alt Hacker NewsIt's a fun webpage about a programmer dipping their toes in the very most basic elements of music and documenting some of their current understanding.Imagine I wrote an article called "Programming for musicians" that was mostly about how to turn your computer on and install homebrew[1] and finished by showing you step by step how to cut and paste "hello world" in javascript from stack overflow. You might rightly say that while "programming-adjacent" the article didn't really address programming.
Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory. So this is super-basic music theory of the level that you couldn't really expect to pass high school music without knowing. I've picked associated board because this is the most generic music theory syllabus possible, and grade 5 is very basic. If you were actually studying music you'd go way way beyond this.
To a first approximation none of this is in the article. It also doesn't have any more advanced topics (functional harmony, orchestration, voice leading, transposition, key/scale relationships, advanced rhythmic concepts etc). That's why I say the article isn't really music theory.
And then for completeness, when I say that what is music theory is wildly misleading I'm talking about things like "chords are notes stacked in thirds". There's so much wrong about about this it's hard to even start, but for starters it's an if and only if when it really shouldn't be. Notes stacked in thirds are chords, but there are a whole heck of a lot of chords that aren't stacked in thirds. It's like if I said "even numbers are 4 and 6". It's like sure, but there's more to it than that.
[1] without mentioning that this was only needed if you were using a mac
[2] https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/music-theo...
Replies
> Here[2] Is the syllabus for ABRSM Grades 1-5 music theory.
I've always thought that's mistitled. Better would be Traditional Western Music Notation Theory.
Notice what's absent, e.g. frequency and timbre which are nicely introduced by the current article.
Music theory is a lot wider than the ABSRM syllabus. And the current article is a great starting point.
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The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing.
The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels much more intuitive to some (like the author, and myself), compared to traditional music education.