![]() Really, what do you suggest? Jargon is hard for the newcomers, but there's a reason it exists- it enables experts to communicate clearly and non ambiguously about specific concepts and ideas. And since language is always evolving, in 50 years people will complain that your once modern and easy to understand word is now obscure terminology. Or we could try to find a modern word that explains the concept better than the legacy one, but that means that all material from before the change is going to become very hard to understand unless you know all synonyms for a given concept. But all the experts will soon abbreviate this to something else, and soon enough we'll have the same problem we started with. Or we could give concepts more explicit names - instead of octave, we now have interval-between-two-pitches-with-logarithm-base-two. What do you suggest? We could invent new words - great, instead of an octave we now have a zargablub. Algebraic rings have little to do with rings in real life, tensors have little to do with the muscle in my calf, and so on. ![]() The same can be said of almost any field. Though her charts were simple, my brain had to work in overdrive for that entire gig. But a bandleader hired me, who had her repertoire written out using the Nashville Number System. I play mostly jazz, which has its own notational traditions. I actually had such an experience not too long ago. For instance, tabulature is used for teaching the electric bass, and documenting transcribed bass lines, but nobody can sight-read tab well enough for it to be an alternative to standard notation for performance use. And some notations are considered to be useful for one thing but not another. I daresay that learning a new notation system would be virtually prohibitive at my age.Įvery town has a cadre of musicians with similar skills, which in turn creates an incentive for composers and arrangers to continue using standard notation. I'm tethered to "standard" notation because I developed fluent sight-reading ability as a kid, and I continue to practice it. In addition to the amount of existing literature, there's also the matter of developing the skill to read it. > But we can't - because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. But we can't - because everyone's using the broken version, there is a huge corpus of knowledge written in the broken version, etc. ![]() Think of all of the inconsistencies in English - yes, we'd be better off in many ways if we could just fix all of the broken bits (e.g.: the past tense of "lead" is "led", but the past tense of "read" is written "read". it's much like language that way, though. ![]() There are historical reasons for the oddities but it wouldn't be too hard to come up with better. Looping the pitches from G back to A, but most starting counting at the C (for the simplest major scale). A whole tone scale is about the intervals between pitches. The base unit of movement is the half-step but the full-step is almost a useless concept - a major scale is a seemingly random pattern of half and whole steps, major and minor intervals included in it. THE SYNTHESIZER HAS VIRTUALLY NO STANDARD REPERTOIRE CODEWhen you start writing code working with scales, intervals, triads, seventh chords, etc., the oddities really become obvious. It sounds mathematical in some ways (there are certainly numbers in there) but when you look closer it's inconsistent and/or just plain weird. I studied music in university, and have run a music-theory centered website since 1998 or so, and I definitely find the terminology to be rather bad. I'm surprised you've not found more agreement. But does the barbershop effect actually physically come from constructive interference (this would limit it to a small number of chords made of undertones, incidentally), or is it just a noticeable auditory illusion that occurs in trained ears? This effect is where the entire musical scale comes from, after all. ![]() I don't doubt the power of overtones lining up. It's not that the alternative is that barbershop singers are delusional or something: the alternative is that barbershop singers - and some listeners - have well-trained ears for just intonation, and the perception of the chord they're singing changes inside their brain when the intervals line up. I've recently heard some doubt, however, about whether this overtone effect is actually perceptible to listeners, in a way that would pass double-blind tests and stuff. It would be great if music has a built-in payoff for singing with just intonation. I don't mean to be skeptical in a negative way. Is there a solid example of loud overtones being generated by the "barbershop seventh" that you can point to, such as in a recording? ![]()
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