Mathematical explanation of music and white/black notes in a piano

Re:Mathematical explanation of music and white/black notes i... by alextgordon on Thursday November 25, 2010 @03:15PM (#1940926)

Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music is, in a sense, a mathematical illusion, but revealing the trick only makes it more fascinating.

This is true, but I think the answer is far more mundane. Musicians operate at a couple of levels of abstraction above that SO answer, so such details become irrelevant to them.

Imagine if the standard introduction to programming was a course on Java or PHP. Pretty soon you'd have a plethora of programmers who didn't know a thing about pointers or any of the old tricks programmers used to do with assembly. Wait... that's already happened :)

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Re:Mathematical explanation of music and white/black notes i... by JeremyBanks on Thursday November 25, 2010 @06:51PM (#1941275)

I'm not sure I understand. Your argument for why musicians should start at a higher level of abstraction is that starting programmers at a higher level of abstract works out poorly?

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Re:Mathematical explanation of music and white/black notes i... by levesque on Thursday November 25, 2010 @06:50PM (#1941274)

Yeah, and now we argue about whether or not knowing the basic mechanics of your typical language (be it programming or music) can help you achieve a greater global understanding and thus allow you to be a better musician/programmer overall.

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