[linux-audio-user] Mailing list for general music making questions?

[tim hall]

On Tuesday 18 February 2003 01:24, Levi Burton wrote:
> I have always been fascinated by the creative process.  It seems everyone
> has a different way of discovering what works for them and what does not.
> Sometimes I sit and wonder to myself, "This is a pop song, but what makes
> it a pop song?" or, "This is a sad song, but what _makes_ it a sad song?".
> Being someone with no music theory background, this type of information
> would greatly improve the creative process for me.

It's all to do with ratios, everything in music is built on the basic ratio 
of 3:2 (or v/v) - this is the most harmonic relationship you can get (apart 
from 1:1, which doesn't really count as it produces no movement. As the maths 
gets more complicated, so does the sound, with some notable exceptions like 
the major 3rd. Pop songs are generally based on fairly simple ratios, and 
therefore are easier to digest. You can apply this to rhythm, melody, chord 
sequences (cadences) and even minutiae like delay timings. The research that 
went into the timing of Lexicon reverbs is well worth knowing about in this 
respect.

To cut a (very{read:the entirity of recorded history}) long story short if 
you multiply / divide 2/3 by 2/3 enough times you end up with the frequencies 
of what is known as the diatonic scale of seven notes (actually that's a 
complete lie, but it will do for this explanation). Out of this scale you can 
make 2 sets of 3 chords, one 'major' set (happy) and one sad set (minor) plus 
an odd chord which sounds horrible to most people. The chords in each set of 
3 have the same 2:3 relationship to each other. Most Blues numbers are based 
entirely on this relationship.

It's worth playing with the maths, and if you have the means, converting them 
into Hertz, anything between 60Hz and 10kHz should make audible sense. This 
isn't really any kind of explanation at all, I know, but it may be a starting 
point. You can also analyse as much as you like and still never find out what 
makes 'great' music either, that's what I like about music, it seems to be 
the one place where science and magic truly meet. Ask Pythagoras.

burble, twitter &c. ...

tim hall