Does Music Theory really apply for Electronic Music?

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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I would not dismiss the idea of mathematical music being very natural. Primitive music around the world tends to develop around and up to major pentatonic (sans a tone or two here and there), and it's only scholarly music that goes beyond that natural urheimat of simple aliquots. Primitive music everywhere is very "Pythagorean".

But western people tend to rather condescendingly lump "world music" in one bag, not taking into account that Indian classical and Arabian classical (or better said, Turkish classical, as the world of maqams truly developed in Ottoman empire) are every bit as scholarly as diatonic harmonic theory of Europeans. To take these academically developed musical traditions as a proof that invalidate anthropologic naturality of simple intervals is more likely a honest mistake induced by some simple western arrogance.
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lots of popular songs have a change from the key's native chords to a non-native chord, like In My Life by the Beatles, it is in key of A, and it changes from the D major chord wihich is part of the A major key to a D minor chord which is not part of the A key......

"In (Dmajor) myyyyyy (Dminor) liiiiife, I (Amajor) loved you more...."

you have to have some sort of key for every song imo....but you can have cool deviations from the key to spice it up and to add emotion... like in this beatles song.

But the important thing with that song is that it goes from the D which is the 4th chord, which is the subdominant cadence and then it goes back to the tonic root Amajor....so you have to be mindful of how you're connecting the chords....for the right musical/tonal effect.
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Interesting discussion, but I would not say that most of those who are considered to "break the rules of harmony" really did this. They only crossed the border line of simplicity. Most known dance, trance and progressive electronic music bases on sound in the first place and not so much on complex harmony. So there is "room for improvement" :-)

In quite a lot of cases I allready experienced song writers in trance and techno thinking to have invented something very new, but in classical music these harmonies were know very well already. One of those guys one day asked me to master his new CD and brought along his "most progressive" tracks. Well the one he considered to be the most weired one was pretty similar to a track of Ligeti I had in my files :D
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peejunk wrote:I would not dismiss the idea of mathematical music being very natural.

I did not do that. I said essentially that temperament is an artifice.
peejunk wrote: Primitive music everywhere is very "Pythagorean".
Not sure what that means unless it is to say that the intervals are not tempered as in 12tET.
peejunk wrote:the world of maqams truly developed in Ottoman empire
Is itself a statement of hegemony. I lived with a Turkish couple, and he particularly believed a lot of crap like this, or at least thought it was funny to state it (she would ridicule it). I think the cart 'Ottoman Empire' fails to pull the horse of for instance all the work of Al-Farabi.

I found this statement at the wiki for "Rast": Rast is regarded as the basic Dastgah in Persian music and later on was copied in Arabic music and Turkish makam music,
:lol:
And of course we see Persians and Turks want to claim Baghdad's Al-Farabi... ;)

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jancivil wrote:
peejunk wrote: Primitive music everywhere is very "Pythagorean".
Not sure what that means unless it is to say that the intervals are not tempered as in 12tET.
Bingo. "Just intonation" is another term, and there are doubtless others. In essence, these terms refer to ratios using smallish numbers: exactly 3/2, 4/3, 5/3, even 9/8, which produce very pure harmonies in relation to the tonic. (Pythagoras was all about ratios, after all.) The sound can be very restful, harmonious and pleasant against a drone, but can seem somewhat lackluster after a while, and chords (and especially key modulation) can be a bit weird, but highly skilled vocalists and string players learn to adjust specific notes in context, and some synths do so as well.
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Making music without knowing music theory is like speaking in a language you don't fully understand. Theory puts the pieces together.

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neptunes_ruby wrote:Making music without knowing music theory is like speaking in a language you don't fully understand.
Pointless necro of the thread. And the correct analogy would be that its like speaking a language without having studied linguistics.
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neptunes_ruby wrote:Making music without knowing music theory is like speaking in a language you don't fully understand. Theory puts the pieces together.
Which music theory are we talking about here? Because formal music theory usually equates to Western European music theory. But the great advantage of electronic music production is you don't need to be limited to that, whether that means retuning to alternative scales or going into microtonal territory. The former may have some custom and practice associated with it even if there is no academic 'theory'. The latter is pretty much unknown territory.

I'd argue that understanding how western music theory came about is an advantage when trying to compare these different systems but the ground made possible by electronic instruments is potentially so vast that arguing you need music theory to speak the language is like saying learning English is the key to Hungarian.

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Gamma-UT wrote:
neptunes_ruby wrote:Making music without knowing music theory is like speaking in a language you don't fully understand. Theory puts the pieces together.
Which music theory are we talking about here? Because formal music theory usually equates to Western European music theory. But the great advantage of electronic music production is you don't need to be limited to that, whether that means retuning to alternative scales or going into microtonal territory. The former may have some custom and practice associated with it even if there is no academic 'theory'. The latter is pretty much unknown territory.

I'd argue that understanding how western music theory came about is an advantage when trying to compare these different systems but the ground made possible by electronic instruments is potentially so vast that arguing you need music theory to speak the language is like saying learning English is the key to Hungarian.
Id have to agree and disagree with you. I don't believe everyone needs a formal understanding of music theory to make music. I'd be foolish to say so because there are plenty of popular musicians that have composed great works without understanding theory.

Now, we're talking about electronic music, which is a very experimental genre of music. Therefore it'd be even more wrong of me to say it is necessary, but it indeed puts the pieces together. Music theory essentially is the understanding of what "sounds good" together, and I do believe any serious musician should have a grasp on these popular and common concepts found in music, even if they don't necessarily use them all the time.

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Whatever the place in the world, whatever the ages, even in the tribes, a minimum of music theory, even built on rules having nothing to do with the "classical occidental rules", have always been necessary to express something. Because the music is an expression, a language of emotion... therefore a language. So it needs a kind of "grammar" and "syntax", even rudimentary, to let the musician be understood in their ears and in their minds by the people who listen to him. That's why there are so many scales and modes throughout the world and throughout the times.

Music theory doesn't mean "imperative occidental tuning and rules". But the music needs collective rules or at least collective conventions, planetary or at the scale of a single region. If not... the musician just plays around for himself, it's a kind of "masturbation of his own ears", and he doesn't express anything anymore to the others, he simply plays around with more or less hazardous beauty. To express something and to be understood, there must be conventions, like a grammar, even rudimentary.

But there is also another importance to respect rules or conventions... it is that without these rules or conventions on which he can build something that progresses with the years... instead of that, his "music" will desperately stagnate for the eternity in a kind of boring "soup" which little by little will interest few and few persons.

To be a composer doesn't need to plunge one's head in hard theory books, but it needs to respect a minimum of conventions and rules. Even musicians like Jimmy Hendrix who had never learned anything of the music theory had learned a minimum of their conventions to compose, and they respected these conventions in their songs, and everybody can clearly hear these conventions perfectly used in his songs, musical conventions at the scale of the note time and the phrase time as well as at the scale or the structure itself of the song.
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Yes it applies, although some of the more avant garde electronic music or ambient stuff can get away with ignoring or replacing a lot of it.

I suppose you can sit in your bedroom and just pick out notes for your synth by ear and make a trance track that sounds OK but that must be hard work. If you have no knowledge of keys/scales/chords or cadences for example, writing a melody by trial and error is going to take a while! It's much more efficient to learn some basic music theory...
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excessional wrote:Yes it applies, although some of the more avant garde electronic music or ambient stuff can get away with ignoring or replacing a lot of it.

I suppose you can sit in your bedroom and just pick out notes for your synth by ear and make a trance track that sounds OK but that must be hard work. If you have no knowledge of keys/scales/chords or cadences for example, writing a melody by trial and error is going to take a while! It's much more efficient to learn some basic music theory...
1. What is trance? How do you know a trance track "sounds OK"?
2. What the hell have keys/scales/chords or cadences to do with melody?
3. If I want to use just concrete and abstract sounds, what kind of "keys", "chords" and "scales" will I use?
3. In what way does learning music theory help you write a melody?

As someone who knows a bit about music theory, I think you are mixing things and blurring the picture.
Fernando (FMR)

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There is a real cart to pull the horse ideation of music theory about, and this forum illustrates it pretty often.

If you have made observations about the type of chords typifying 'trance', or anything, that you can rely on, you are using music theory.
Some people think there are things which exemplify music theory because the principles are just that correct or something, but that is a cart being asked to pull the horse.

Now, there is music that I have encountered through these pages that seem to have been made through an inchoate if not incoherent process that I would be hard pressed to gauge if 'theory' applied. "Electronic Music" it was called, but it was EDM. Could've benefited from some training in the usual principles, voice leading particularly.
But.
Music theory isn't theory in the sciency sense of it, it's observed principles of a convention after the fact of really consensus, 'this works'.
Some of it in legitimate conservatory is actually mistaken, even. I mean the principles of voice-leading are derived in large part after JS Bach, and he violated things you're taught in it. I had four points taken off my final at CCM, in a brilliant bit of writing (according to his notes), due to a hidden fifth in an augmented sixth resolution. I could find that in Bach without a long search; it was not really feasible to do otherwise, in that actual situation.

So don't take it as a cut and dried thing. If you believed 'parallel fifths' are truly illegal, you're not going to get on too well with heavy guitar rock 'power chords'.


As to melody, I don't find that questions about it here have been music theory matters. I know sort of what it means to me but it's subtle and I was absolutely not trained through harmony to write melody. I believe you have a sense for it or you don't. But it isn't going to come about through 'theory tips and tricks'.

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jancivil wrote:As to melody, I don't find that questions about it here have been music theory matters. I know sort of what it means to me but it's subtle and I was absolutely not trained through harmony to write melody. I believe you have a sense for it or you don't. But it isn't going to come about through 'theory tips and tricks'.
Precisely. Melody is something that we do almost instinctively, and resides basically in our deep collective memory, and cultural background. So, our melodies owe very much to the environment we were raised, and to the kinds of melodies and sounds we were exposed previously. Someone who were stuck very early in his/her life to a very particular genre of music, may have difficulties in writing a melody, especially if that genre of music is not very melodic.

Music is very much a learn by doing job, and the more and diverse music you know, the more competent you will be. Of course, the inner nature of each individual also has an influence. No matter what the politically correct says, we are not born all equal.
Fernando (FMR)

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