I grew up in a family with 7 kids and my youngest sibling is just 12 years old. I remember when my younger set of siblings were born, I was thinking "I'm going to teach them EVERYTHING I've learned at a young age, and they will be way ahead of their peers." I failed to grasp just how much of their personality is ingrained in them from their DNA and that they might not have all the same interests as me. It was a great learning experience though -- when I do have kids, I'm not going to try and shove my interests down their throat. I'm going to pay attention to what they are drawn to and give them as many resources as I can so they can pursue that interest as much as they desire.
Is this really true? I hope not!
Interests can be encouraged because there's some flexibility in someone's natural tendencies. It's the old "nature vs nurture" discussion, about which one dominates the other.
Perhaps the above poster's sibling looked for other interests because the poster had already 'taken' whatever interests they were sharing. But perhaps not - it's hard (impossible?) to know.
You can't start telling your child about maths if they're busy doing something else. All you can do is wait for a moment when their curiosity spots something and try to feed that.
Even when you catch their interest it's easy to break it if you can't explain it, so los of kudos to Brent for navigating it perfectly.
I ask him to tell me about what he is learning, and he patiently tries to explain it to me, but I just nod along because I have no idea what he's talking about.
Most everything beyond is attaching labels to the frequencies and combos. Just as we have names for frequencies of light (red, yellow, blue) and patterns (gradient, checkerboard) there are names for frequencies of sound (A, C#, E) and their combinations (major, minor). There are also more esoteric terms (chiaroscuro in painting, neapolitan flat 9 in music) for people who've spent so much time on a subject that the basics have become boring.
Oh, and there's also divisions of and patterns for time in music theory. E.g., "hold this note for twice as many milliseconds as the previous one".
There have been some good resources here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=music%20theory&sort=byPopulari...
@jimbokun: It might be easier for your son to express what he's learning if you can catch while he's got e.g., a piano or guitar at hand. Humans have a hard time generating compound musical waveforms using just their vocal folds (though it can be done to a limited extent as in Mongolian throat singing). Explaining it while playing it will probably also help cement the concepts in his understanding ;) .
Already learned some things, thanks!
There are 12 unique notes in an Octave (yes, octave means 8; ignore this for now). On the 13th note, the octave repeats itself (counting is 1-indexed). But of these 12 notes, only specific subsets are combined into specific scales.
The most popular scale is the Major Scale which follows the pattern "Tonic Major_2nd Major_3rd Perfect_4th Perfect_5th Major_6th Major_7th" (there exist other notations). The Major Scale imparts a generically-happy mood. But there's other scales, including: the Chromatic Scale; the Major Scale; 3 varieties of Minor Scales; 7 varieties of Diatonic Modes (including Major and Natural Minor); the Pentatonic Scales; etc. E.g. Smoke on the Water, Sunshine of your Love, and Fight for your Right (to Party) all sound similar because they use the Blues Scale.
Once you familiarize yourself with the intervals, scales, and their various notations (which is its own feat), you can jump into the meat & potatoes of Music Theory. Which mostly consists of analyzing Chord Progressions and Key Signatures in order to find commonalities in mood. Chord Progressions and Key Signatures determine a song's general mood. It's too complicated for me to summarize quickly. But it's where all the interesting stuff happens.
N.B. I've deliberately omitted various details for the sake of brevity. E.g. I could have mentioned Time Signatures, Rhythms, Tempo, Dynamics, etc.
Guess what... A perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio/interval of frequencies (+/- a small allowance for the historical/mechanical constraints that lead to well/equal tempering unless we're talking modern micro-tonalism in which case no adjustments are necessary). The inverse, 2:3, is a perfect fourth.
The example frequencies I gave correspond to concert-A, then E and D. I took a very simple/short path from intervals to harmonic function/progression to try to give a taste of the meat and potatoes before providing a link to additional sources.
I avoided music theory terms because that would've been a circular definition for any readers who had no understanding of even the basics.
In light of your post, I should've added a sentence or two about mood (major = happy, diminished = tense/scary) and compared that to how you can make a 'warm' picture using reds, oranges and yellows or a sombre picture with darker colors, etc.
Is there a good YouTube video introducing some of these concepts using popular songs?
Another thing to keep in mind is that musical patterns accrete into genres. And there's a wide variety of genres. So it's difficult for any single video to cover everything in detail. I think it's more common for videos to cover the patterns of a particular genre. E.g. if you're interested in Blues, consider searching for videos about Blues.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm4LO22-cyY I remember the above Vox video highlights a unique chord which sounds "melty" and is often used in holiday music. The chord is known as a "minor_7th, diminished_5th" aka "m7d5".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I This video is about the infamous "4-chord pop progression". It's ubiquitous on the radio. Elitists and connoisseurs tend to look down on it for appealing to casuals. The progression is "I V vi IV" (capital denotes major chords, lowercase denotes minor chords).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfjXp4KTTY8 When I think of the "12-Bar Blues (Chord Progression)", I think of Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Pride and Joy". But there's tons of educational videos on this. It's very popular in not only Blues, but Rock & Roll. It's "I I I I; IV IV I I; V IV I I". But things get interesting here because musicians often substitue "jazzy" chords like Dominant_7th's (aka V^7). For bonus points, look up "tritone" (N.B. Rock is truly the devil's music).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dISEg1ydQoM I'm not actually sure what song I'm thinking of, but there's a particular trope often used in Hollywood films to denote a bullfight. It's based off the Phrygian Mode, which tends to sound very "spanish-y". In lieu, I've linked the the first bullfight track I found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4fa44_sq2E A genre I'm particularly fond of is House. Which is often characterized by its "Four on the Floor" drum beat. It's very simple, just continuous quarternotes of kicks. The rhythm is sometimes denoted "1 2 3 4" (where the structure of a single bar is "1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a"). The above video is Daft Punk's "Superheros".
And then there's Jazz. Which is hard to explain, because it's the genre where anything goes. And besides jazz, there's lots of other techniques and obscure genres that I can't possibly cover in a single post.
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In any case, I'd suggest looking up a particular genre you like and studying it. If you're a musician, learn scales. 90% of pop music these days uses either Major or Natural Minor. But you can really expand your horizons by learning other scales. It's boring, but it builds a strong foundation. Like how a basketball player will run laps rather than shoot freethrows all day.
It is mostly a descriptive theory in that it studies musical patterns (rhythm, melody, harmony, intervals, scales, modes, chords and chord progressions) but it can also be prescriptive (for e.g. - don't use certain note intervals in a guitar solo if you are using certain chords in your song)
None of this has anything to do with Physics. Music Theory is completely abstracted from the physical world.
See my other comment.
Similarly, it seems like studying the frequencies and their relationships illuminates at least a portion of what music theory covers.
If you can provide a better overview or point out how it's anything more than a bunch of terms/shorthand for sonic patterns, I'd love to be informed.
It might be easier for your son to express what he's learning if you can catch him while he's got e.g., a piano or guitar at hand. Humans have a hard time generating compound musical waveforms using just their bodies/vocal-folds (though it can be done to a limited extent as in Mongolian throat singing). Having him play the sounds as he explains them will probably also help cement the concepts in his own understanding ;) .
That is the most depressing thing I've read in a good while.
If it feels better though, as the youngest of three children, I find I was allowed to wander a bit more, and that has actually proved useful.
One of the things you figure out is that some kids aren't interested. And if your kid isn't interested in thinking about prime numbers, you're going to be hard pressed to change that. Conversely they will have interests that you don't share, and it's going to be harder for you to participate meaningfully in that beyond being generally supportive. They are individuals that way.