The study of the inner workings of
music. Includes things like
scales,
harmony,
rhythm, and
why it's fundamentally impossible to tune a piano perfectly.
Music is extremely
mathematical, much to my own personal delight. Everything fits into a well-defined
system, and can be described in
simple, non-
ambiguous terms. Until you study
jazz, that is.
And yet there are always
mysteries that linger. One of my favorites is this: how is it that two notes in the interval of an octave manage be different, and yet in some
undiscernable,
indescribable way, sound the same? Yes, I know that the wavelength of the lower pitch is exactly twice as long as the higher one, but that still doesn't explain the intangible way that they can
sound the same and yet different.
Not to mention that once everything seems to be making sense,
jazz comes along and breaks every single rule you ever learned. Set your
cat down on the keys of your
piano and you just played a
jazz chord.
Any
geek should love music theory. Especially when you realize that music is much like
computer programming: it's beautifully logical, and yet we're still much better at it than any
computer. :-)
People seem to be interpreting the
whimsical tone of my writeup to mean that I don't know what I'm talking about. Rest assured that I
mostly do. :-)
Art Tatum: I don't really understand the point of your analogy. Different shades of the same color don't really compare to octaves--color shades are only a result of varying
intensity of the same
hue, whereas octaves are a result of two
pitches whose frequencies share a certain property (they are in the ratio of 1:2^n). If the color spectrum were
periodic in such a way that every period had a color that was like a color in the last period, yet somehow different, then your analogy would apply.
srkorn: Yes, I understand the idea of a fundamental frequency and resulting
overtones, but that still does nothing to explain the
psychoacoustic reasoning behind human
perception of the sound of an octave. How would you explain to a
deaf person what an octave sounds like? What could you say, besides "They're
different, but somehow they sound the same?"