What have I gotten myself into....

ShiroKuro · 2025-05-14T01:24:31+00:00

I enrolled in the intro to music theory class through my uni's music school. This is a summer-session course, partially online, the same amount of material a...

pseudonym58

iternabe I can get used to any system, as long as it's universally accepted. After all, in the US we still use the Imperial system of measurement, despite the fact that the metric system is a lot more logically laid out (actually I prefer Fahrenheit to the Celsius system for temperature, as it has finer whole increments)..... But I'm getting way off topic.
Okay, so ignore the lowest A, A# and B, and from there on it's C1, C#1, D1, etc.
If I were a piano tuner, I could quickly memorize where everything is. It's just a shorthand and it's easier than referring to A4 as "A 440 Hz".

ShiroKuro

pseudonym58 I could quickly memorize where everything is.

I'm good now. But I would have like to have been told that the B below C4 was B3 not B4, rather than having to figure out trial by fire style!

Actually it makes perfect sense (now!) that the numbers start on C, but if the explanation starts at middle C, I think it has to be very, very clear that when you go down, you're already in a different set of numbers...

ShiroKuro

iternabe I had a hunch that the whole point of learning music theory is that’s not enough?

Also, this comment made me laugh out loud!! Truer words were never spoken! 😆

iternabe

@ShiroKuro I think I have some sense of what you are feeling. Recently I got Walter Piston's Harmony book, and read through the first few chapters. I find the information it introduces (a few I knew, but many many new to me) interesting to know, took some thinking to understand, yet very difficult to memorize and master. Then I did the exercises at the end of those chapters. Oh my! It got hard so quickly. The chord progression in four-part voice exercise took me so long to complete. And that's where I left it, for a few months now.

I get the idea that such book is for composers, and for musicians to get into the composer's head. And that would be where the benefit lies. Yet, it would seem to take some special perseverance, some I have not found in myself, to go through the study alone by oneself. Having a teacher and course to lead and push you through this could turn out to be a very good thing. So hang in there! I am rooting for you!

ShiroKuro

iternabe thank you!!!

keystring

iternabe Recently I got Walter Piston's Harmony book, and read through the first few chapters

Piston is outdated, and is also meant for teachers who already know their theory. I can't remember details because it was long ago and I abandoned it soonish.

keystring

ShiroKuro I think one problem is that this particular detail (the octave position numbers) was not contextualized in any way -- i.e., why is this a helpful thing to know.

That might go to what I was trying to get at in my probably too long post where I tried to contrast how I decided theory might be taught and tried it out, and the subsequent observation of the 6 week condensed course. You also get where people learned, and now teach, theory as a separate abstract thing with no connection to music - no application to music in any real way, and it gets passed on the same way. Additionally, I'm no fan of cramming in a condensed way. I think when this is over you might want to unpack some of it in a more leisurely way.

Sort of related: I took a postgrad course in a new level of 2nd language teaching and the professor used the word "integration". She talked of grammar and vocab, which I relate to "theory", and said that these are useless unless you can apply them directly to speaking and writing in real time. I see "integration" in theory with played music too.

keystring

One precaution as the course advances: in all likelihood they'll get into patterns which apply to (simplified) Common Practice era music (roughly Bach to Mozart and a bit beyond). Later music can deviate from that or the rules can be taught too tightly as rules. Give it all ample wiggle room.

pianoloverus

ShiroKuro your comment is not very helpful. For one thing, I already know the basics, mostly (excluding this octave number, which is now tattooed on the back of my eyeballs).... I'm taking this course because I want to know more than the basics, like chord theory and so on, but I (obviously) have lots of holes in what I know at the moment, so I need to start with the intro course and I need to start at the beginning.

And, I'll be coming here to vent as much as anything else, so please cooperate!

Why vent over something that takes a minute to learn?

ShiroKuro

pianoloverus Why vent over something that takes a minute to learn?

This is like humor. If you don't get it, it can't be explained.

twocats

ShiroKuro although I've always know (somehow) that middle C is C4, I didn't realize that the B below middle C is B3

It is?! So only the C octaves are how the numbers are incremented??

Well your painful process taught me something 😂 I only vaguely knew how to assign the note name positions!

ShiroKuro

twocats So, if you start at the bottom of the keyboard (ignore the A and B for now) the first C is C1. Then you could go up (toward the treble side) to the B, that's B1. The next C is C2. And so on, up the keyboard until the last note in the treble, which is C8.

So the octave numbers always start at C, which means whatever B is immediately to the left of C is one number lower.

So the B to the left of middle C is B3, the one an octave below that is B2. OTOH, the B to the right of middle C, 7 notes above middle C, is B4. The C above middle C, immediately to the right of B4, is C5.

And now I will never forget this because I've taught it to someone else. I hope it's on the test! 😃

twocats

ShiroKuro well today I learned something useful! I won't tell a future tech the wrong A or B to voice!!

iternabe

ShiroKuro I looked it up and found this is called Scientific Pitch Notation.

Scientific pitch notation (SPN), also known as American standard pitch notation (ASPN) and international pitch notation (IPN), is a method of specifying musical pitch by combining a musical note name (with accidental if needed) and a number identifying the pitch's octave.

More interestingly, this notation was first proposed by an American Robert W. Young in 1939.

After reading about it, my new way of deciphering that notation is like this:

C is the reference note of each octave, therefore every octave starts at C
C3 is the C note in the 3rd octave
B2 is the B note in the 2nd octave

ShiroKuro

twocats I won't tell a future tech the wrong A or B to voice!!

Yep, and I will use this terminology as well when talking to my tech in the future.
And now I'm not so grumpy about yesterday's assignment! 😁

pianoloverus

ShiroKuro Thank the Lord!

pseudonym58

There will be a pop quiz after this thread is completed.

BartK

Be glad you don't have to learn the German system, which is in use here in Poland. 😆

Quick summary:

Notes are C D E F G A H (B actually means B-flat)
For sharp the suffix -is added: cis, dis, eis, fis, gis, ais, his
For flat the suffix -(e)s is added: ces, des, es, fes, ges, as, except B-flat, which is b as noted before. 😁
Middle C is notated c¹, with a lowercase letter and a superscript showing the octave.
Higher octaves have higher superscripts, like c², c³, etc.
The octave below middle c is called the "small" and has lowercase letters without superscripts: c d e f g a h
The octave below that is called the "great" and is notated with uppercase letters: C D E ...
The octave below that is called "contra" and notated with uppercase and subscripts: C₁ D₁ E₁ ...
The octave below that is called "sub-contra" and has higher subscripts: C₂ D₂ E₂ ...
It goes on like that...
In older texts they might use apostrophes for the higher octaves (c' c'' c''' etc) and commas for the lower octaves (C, C,, C,,, etc), which is even more confusing. The names of those higher octaves actually comes from this notation as they are called "one-stroked", "two-stroked", etc.

The advantage of that is that you can go below A0 and... well, that's the only advantage. 😄 It's a pain in the butt and I never use it unless I have to read materials in Polish. I always think using the American system, which is far superior.

hebele

BartK I am sorry but that is such a convoluted mess 🙂

However about:

In older texts they might use appostrophes for the higher octaves (c' c'' c''' etc) and commas for the lower octaves (C, C,, C,,, etc), which is even more confusing.

I've used something very similar in In LilyPond. It uses ' and , for raising and lowering the pitch. And I don't remember complaining about it 😃

For example, this:

    \relative {
      a' a, c' f,
      g g'' a,, f'
    }

becomes:

BartK

hebele
Yes, I know LilyPond uses the German system, which is where it got this from.

At least with this system I don't have to know what a "hemidemisemiquaver" is and I can use sane note value names like in American English.

rsl12

I suppose one advantage of having C be the base note as opposed to A is that you don't have the ambiguity of whether Ab4 is the same as G#3 or G#4. (I don't suppose there is ever a reason to refer to Cb in this system)

BartK

rsl12
From the Wikipedia page:

The octave number is tied to the alphabetic character used to describe the pitch, with the division between note letters 'B' and 'C', thus:

"B3" and all of its possible variants (Bdouble flat, B♭, B, B♯, Bdouble sharp) would properly be designated as being in octave "3".
"C4" and all of its possible variants (Cdouble flat, C♭, C, C♯, Cdouble sharp) would properly be designated as being in octave "4".
In equal temperament "C♭4" is same frequency as "B3".

iternabe

rsl12 I don't suppose there is ever a reason to refer to Cb in this system

Recently I tried to recreate the score of some exercises in MuseScore, and it finally made me understood why Cb and B (or other enharmonics) cannot be used interchangeably. Because they will fall on different line or space on the staff, which in turn will affect quick identification of intervals in relations to nearby notes. For example, if I identify interval of major 5th as line to line, or space to space, then B-F#, or Cb-Gb both follows this rule and looks fine, but B-Gb, or Cb-F# would look like interval of 6th or 4th respectively.

Another example would be in a scale, each letter can only used one time. Written out on the staff, the notes of a scale goes up steadily one step at a time from line to space to line. Although you can also write out the same pitches of a scale differently, let's say use both F and F# (instead of Gb), it would just look wrong because now you have two notes of a scale falling on the same line.

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