What is really a "music theory"?

[BertKoor]

TL;DR

I bet for 95% of today's musicians (slash producers) "Music Theory" would only need to cover the names of notes, intervals and chords.

[woggle]

I've read some years ago Patel "Music, language and the brain", as well as Huron, Temperlay and a couple of years ago Deutsch "the psychology of music" 3rd edition. All are very dense scientific books, but all of them are "wrong" in a fundamental sense: they all preconceive "music" and more often than not they are in fact analysing "sound" which is NOT the same thing.

Yep, all about the sound, not music. All about music being preconceived...

In the baroque context, the V-IV progression is somewhat surprising, whereas in the context of reggae, the same V-IV progression is commonplace. If the listener is to correctly anticipate the progression of acoustical events, she must somehow bracket or segregate two different sets of expectations . . . It is the ability of brains to form multiple schemas that provides the psychological foundation for distinguishing different styles and genres. Without this foundation, baroque and reggae would meld into a single general musical schema. Our experiences with baroque harmony would interfere with our ability to accurately predict harmonic progressions in reggae, and vice versa.

He gives an example of prediction from a specific practice. One could give another example from another tradition.

[Gamma-UT]

All this debunking of Helmholtz's idea that the harmonic series fixes everything. And yet...

In the last part of my book, I have endeavoured to show that the construction of scales and and of harmonic tissue is a product of artistic invention, and by no means furnished by the natural formation of natural formation or natural function of our ear, as it has been hitherto most generally asserted. Of course, the laws of the natural function of our ear play a great and influential part in this result; these laws are, as it were, the building stones with which the edifice of our musical system has been erected...But just as people with differently directed tastes can erect extremely different kinds of buildings with the same stones, so also the history of music shows us that the same properties of the human ear could serve as the foundation of very different musical systems."

Yes, Helmholtz overplays the significance of beats in the perception of music but he was working well before anyone had an idea of how neurons train themselves and, naturally, assumed the process was more analogous to the mechanical designs of the era of steam. But his critics overplay the role of beats in the 400pp book Helmholtz actually wrote.

[Gamma-UT]

He gives an example of prediction from a specific practice. One could give another example from another tradition.

I don't really understand the objection. He's comparing practice in reggae to baroque. Is reggae part of the baroque tradition?

Also, the point of quoting that passage was to Musicologo's assertion that Huron and other writers in that vein are concerned only with sound and that they feel music is "preconceived".

[woggle]

My apologies, I have underestimated the required background. Huron talks of the brain's basic goal or function of prediction and the manipulation of that by music. In your quote Huron describes that working across two models of music (schemas) that the listener has. Many more schemas can be instantiated or drawn upon by a listener and those schemas vary according to the listeners experience. There is nothing there about music in the negative prescriptive sense you refer to. All reference is to experience and schemas so derived.

[Gamma-UT]

All reference is to experience and schemas so derived.

I wasn't aware this was an issue. What part of the previous two posts made you think I considered schemas of any kind in this context to be innate and not learned or acquired?

[woggle]

All reference is to experience and schemas so derived.

I wasn't aware this was an issue. What part of the previous two posts made you think I considered schemas of any kind in this context to be innate and not learned or acquired?

The bit about Huron being concerned with music being preconceived implied to me you didn't understand the idea of schemas. You couldn't I think have made that comment if you thought Huron as talking about learned regularities in the environment and violation of those expectancies. I won't be surprised if I read you wrong. I'm on a tablet whilst doing other stuff so all this is pretty rushed

[Gamma-UT]

The bit about Huron being concerned with music(in a pejorative prescriptive sense) implied to me you didn't understand the idea of schemas. You couldn't I think have made that comment if you thought Huron as talking about learned regularities in the environment and violation of those expectancies.

You certainly seem to have some rigidly engrained schemas if you felt able to read that into my initial reply to Musicologo. Maybe I should have quoted a bit a few pages later about timbre vs musical structure. But, on the whole, I'm finding it difficult to see how anyone could make any assumption of my understanding of how the mind builds schemas and world views from that one thing.

OTOH, maybe it does illustrate Huron's point about the rapidity with which the brain seizes on small fragments of information and builds a set of expectations from them.

[woggle]

The bit about Huron being concerned with music(in a pejorative prescriptive sense) implied to me you didn't understand the idea of schemas. You couldn't I think have made that comment if you thought Huron as talking about learned regularities in the environment and violation of those expectancies.

You certainly seem to have some rigidly engrained schemas if you felt able to read that into my initial reply to Musicologo. Maybe I should have quoted a bit a few pages later about timbre vs musical structure. But, on the whole, I'm finding it difficult to see how anyone could make any assumption of my understanding of how the mind builds schemas and world views from that one thing.

OTOH, maybe it does illustrate Huron's point about the rapidity with which the brain seizes on small fragments of information and builds a set of expectations from them.

I'm feeling a bit of aggression here so thanks but no thanks.

[Gamma-UT]

I'm feeling a bit of aggression here so thanks but no thanks.

Funny how that happens.

My apologies, I have underestimated the required background.

I guess the internet makes us all assume the worst. It's another of those pesky acquired schemas.

[Musicologo]

Gamma UT, in your example Huron is studying the brain. He is talking how some people might react to some sounds (the act of listening and reacting to recordings, must assume a *practice* of listening. Who listens to "baroque" and "reggae"? Who considers that to be music in the first place?). Again, a lot of requisites are made in order to convey a point that only applies to a subset. Moreover, and this is the most important part, that I already told before - he seems to be studying "reception" - how some people react to sounds, but he is not explaining how and why those sounds exist in the first place.

I believe a lot of "psychologists" do just that: they study "reception", they study "brains". That is certainly valid and interesting, and I've read it, BUT On the other hand, I'm interested in studying music, in "music theories", and that implies explaining "production". So for me the real questions would be "who did that "baroque music" and "reggae music" and why and how? etc...

Reception of sound is subjective, depends on the listeners ("the brain"), production on the other hand is observable, can be traced, therefore is more "objective" and can/should be explained (not merely described) and it seems the core and purpose of "music theories".

Concluding: a music theory is something (or should be) something that tries to explain the production within the musical practices, what concepts inform them and what behaviours shape them and what sounds emerge from it.

A music theory is something that explains WHy and how bach used counterpoint, a music theory is something that explains why giant steps emerged naturally in the musical practice of Coltrane, a music theory is something that explains why and how bulgarian women sing dyads as labour songs, etc..

[Gamma-UT]

I believe a lot of "psychologists" do just that: they study "reception", they study "brains". That is certainly valid and interesting, and I've read it, BUT On the other hand, I'm interested in studying music, in "music theories", and that implies explaining "production". So for me the real questions would be "who did that "baroque music" and "reggae music" and why and how? etc...

Psychology is more concerned with the mind than the brain. Neuroscience focuses on the brain. I make the distinction because if neuroscience suddenly determined that your left toe had a key role to play in consciousness, it wouldn't affect psychology all that much.

Huron and psychologists who have developed similar theories regard music as an enculturated phenomenon. The mind adapts to music over time and that process of adaption influences how the mind perceives it. That adaption involves cultural factors as much as the sounds themselves. Schoenberg had a hunch that was the case - that the listener can adjust to any music and find it pleasing given enough exposure. Ironically, for many people, 12-tone serialism seems to put a limit on how much adaption the mind can take.

Reception of sound is subjective, depends on the listeners ("the brain"), production on the other hand is observable, can be traced, therefore is more "objective" and can/should be explained (not merely described) and it seems the core and purpose of "music theories".

What is music without listeners? The composer cannot conceive of any music without attempting to hear it - even if they only imagine how it sounds. At no point do you remove subjectivity. Even if the the music is composed entirely using algorithmic rules, those rules will most likely be heavily influenced by subjective opinions about what each rule is meant to achieve.

There is a conceit around "music theory" that it justifies the term "theory" rather than "custom and practice". Other posters have already gone into that one. I'd argue that the relationship between tonic and fifth is almost innate, simply because it's a relationship you can hear in the timbre of most resonating objects, so you can get to pentatonic-type scales very quickly in musical evolution. But, it would be hard to argue that it isn't simply something that's learned very early on.

However, it seems odd for someone who recommends the idea of ethnomusicology to then demand an objective theory. Ethnography is at its heart subjective. Practitioners try not to introduce subjective bias but bias is inevitable in any research like that.

A music theory is something that explains WHy and how bach used counterpoint, a music theory is something that explains why giant steps emerged naturally in the musical practice of Coltrane, a music theory is something that explains why and how bulgarian women sing dyads as labour songs, etc..

History does that. Early Western music had a go at trying to push music into a straitjacket of mathematical relationships in the hope of completing some grand theory that aligned music with astronomy. It didn't work out so well, but it did strongly influence the development of ideas like dissonance rules for counterpoint, which gradually broke down as composers embraced influences from different kinds of folk music.

The bad news is, there is no written history of folk music and how different peoples adopted ideas from their neighbours.

[jancivil]

All this debunking of Helmholtz's idea that the harmonic series fixes everything. And yet...

In the last part of my book, I have endeavoured to show that the construction of scales and and of harmonic tissue is a product of artistic invention, and by no means furnished by the natural formation of natural formation or natural function of our ear, as it has been hitherto most generally asserted. Of course, the laws of the natural function of our ear play a great and influential part in this result; these laws are, as it were, the building stones with which the edifice of our musical system has been erected...But just as people with differently directed tastes can erect extremely different kinds of buildings with the same stones, so also the history of music shows us that the same properties of the human ear could serve as the foundation of very different musical systems."

Yes, Helmholtz overplays the significance of beats in the perception of music but he was working well before anyone had an idea of how neurons train themselves and, naturally, assumed the process was more analogous to the mechanical designs of the era of steam. But his critics overplay the role of beats in the 400pp book Helmholtz actually wrote.

Yes, and he did change his mind. But, many people still take his initial work as gospel. I don't have a bone to pick with Helmholtz as a good scientist for his time, I didn't touch that, the point is that the work has advanced since, and on all fronts.

However, he did have an overarching musical view that is ignorant of some basics which were not at all new then, he thought just intonation was so perfect everyone should quit ET. He was right, JS Bach 'Well-tempered Clavier' must be wrong. That's pretty stupid.

[jancivil]

Moreover, he insisted that the musical tonalities are all essentially identical, and that it makes no difference what fundamental pitch is chosen, except as an arbitrary convention or habit.

So you think there is an absolute difference between 432 and 440, and one is not just a transposition of the other?

Abstractly, in an electronic sound producing instrument where equal temperament is absolutely true, I suppose not. If we're using instruments, very definitely there is a difference.

As I suggested, instruments made to vibrate don't work like that. If you wanted to force a saxophone to 32¢ below where it was more or less constructed to function, well I haven't done but I have a good idea it's not quite right. I have done -25¢ in samples and it seemed flaccid but I couldn't explain it, I'm not a good technical writer, I'm sorry. There are reasons owing to the design of saxophones to spell things as this versus that, vis a vis 'Eb saxophone' vs 'Bb saxophone'; then you may ask why there is an A clarinet and a Bb clarinet. Is the piccolo clarinet in Eb just a transposed Bb bass clarinet? Demonstrably not. Why has tuning in orchestras risen in pitch over the years?
Why did JS Bach compose 24 Preludes and Fugues, one for each key, instead of just doing the two [major & minor] 12 different ways? NB: Well-tempered.

So if the question is as a pure sine wave is there a difference? Duh, no. What did I say? What did the retune the world or whatever it was say as quoted: "musical tonalities"; and went so far as to say pure sines are not musical. Nature of sound and nature of the aural apparatus is far more complex and subtle.

I went into this around that point but I deleted it so posts don't wander all over the place.
Take the guitar. If you tune to a strobe tuner, I mean you ensure that at one place everything matches this 12tET, there are problems even in the one place for many of us. If you have a perfect major third between the G and the B string, you want an E major in open position, the G# will be sharp. If you tune by matching open harmonics, other things are dodgy; guitar setup is an art. And not everyone will entirely agree. Some people have no problem using the strobe tuner. Yet, you may wish to verify this independently interrogating piano tuners, a straight-up 12tET, as though you could simply check it by machine, isn't what is done. They have a real purpose.

Musical sound, in instruments, in the voice is, our ears are nonlinear.

I'll see if I can find an actual reference that explains what that means.

Good idea.

[sfxsound3]

If music is a type of language, music theory describes the rules according to which it is organized, and which you have to abide to, if you want to produce meaning when using it. Of course there are dialects. Just as there is human language, then Indo-European, then English, then Cockney, etc.
So it's a field of knowledge, which can be studied scientifically, or can be layman's practice.

You could ask what knowledge is and where it comes from, but will you?