...And this is what I love about Hacker News. As a 33 year old musician who got the programming/entrepreneurial bug only more recently, it brings me great hope to see things like this on this board. It brings me hope because a lot of times I feel like such a late comer to the party, surrounded by folks younger than me with many more years of experience in the programming realm having conversations about others' technology articles that are, sometimes, stratospherically over my head.
Yet occasionally another programmer/musician type, who maybe got into the game the other way round, writes a post like this that expounds with mystery and wonder upon a topic that I know inside and out. And it gives me hope that the years that I spent in the musical woodshed learning those things inside and out were not wasted in the context of the startup world, but giving me a massive amount of (what I now know as) domain expertise.
So thank you HN, and happy new year. May this be your year, as I'm feeling pretty good that it will be mine and my family's.
Jgrubb, as a 53-year-old musician/programmer/entrepreneur (formally trained [in parallel, mostly] in the first two), may I posit that you're not a late-comer to anything yet!
That's one of the reasons that a 9th chord inverted, were the 9th is on the bass, was frowned upon in 19th Century music theory. They argued that the 9th in the bass is a 2nd, not a 9th.
To give you an idea of how conservative people were regarding music, even in the beginning of the 20th Century, the Vienna Music Society rejected playing Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht at first on the ground that it had inverted 9th chords [1]. See [2] for an example, it's the first chord in the second bar.
Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th, etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz.
Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians.
For those of you interested, but confused, go to a music store and ask for a "fake book," a big collection of tunes in "head chart" format (just melody and the kind of chord symbols being discussed here. Study it like a new programming language. Bang out the chords on a piano, if you can. (Most fake books have a "glossary" of the chords in the front or back.)
Donald Knuth said that when a new CS grad student arrived at Stanford, they didn't ask, "are you a musician?," they just asked, "what instrument do you play?"
I went to UNT as well (not for music) and I'm still in Denton and work remote from here, not because it's a great tech hub but because of the music scene and culture I want to raise my kids in.
A good number of the best coders I work with right now are fantastic musicians, including Chad Fowler who is a phenomenal sax player, and another senior dev on my team who is a superb UNT-trained jass pianist. We talk about this all the time -- so many good coders are also musicians.
Great story about Knuth, I was never aware of that quote!
I'd like to tack on another key feature to these 13th chords (no pun intended)-- and that is of spreading out the voicing across the instrument's (usually piano's) range.
There's a sort of rule of thumb in jazz that the only interval that sounds genuinely BAD is the flat 9. Try it on your piano right now (say, C and C# an octave up). Notice that a similar interval, the major 7 (C and B) sounds pretty, even though the notes are kinda clashing because they're so close. But on the other hand the flat 9 sounds GREAT if you voice it right. To see this, hit a low C, then E, B-flat, and D-flat. Similarly this chord works with all the other color tones: 9s, 11s, 13s.
I think ultimately what makes jazz piano truly musical is when the musician has spent a lot of time trying out different voicings, spreading them out or crunching them in, and listened to each one to see which sounds the best.
> C9, C11 or C13 respectively instead of, say a Csus2, Csus4
That's actually not correct. sus, as in "suspended", implies that the third is absent from the chord. Cadd2 or Cadd4 would be more correct. A major chord with an added forth is kind of a weird sound, however -- too unstable, the fourth wants to resolve. add2 chords are fairly common, though!
"gives the chord a very different direction it wants to go"
I struggle with this every time I write songs. How exactly do you know which direction you should go, and how to transition from verse to chorus (i.e. how to pick good transition chords/notes). Currently, I do this by ear, whatever sounds good, but I know there is a better way.
No, there really isn't a better way. All the rules behind music theory are based on what sounds good, not the other way around.
What you can do, however, is push yourself to try out new harmonic structures. You can make your chords more complex, you can delay resolution much longer, you can shift keys.
There are also other musical idioms like polytonality, alternate scales, etc. that you can use to expand you horizons.
But ultimately, you still should pick something that sounds right to you.
Let's be honest, a large majority of charts follow convention, if not transparently in the case of a straight "I Got Rhythm" changes or blues, but more opaquely with substitutions or variations of predefined changes. This is true with jazz and even more so in pop music.
A trick I always use it to transpose into a common key and watch the overlap develop. It may surprise you to find most tunes are the same I IV V or II V I progression in various keys...
Of course, blindly creating something from such patterns is a not very fulfilling, but adding your own variations and color can be. Or, deviating from convention for effect becomes viable when you deeply understand those conventions.
A few people in this thread mentioned that the notation used in this article is in fact quite simple and could be learned in 10 minutes or so.
Personally I find the article quite incomprehensible, and I thought I knew a littlebit about music theory :) Just a tiny bit, however, and I don't even play an instrument--I always found it very hard to even just make a passable tune on a tracker/software synthesizer. Even though I love music and spent a lot of times creating mixes and mash-ups in software such as Ableton Live and Traktor (which were pretty good according to those who heard them both on and off the dance floor), as well as coding software synthesizers, instruments and sound effects (which were also pretty good according to my rankings in 4k demo-competitions over 10 years ago).
I wonder, can anybody perhaps provide a couple of links to some good introductory articles that would tell me about how to interpret the things discussed in this article? (I'm willing to spend more than just 10 minutes on them, btw ;-) )
Sorry to be pedantic, but a 9th chord actually has a 9th and a _flat_ 7th. For example C9 has the notes C-E-G-Bb-D. 9th chords are part of the dominant group, not the major group.
A chord with a 9th and a 7th is a _major_ 9th. For example, the chord C-E-G-B-D is Cmaj9 (sometimes written C triangle 9).
I was puzzling over the same question. Some of these words are semantically overloaded, and as far as I can tell there's no single interpretation that makes it all "work out" the way you would require if this were math. There are two meanings to "adding 7":
1. adding 7 arithmetically to obtain the same note an octave higher;
2. adding in a 7th note to whatever chord you are playing.
But the way the chords are named isn't what you'd guess from those two meanings. If it were, you'd add a 6th to C major to get C6 (that part is true) and then a 7th to C6 to get C13 (that part is not true). Instead, there's yet a third way the notes are "added", namely cumulatively in the following sequence (I've cribbed most of this from the OP):
C C+E+G
C7 C+E+G+B♭
C9 C+E+G+B♭+D
C11 C+E+G+B♭+D+F
C13 C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A
(The author's argument is that while the chords are theoretically defined to include all these notes equally, some notes - especially B♭ - are more important than others. So even if you drop E,G,D,F and only play C+B♭+A, that's still arguably C13. He's saying that's the essence of the chord.)
I suppose some arbitrariness is inevitable, because there are only so many letters and numbers to go around, and more chords with a plausible claim to the "best" names -- which, if you know regular expressions, would be something like [A-G][1-9]+ -- than there are names available. One beautiful thing about music is that it isn't math (we have math for that). It seems to overlap with math and then mixes everything up in mind-blowing ways, at which point all you can do is feel. Well, memorize and feel.
Does anyone know historically how C13 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A" rather than "C+E+G+B♭+A", which if you consider things only symbolically, seems more likely? Obviously, it must be because that's what people were playing - but who? Presumably jazz musicians? When was this name settled upon?
These chords progress in units of 2. So you start with your triad (1st, 3rd, 5th). For the 7th chord you add the 7th, naturally enough. The next chord is then a 9th chord, so you add a 9th interval, but it wraps around modulo 8, so it's really a 2nd interval (since intervals are 1-indexed). Next it's an 11th chord, but the interval is really a 4th, and so on. The idea is to think of them spread out though, as successive thirds.
yeah, as I said in the post, it's Jazz Theory 101. But anyone coming from a classical music theory background will hopefully find it a helpful insight.
Ironically, the situation is very similar to math.
It's relatively easy to read music theory notation, so that the Gibberish and Goobeltygookus make sense, similar to learning mathematical notation. (I personally believe this is easier than learning the alphabet, but that's a different story)
However, understanding what the abstractions mean is difficult. The difference between memorizing formulas and intuiting patterns. Maybe this is no harder than understanding the abstractions behinds words.
Like most "hard" things, the largest reason for difficulty is one of obtaining persistent practice.
If it were common to sing piano music using theory words rather than a single "lalala", for example, or if our language made use of specific tonal changes (up a second v down a major third), or if everyone learned the theory at the age where we now learn the alphabet, the gibberish goobeltygook would seem "easy".
It seems pretty straight forward to me. The entire article, and this type of music theory, is about intervals and combinations of notes at different intervals.
Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it.
In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world.
The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of something like regular expressions.
And it's several orders of magnitude easier than actually learning to play your instrument. Which also millions of people manage to do.
It's here because someone found it worth sharing. From the HN guidelines:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is
inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic,
flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all
users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something,
please don't also comment that you did.
[+] [-] Jgrubb|14 years ago|reply
Yet occasionally another programmer/musician type, who maybe got into the game the other way round, writes a post like this that expounds with mystery and wonder upon a topic that I know inside and out. And it gives me hope that the years that I spent in the musical woodshed learning those things inside and out were not wasted in the context of the startup world, but giving me a massive amount of (what I now know as) domain expertise.
So thank you HN, and happy new year. May this be your year, as I'm feeling pretty good that it will be mine and my family's.
[+] [-] scrozier|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davedx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kroger|14 years ago|reply
To give you an idea of how conservative people were regarding music, even in the beginning of the 20th Century, the Vienna Music Society rejected playing Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht at first on the ground that it had inverted 9th chords [1]. See [2] for an example, it's the first chord in the second bar.
[1] See "reception" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verklärte_Nacht
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ic3ZLj5RPw#t=3m12s
[+] [-] scrozier|14 years ago|reply
Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and musicians.
For those of you interested, but confused, go to a music store and ask for a "fake book," a big collection of tunes in "head chart" format (just melody and the kind of chord symbols being discussed here. Study it like a new programming language. Bang out the chords on a piano, if you can. (Most fake books have a "glossary" of the chords in the front or back.)
Donald Knuth said that when a new CS grad student arrived at Stanford, they didn't ask, "are you a musician?," they just asked, "what instrument do you play?"
[+] [-] davesims|14 years ago|reply
A good number of the best coders I work with right now are fantastic musicians, including Chad Fowler who is a phenomenal sax player, and another senior dev on my team who is a superb UNT-trained jass pianist. We talk about this all the time -- so many good coders are also musicians.
Great story about Knuth, I was never aware of that quote!
[+] [-] dextorious|14 years ago|reply
Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles beyond jazz music.
Contemporary classical, that is.
[+] [-] owensmartin|14 years ago|reply
There's a sort of rule of thumb in jazz that the only interval that sounds genuinely BAD is the flat 9. Try it on your piano right now (say, C and C# an octave up). Notice that a similar interval, the major 7 (C and B) sounds pretty, even though the notes are kinda clashing because they're so close. But on the other hand the flat 9 sounds GREAT if you voice it right. To see this, hit a low C, then E, B-flat, and D-flat. Similarly this chord works with all the other color tones: 9s, 11s, 13s.
I think ultimately what makes jazz piano truly musical is when the musician has spent a lot of time trying out different voicings, spreading them out or crunching them in, and listened to each one to see which sounds the best.
[+] [-] chrisguitarguy|14 years ago|reply
That's actually not correct. sus, as in "suspended", implies that the third is absent from the chord. Cadd2 or Cadd4 would be more correct. A major chord with an added forth is kind of a weird sound, however -- too unstable, the fourth wants to resolve. add2 chords are fairly common, though!
[+] [-] jtauber|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkules|14 years ago|reply
I struggle with this every time I write songs. How exactly do you know which direction you should go, and how to transition from verse to chorus (i.e. how to pick good transition chords/notes). Currently, I do this by ear, whatever sounds good, but I know there is a better way.
[+] [-] autarch|14 years ago|reply
What you can do, however, is push yourself to try out new harmonic structures. You can make your chords more complex, you can delay resolution much longer, you can shift keys.
There are also other musical idioms like polytonality, alternate scales, etc. that you can use to expand you horizons.
But ultimately, you still should pick something that sounds right to you.
[+] [-] bryanh|14 years ago|reply
A trick I always use it to transpose into a common key and watch the overlap develop. It may surprise you to find most tunes are the same I IV V or II V I progression in various keys...
Of course, blindly creating something from such patterns is a not very fulfilling, but adding your own variations and color can be. Or, deviating from convention for effect becomes viable when you deeply understand those conventions.
[+] [-] the_cat_kittles|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmroyal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guscost|14 years ago|reply
People usually measure things with natural numbers when the things to be measured share some of the properties of natural numbers, like equidistance.
[+] [-] tripzilch|14 years ago|reply
Personally I find the article quite incomprehensible, and I thought I knew a littlebit about music theory :) Just a tiny bit, however, and I don't even play an instrument--I always found it very hard to even just make a passable tune on a tracker/software synthesizer. Even though I love music and spent a lot of times creating mixes and mash-ups in software such as Ableton Live and Traktor (which were pretty good according to those who heard them both on and off the dance floor), as well as coding software synthesizers, instruments and sound effects (which were also pretty good according to my rankings in 4k demo-competitions over 10 years ago).
I wonder, can anybody perhaps provide a couple of links to some good introductory articles that would tell me about how to interpret the things discussed in this article? (I'm willing to spend more than just 10 minutes on them, btw ;-) )
[+] [-] robocop|14 years ago|reply
A chord with a 9th and a 7th is a _major_ 9th. For example, the chord C-E-G-B-D is Cmaj9 (sometimes written C triangle 9).
[+] [-] jtauber|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibastral2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruseom|14 years ago|reply
1. adding 7 arithmetically to obtain the same note an octave higher;
2. adding in a 7th note to whatever chord you are playing.
But the way the chords are named isn't what you'd guess from those two meanings. If it were, you'd add a 6th to C major to get C6 (that part is true) and then a 7th to C6 to get C13 (that part is not true). Instead, there's yet a third way the notes are "added", namely cumulatively in the following sequence (I've cribbed most of this from the OP):
(The author's argument is that while the chords are theoretically defined to include all these notes equally, some notes - especially B♭ - are more important than others. So even if you drop E,G,D,F and only play C+B♭+A, that's still arguably C13. He's saying that's the essence of the chord.)I suppose some arbitrariness is inevitable, because there are only so many letters and numbers to go around, and more chords with a plausible claim to the "best" names -- which, if you know regular expressions, would be something like [A-G][1-9]+ -- than there are names available. One beautiful thing about music is that it isn't math (we have math for that). It seems to overlap with math and then mixes everything up in mind-blowing ways, at which point all you can do is feel. Well, memorize and feel.
Does anyone know historically how C13 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A" rather than "C+E+G+B♭+A", which if you consider things only symbolically, seems more likely? Obviously, it must be because that's what people were playing - but who? Presumably jazz musicians? When was this name settled upon?
[+] [-] splat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxxx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtauber|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiecki|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtauber|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mml|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diN0bot|14 years ago|reply
It's relatively easy to read music theory notation, so that the Gibberish and Goobeltygookus make sense, similar to learning mathematical notation. (I personally believe this is easier than learning the alphabet, but that's a different story)
However, understanding what the abstractions mean is difficult. The difference between memorizing formulas and intuiting patterns. Maybe this is no harder than understanding the abstractions behinds words.
Like most "hard" things, the largest reason for difficulty is one of obtaining persistent practice.
If it were common to sing piano music using theory words rather than a single "lalala", for example, or if our language made use of specific tonal changes (up a second v down a major third), or if everyone learned the theory at the age where we now learn the alphabet, the gibberish goobeltygook would seem "easy".
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dextorious|14 years ago|reply
In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all around the world.
The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the difficulty of something like regular expressions.
And it's several orders of magnitude easier than actually learning to play your instrument. Which also millions of people manage to do.
[+] [-] jergosh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dextorious|14 years ago|reply
(And maybe my comment too, but mine is double-meta, so I would understand any down-voting to it).