alt Hacker NewsThat's sound design theory, not music theory. They're not the same thing.
Music theory is about chords, scales, rhythm, and - most importantly and elusively - how to fit them together to say something interesting.
Entry-level trad Western Theory gives you the concept of a basic grammar as a first introduction, but once you have that you can extend it fairly painlessly to jazz/funk/metal/pop/whatever.
Advanced classical grammar - baroque and modal counterpoint, extended harmony, and such - has some useful pointers for modern song-writing, but it's a specialised skill for experts. Movie and game score composers likely know it, but it's a degree-level skill.
Sound design theory is a subset of orchestration. The proof is that you can take most music and play it with simple sine wave bloops - no orchestration at all - and it remains completely recognisable.
Explaining equal temperament etc sounds clever and it's interesting if you like that kind of thing, but it's a distracting level of nerdery that doesn't help at all with basic song writing.
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I agree. As a (hobbyist) musician and a (professional) programmer, I would not classify this web page as “music theory” given its widely accepted definition.
At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.
For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a chromatic scale”) allows a programmer to understand not just the how but the why for the basics of western music.
For people that just want the how, one would start with “here is a pentatonic scale” followed by “here is a major chord”.