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Re:Music theory for nerds by Ericson2314 on Monday September 19, 2016 @12:37AM (#12528953)
The thing I most want to change is how time signatures are notated: I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.
Re:Music theory for nerds by spiralganglion on Monday September 19, 2016 @01:08AM (#12529085)
That works, and would be an improvement, so long as your rhythms are based on constant integer subdivisions.

It's possible (and fun) to play music where the rhythmic structure changes smoothly and continuously. But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate, so music cultures that depend on notation or oral communication have left this territory largely unexplored.

The handful of classical composers that have attempted this (Steve Reich, Brian Current, etc) have either abandoned western notation (Reich) or hacked on their own bespoke glyphs with their own situation-specific explanations (Current).

Electronic musicians can easily explore this space by writing their own software (Autechre, your humble author, etc). When your musicians are mechanical, you can explore all sorts of otherwise impractical permutations of theory.

Most delightful, though, are the non-western cultures that communicate musical ideas entirely without written notation or spoken language, and instead communicate musical ideas through play (Indonesian Gamelan, Australian Aborigines, etc). You get the ineffable human qualities that make music most beautiful, and the freedom to explore structural spaces that are difficult to capture with discrete/unitized/quantized notation and language.

Re:Music theory for nerds by ludston on Monday September 19, 2016 @01:36AM (#12529196)
> But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate

It's really easy to orally communicate. You can just sing it!

(I know what you mean, is it's difficult to describe using a computer keyboard. Using a pen and paper it is really easy, given that you can just draw notes and time signature changes in the margin.)

Re:Music theory for nerds by ktRolster on Monday September 19, 2016 @12:43AM (#12528978)
I'd like to specify branching factor all the way down the rhythm tree.

I'm not really sure what this means, but it sounds interesting.

Re:Music theory for nerds by Ericson2314 on Monday September 19, 2016 @08:25AM (#12530818)
By default the next note is half as long as the previous. But sometimes that's inconvenient. For example 9/8 is usually 3-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2... A bar is devided into 3 dotted quarters and a dotted quarter into 3 8ths, and anything further down is split in half as is normal.
Re:Music theory for nerds by ktRolster on Monday September 19, 2016 @11:21AM (#12532100)
Oh that sounds great, but very difficult to read/play
Re:Music theory for nerds by Ericson2314 on Monday September 19, 2016 @06:37PM (#12535354)
Sometimes when there's a bunch of triplets the editor will just write "simile" and drop the triplet notation.

This could work like that and only the time signature would need a brand new notation, so no I don't think it would be super hard to read.

Re:Music theory for nerds by ktRolster on Monday September 19, 2016 @11:38PM (#12536859)
Triplets are tough to play haha