> Why is this at the top of HN?

What the ..? Because it's a cool blog post of course! It carefully and clearly explains things the author understands about music (in a much better way than I've seen before), and then clearly and carefully goes on to describe and comment on some things the authors doesn't understand as well.

Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming. I've never seen a comment like yours on top of an HN thread about any of her posts. What's going on, somehow because this is about music and not programming we need to get all pedantic?

"Get pedantic"? No, the blog post is what happens when people only hear half the story and then proceed to go crazy on the part they don't know. It's a crapfest

It's the same though process used by some politicians and conspiracy theorists

I don't think the commentor is suggesting that music is an unworthy topic to be on the top, rather that the post is insufficiently insightful to be on the top.

Yes, this.

> Basically, it's a Julia Evans blog post but about music instead of system programming.

The joy of Julia Evans blog posts is her commitment to learn, and to document as she learns, interesting or difficult things until she's mastered them. Not to give them a once over lightly and then snidely dismiss them as broken.

I think people with experience in the field are just annoyed with her poorly-conceived assertions at the end, e.g. "This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever." rather than pedantry.

Only a lot of experience could just be cargo cult and busy work, as is in most fields.

I.e the music world's analogue to: "but of course you need to make XML configuration files for everything and FactoryFactorySingletons etc, that's how we do things in J2EE".

There's been other proposed notations, but they all have their own shortcomings. Any alternative would have to be much better than the standard one, otherwise nobody would bother to retrain to use it.

The problem with this blog post is that it's clear that there's a lot they don't understand but they still criticize without finding out the why (which many commenters here have provided those answers).

I think the blog post could be much better written without the uniformed commentary as there's some things that are good about it. It's just that the other parts puts some people off from recommending it.

I'm not an a musician by most measures, and definitely not an experienced one. I lack exactly training and experience, so my understanding of music notation comes from the same kind of observations as the post author - only over a longer time and in the context of playing many instruments badly. So I don't think I drank any cool aid.

So, my comment is a response to the specific points they made. Yes, there may be cargo culture around it, and certainly the system isn't perfect. But their examples are non-examples of that.

Is it? It starts out with and I quote.

"I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it"

"I’m a bit out in the weeds from here on. C major is identical to A minor, and I don’t understand why we need both."

This is why it shouldn't be here. Too little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's good to be intrigued about things as you study them, but it's dangerous to start forming strong opinions and tearing them down when you don't have a solid foundation. I see this often on HN, in the form of, OOP sucks, Abstraction will kill you. I learned golang for a week and you should never use it...

I believe everyone should have a medium for expression and express themselves, the problem is that "newbies" to the topic sometimes read these highly opinionated posts and believe it to be the truth and get primed for the wrong information. I like music BTW and system programming too, yes, the musical notation is weird, but you have to dive in to grok it. It's like system programming, WTF is ioctl()? But dive in and it makes sense, accept it and move on, unless you can come up with better.

> Nope, they exactly allow the notes to show scale degree relationships. Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be very confusing as the regular scale notes would be marked with accidentals.

Presumably, they have in mind to straightforwardly eliminate BOTH key signatures and accidental markers; e.g., a staff in which adjacent positions are always one semitone apart, and all pitches and intervals between them are thus always directly indicated without need for reference to a key signature for decoding.

There are pros and cons to this scheme (as it privileges indicating pitch relationships over, as you put it, "scale degree" relationships), but at any rate, it would not involve confusing accidentals, nor any significant difference between working in C major scale vs. any other (even less bias in favor of C major than the current system!).

A staff with a separate line or space for every semitone would probably be pretty unreadable, and the places corresponding to non-scale tones would go mostly unused in most music. Besides, the key signature at the start is very useful to any experienced musician as it immediately tells them how the piece is supposed to be played. You can think of it as a header that tells you how the rest of the notation should be interpreted.

I don't think it's a coincidence at all that the common Western staff has five lines and four spaces - it's a small enough number that subitizing [0] is possible. After all, the notation has evolved to be convenient to those who need to read or write sheet music, even though it might look weird to a layman.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

eevee seems to be a relatively popular writer, however I became less enamored with the persona as I realized that a lot of the work on display is shoot-from-the-hip hot takes, a smattering of summarized research minus the essential components of appreciation, concrete experience, asking for directions, or admitting "I might be wrong". I expect this kind of thing from sophomore CS students, not a blogger who presumably has an earnest interest in learning a thing and presenting said learnings.

>or admitting "I might be wrong"

The post left open questions all over the place and the introduction states this very clearly:

>I stress that I don’t know anything about music and this post is terrible. If you you so much as know how to whistle, please don’t read this you will laugh at me.

Maybe there may be other posts where you could complain about a lack of humility, but this is not that one.

The whole thing reads like https://xkcd.com/793/

>Why is this at the top of HN?

Because it was voted to the top after being deemed interesting by HN users. Social boormarking website et al.

>Without key signatures, music in any major scale other than C would be very confusing as the regular scale notes would be marked with accidentals.

That's assuming otherwise keeping the same notation, which is totally against the point of the author.

> Because it was voted to the top after being deemed interesting by HN users.

Maybe I worded my actual thought poorly: Why do HN users deem this interesting? It's an honest question, not rhetorical.

It's top of HN because a lot of people find a physical/technical introduction interesting...

> Why is this at the top of HN?

It's catnip for the part of the HN audience who thinks:

1/ I am smart at computers and basic maths, so I must be smart on an absolute scale.

2/ I can't understand this easily, so therefor it is obviously broken.

Much like "timezones are hard, therefore wrong", "why should I learn other human languages, they don't work like I expect", "running a society is harder than telling a computer what to do, so people are stupid".

Or perhaps it is genuinely useful?

Music is an interest of mine, but not an active obsession. I've learned songs I want to play only through tabs, because every time I attempted to learn sheet music online, I ran away out of the fear of the heavy fog that exists in most descriptions about sheet music. Not to mention insufferable smugness, much like wine and craft beer snobs, about how sheet music is superior.

This guy, on the other hand, kept my attention, and described it in a way that I honestly found worth my time. I read the whole thing without wanting to switch tabs or multitask.

While there are some interesting parts, you have to filter the absurds like "C Major and A Minor are the same thing"

That's where the discussion right here on HN is helping :) One could argue that that is also a positive thing to have come out of the article having been written in the first place!

Indeed the difference between C major and A minor is the only really interesting thing I learned out of this post.

Which is great! That's why i read HN basically.

It's awesome that you're finding new things to learn. Honestly, reading sheet music is beneficial in a frightfully limited number of situations, and many many great musicians simply can't do it or find it a large struggle. Tabs are a wonderful entry point, I would encourage you to pursue learning by ear before reading. Keep playing!

"This threatens my ego so I must devalue it"

As a geek and a formerly classically trained musician, I found it interesting to see how a geek discovers musical conventions.

I think his post raises interesting questions about western music's discoverability, something developers should be interested about.

And I believe, having spent a lot of time with many western classical musicians, that this poor discoverability is in part appreciated and encouraged by many professionals. When I read about the Sokal affair, about some humanities academic hiding their dubious competences and relevance behind some cryptic mumbo-jumbo, I first thought of my musical theory lectures.

This is a great point. Hiding behind "mumbo-jumbo" is certainly a big problem with many art forms, and actively prevents a lot of people from entering or even enjoying it. Classical music is sadly especially plagued by this.

It's somewhat natural for humans to create exclusivity, especially for areas they have spent a lot of effort or resources on entering themselves. In the case of art and other humanities, I think this is detrimental.

I think the shortcomings of notation and representation (and the pedagogy) of music theory is more the case of managing complexity. It's an evolved system, not a designed one, so it meets its goals in some sort of a local minima, and it'd take a large effort to move out of that minima. But the issues are different from what the blog post author points at. Most of those "features" are there for a very good reason, as most commenters here seem to support.

Exactly! Why would you write a blog post about something with you -- admittedly! -- know nothing about, and to rant and gripe, no less! Boggles the mind.

There's a good reason this is popular. I wanted to understand key signatures and stuff, so I bought a music theory book. Oh boy, that was a mistake. It just listed scales and chords and told me what a staff was. There was no theory there! Then I read a mathematics of music book and finally the scales were explained.

That's why this exists. There's a lot of cruft out there when you look for music theory that isn't what the HN crowd is interested in. The circle of fifths is useful but it isn't music theory, it's this magic thing without explanation that you're told to memorize in most expositions. The opening of this blog is a good, HN-oriented approach towards actually the theory behind music scales.

This is the case for many complex topics. One recent example for me is aviation: Textbooks for pilots are woefully inaccurate, contradictory, and plain confusing. But they get you flying.

This happens naturally when you can practice an art/craft/skill without deep understanding of the complex system that underlies it. Since that understanding isn't interesting to many, the system survives by teaching an incomplete or inaccurate model that works most of the time. The full understanding only comes with actual practice, and is [implicit knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge) rather than an explicit one. This is sufficient for most people to master the art/craft/skill.

I'm guessing that these textbooks for pilots are labelled things like "Fundamentals of Flight"[1] or "Pilot's Manual" and not "Theoretical Aerodynamics". I think it is a peculiarity of music that the field labelled "music theory" is actually about music practice (or perhaps music description), at least at the introductory level. And this causes frustration in a certain subset of people.

For example, you don't find the info from this article in the wikipedia page on Music Theory, though you do find it in the "Music and Mathematics" page. I understand that there's more to music theory than rational numbers and the twelfth root of two, but it was the first thing that ever explained to me why something was true in music. In contrast to the circle of fifths which shows that there is a pattern but does not explain form where that pattern came.

[1] Actually I googled this one and it exists and it seems to be about the design of aircraft; a case where it's perhaps more theoretical than I would have guessed.

Yes, you are absolutely right ("Pilot's handbook of aeronautical knowledge", "Helicopter flying handbook", etc.).

That said, rational numbers and twelfth root of two etc. aren't exactly what musicians or composers would be thinking about, but rather scales, intervals, chords and progressions. That's the music theory the OP was arguably looking for. Those are introduced on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory#Fundamentals_of_m...

That's because music theory books are written for musicians, not mathematicians. It is a theory, just an empirical one and not a mathematical one.

The circle of fifths is not magic. Every step you take on the circle of fifths moves one note in the key by a semitone.

To clarify, I was saying that the presentation of the circle of fifths was as if it were magical. By itself, the circle of fifths is descriptive more than it is explanatory.