t know.” That left me thinking either only that teacher didn’t know or the theory was BS.

Now I see it was neither. Music is something we irrational, inscrutable humans made up. Music theory, even at its most brilliant, is just an approximation. I always thought music theory describe fundamental, physical truths that humans intuitively discovered. Now I see that music theory describes our intuitive understanding.

Sort of like how a recipe calls for 1/4 tsp salt but people just use a pinch. I thought the people were being imprecise. But it’s really that the recipe cannot precisely capture all the variables in cooking that actually makes “a pinch of salt” a more precise description.

[duped]

At the end of the day music theory is prescriptive, not predictive. That's poorly taught in high school education, and it's not limited to the arts.

I think people go into a music theory course and want it to be like math or physics where you can plug and chug to get an answer (where the answer is "good" music) - but that's not really what's going on. The tools that music theory gives you are those to understand how a piece of music has been constructed, and if you want to apply that to creating new music you can try using those structures in your own work. It's still up to you (or really, your audience) to decide if it's "good."

[recursive]

Disagree. Music theory should not be prescriptive. It's descriptive at best.

But then you seem to go on to explain that it's actually not prescriptive. If it sounds good, it is good. Theory is sometimes useful to make it sound good.

[epiccoleman]

> I always thought music theory describe fundamental, physical truths that humans intuitively discovered.

There _are_ some fundamental physical truths in music (related to overtones, wavelengths, etc), but the funny thing is that most of our "music theory" has actually had to bodge those truths a bit to accommodate variety and playability.

(For example, listen to a major third on a just intoned instrument versus an equal temperament instrument like a guitar!)

[chubot]

Right it’s after-the-fact music ANALYSIS for certain kinds of music, not a predictive theory of all possible music

Theory is the wrong word