Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Nate's original question was more oriented toward explaining to children, but I mostly swapped it out for an alien metaphor because I didn't want the TH-cam algorithm to incorrectly assume the video was _for_ children. It does weird things when it thinks it's dealing with children's content. (It also lets me cover the more complex details in order to contextualize why I chose to do the things I did in the final explanations.) 2) I think the final episode actually only has me stumbling over this for a couple minutes 'cause the long pauses of basically dead air weren't interesting so the editor cut them down, but checking the raw files, it's about 5 minutes. 3) Throughout this video, when I say things like "This can explain why…" what I mean is "This is an easy way to understand why…" not "This is the exact historical and theoretical origin for…". In this sort of exercise it helps to provide as many hooks as possible, and some of those are gonna be post hoc justifications. That's fine. 4) There are some points in here where I glossed over a more technical explanation for the sake of my actual audience: If I were explaining pitch perception to an actual alien, for example, I'd probably double-check that they understand why I'm talking about frequency ratios, and what it means for human pitch perception to be logarithmic. But my actual viewers probably have the context for that already, and including every diversion like that felt like it dragged down the pacing of the script too much, so I cut them. 5) It's very possible that most of my viewers got bored and left during my rant about the word "tonic", but if I manage to convince even one theory teacher to reconsider their use of that term, it will have all been worth it. 6) Honestly if I really wanted to drill deep, I probably should've included a discussion of why we associate an entire note, which typically has many constituent frequencies, with a single fundamental one when doing our math, but I had to take some license in order to keep the video from being an hour long. 7) A couple of these explanations are kinda contradictory: Early on, when talking directly about functions, I sorted the 3rd into the "definitely stable" category, whereas when I was doing the ladder of 5ths, it fell more into the "colorful" middle ground, putting it in a different position relative to the 2nd. This is largely because, in the former case, I'm more thinking of it in terms of triadic construction, whereas in the latter I'm building a different model. That's maybe confusing, but honestly I think it's kinda neat. Both explanations make sense, and they give slightly different (but largely compatible) results. Music is complicated! 8) To be clear, I do actually know why we use 12 notes per octave. 9) I probably could've been clearer on what pattern I expected you to pick up in the D major question, but honestly I like leaving it kinda vague there because it's so obvious in retrospect that if you _do_ miss it at first, that does a great job demonstrating my point about how hard it is to unlearn your own musical knowledge. 10) It was probably obvious to most of y'all that when I started talking about instruments, it wasn't actually gonna work, but I wanted to include it anyway because playing it on an instrument is, I think, how most of us first learn scales. I know it was for me: To this day, my mental model of most scales is still built on bass fingering. That's why it can be a hard thing to break down: We learn it as a physical pattern, and then derive musical meaning from that pattern, so if you break the physical connection it can be hard to recover the underlying meaning. 11) My final explanation is definitely a bit lacking in nuance and constructability, but again, that's because it's meant to be understood by a child. If I wanted to build it up further, I'd go back to some of that dividing-the-octave stuff I was doing before I had to stop doing math.
doesn't #1 create a category mistake though? explaining the major scale to an alien isn't a problem with a definition of the major scale, it's a problem with explaining anything at all to an alien. if you're going to rule out assumptions about basic familiarity with the sonority of western music, why not familiarity with spoken or written english? or even the ability to experience sound waves propagating at the frequencies human hearing? (even among terrestrial organisms there is a huge variety of auditory sense organs) all human knowledge is based on experience and context, not only because it happens to be that way but also because it can't be otherwise. if we swap the concept of alien for a human "novice" or "wild children" who have grown up isolated from all human contact, most or all of this hang-wringing goes away. You would just play them music. At some point if the person is curious and wants to learn more, you might use the major scale as a tool to explain western music in more detail, but you would never start there. You would play them music. As for explaining the major scale to people who already have a sufficient cultural context to learn it, music teachers do that every day. Even that is still contextual, experiential, and gradual. You learn things like "all the white keys" or "whole-whole-half, whole-whole-whole-half" long before you can provide a definition for a major scale. By the time you are trying to define it (high school intro to music theory maybe?) you are already quite familiar with its sound and use in context. You're just moving from intuitive to discrete comprehension. This is essentially the stalemate you arrive at at 22min. Definitions are much like deductive logic proofs, they can't arrive at a conclusion that wasn't already contained in the premises. They simply articulate existing knowledge in new ways or in relation to other known concepts. No one trying to understand the major scale will be coming to it completely naive. one of my favorite parts about your work is your willingness to call out music theory debates as irrelevant to the human experience of music, so this video really stuck out to me. it is a fascinating exercise for us theory nerds who want to dive really deep into theoretical minutia, but the premise is a straw man and will essentially never come up. what we're really doing here is playing a game of "try to define the major scale with as few starting premises as possible." in that realm, my personal favorites are the physics of sound waves and frequency ratios concept or the idea that it's two major tetrachords a whole step apart.
Hey there! Very interesting explanation. The question ties into a question of mine I always had. (I'm a complete music illiterate, who never played any instrument beside the "recorder" flute in grade school, with zero understanding of the "music" they had us play with it back then, when that's the whole lot of musical education we got in public school here in Italy when I was of the appropriate age to attend it) A question with a pretty long premise... - Premise I clearly remember how as a kid, when in school they tried to give me and the other little students a very first idea of just major and minor scales/sounds, I didn't get it at all: they said that the major one was more "happy", or "peaceful", or "solar", while the minor was more "sad", or "unsettled", or "dark". Not only those concept seemed very different one to the other internally (is "happy" also "peaceful", for example? I wouldn't have said it was, back then...), but the sounds/chords they were illustrating it with didn't reflect any of those concepts to me. Indeed I couldn't actually feel any of those human feelings in whole musical pieces based on major or minor scales at all. They all sounded relatively good, coherent in their musical piece form too, but to me a blues song didn't sound sadder or more unsettling than a military march in major scale: it was quite the opposite (it actually still is, but possibly for different reasons). Then I grew up and I experienced music in many shapes and forms, most of the time coupled with lyrics, quite often with images of some sort (movies, video games, visual art pieces, natural environments or landscapes, and so on). Now I get what they were telling me back then, and indeed I think I would find it difficult to dissociate the sound of a scale from its canonically associated emotion or mood, especially when such music is performed over the particular rhythmic cadence canonically used in the specific music genre it's featured in. - Question (finally!) Do musicians remember when their perception of music wasn't yet influenced by their acquired and studied musical culture? Or, more widely: to what extent is music actually linked to human emotions and moods "naturally", vs "culturally"? - Comment and thanks (LOL!) I don't know if you'll be interested into answering this question I carry with me since childhood. But after watching this video of yours, I think the personal experience with music I speak about in my "premise" could be of interest for your own thoughts to some extent. (That's why I felt like building this wall of text might not have been a complete waste of time and space, btw) Thanks for your videos!
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 is this a challenge? *inhales There is a form of life that can use the power of a star to create C6H12O6 this is a common form of energy among earth lifeforms. on the topic of reproduction, there are some plants that create "fruits" that entice other lifeforms to eat it, and they have "seeds" of their offspring within the fruits, because the seeds are inedible they are dispersed far away from the mother plant and allows for the plant to further reproduce and spread. One of these "fruits" is an apple and its natural sugars and juices make for a delicious treat for homo sapiens, the apple can take many forms and a popular one is to use convection heating the apple within an outer edible crust
I feel like this challenge is equivalent to attempting to describe what chocolate tastes like. You could spend all day trying to describe it, or you could just give them some chocolate to eat. Same for the major scale, or any music for that matter, the moment they start experiencing it for themselves, they’ll start to realise why we organise it and label it the way we do. 😊
If that were the case - That as soon as someone experiences music they'll work out why we organise and label it the way we do - why does only the Western musical tradition organise and label music the way the Western musical tradition labels music, specifically in regards to the major scale? Because all (I think) cultures have music. Not all organize and label music in this specific way.
@@Stephen-Fox obviously he means hearing music from a group as an explanation of that group, and that might seem to presuppose knowledge of music outside the group. But giving examples is a very effective way of explaining what fits within a group. That doesn’t in any way imply that the groupings in question are the only relevant ones. As you seem to have a somewhat hard time with the concept, perhaps it’s easier if we relate it to colours or visual art? Let’s say hypothetically that I encounter someone from a culture that doesn’t have the colour red: The easiest way to explain the color to them is through showing them hues that fit within the group I/we define as red. Or say I have to explain impressionistic painting to someone I might start by saying something about what they were trying to achieve stylistically (the formal criteria if you will), but I’d rely on the paintings to convey the concept . If I was aware the person I was explaining it to had little prior knowledge of western/European art I would include paintings from other genres as context. But normally I’d presuppose that they had this knowledge. The interesting thing though, is that regardless of whether or not they know anything about western art, they’d still learn more about impressionist painting from watching the images than me explaining it at length. Does this mean that impressionist paintings have to be grouped together? Of course not. I can group images in a myriad of different but equally valid ways, and while some would perhaps be easier to explain in words even the simplest ones like a system with groupings based on colours (that’s why the red example) would benefit immensely from the use of examples.
I have to disagree with you since the context and background you come from has an enormous effect on how you would perceive "the major scale". The alien's culture may be more interested and invested in timbre and so then the instrument you'd play the scale on, have a much larger effect that you'd expect (coming from a western background)
@@tiyenin yes thats true. But only up to a point. It depends on how compilcated the thing being explained is. Can you explain Calculus, Relativity, Electrodynamics, Global Warming, Infinity, The Expanding Universe, Entropy, Love, Hate, Economics? Or can you imagine any of those being explained simply without relying on prior relevant knowledge of the recipient?
This a brilliant example of how to break down concepts, musical or otherwise. There are so many times when people assume a certain level of prior knowledge, and cannot even imagine explaining the idea to someone without that. Considering the huge number of backgrounds, abilities, and other factors, no one can have all the background on everything. Finding where that missing step is really opens up the ability to explain and understand any concept.
Despite what my wife and friends may suggest, I'm neither an alien nor a child. That being said, this was the most informative video I've watched about music ever.
The short answer is to explain the 12 notes we use to divide up the octave, and then define the intervals between the notes. The problem is that the 12 notes (as you touched on) are not easy to explain due to temperament. I grew up thinking that the intervals between the notes were some magical mathematical equation, but I learned that those numbers don't quite work that way, and it took us hundreds of years to agree on the current temperament of the notes.
Always difficult to explain what something is rather than what it's for. What is water? What is spicy? What is evil? You did a great job, though. I have often thought about questions like this. A linked one is about the 12 tone equal tempered scale and how we choose which notes to use. As you say, the major 7th is more dissonant than the minor 7th and neither are especially close to the harmonic 7th, which would sound "better" with the tonic.
I like the concept of forcing yourself to explain things assuming no prior knowledge. I had a roommate once who would try to explain complex theory to me and he’d almost always come from a place of, “okay, so you know how XYZ?”. No. No, I don’t. And therefore I’m totally lost in the sauce.
Fantastic exercise! Had a professor in college throw questions like this at us student composers from time to time. The question that created the most debate during my senior year was, "What is Music"? The answer we came up with has stuck with me all these 40 years later. How would you define Music?
Sound either created with or listened to with attention to certain expressive elements that might include rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, and more. That covers Bach and birdsong, but not everyday speech. Car horns are a tossup
a very general definition i like that doesn't exclude more experimental works from being music is "the art of arranging sounds in time". makes sense and fits,, pretty much everything, no?
Music is a sound-based artform with focus on tone, pitch, and timing. Like all art, it's a form of communication - contexts give meaning to pieces of shared vocabulary.
As someone who not only can't read music, but can't play _any_ instruments either, but with aspirations to do so, this is probably the most useful music theory YT video I have ever seen. ... I few more basic theory videos like this, and I might have half an idea what Rick Beato is talking about in his basic theory videos!
As a person who suffered brain trauma resulting in retrograde amnesia at the age of 20 and then really got into music, I find I am constantly asking myself these exact kinds of questions while trying to learn. While it is most definitely true that my cultural immersion pre & post injury had non-conscious impact on my perceptions, I seem to find it almost impossible to grasp the reasoning behind things such as interval functions and chord inversion equivalency; I can make memorize the pseudo-math, but they just don't sound to me like they are often explained. While such has had very little impact on my enjoyment, playing, or writing, it does make it very difficult to communicate with other musicians. This has gotten a little easier as some of the more obscure concepts I've seen on your channel have aligned more closely with what I hear (like scales on a clock, but my equivalency allows for functions to counter-clockwise also, and stuff like that). Anyway, thanks for making content.
yes, exactly-purely mathematical concepts turned into explanation doesn't work for me either, besides, it the math is never as straightforward in musical scales and pitches as one may wish) i do believe it is beneficial to have 'one musical language' - and it is as you said a way of communication, but descriptive tools are always not encompassing, and as i never felt 'grammar' can explain 'language' music theory can't explain music as a living thing. maybe this gap between 'practical application' and 'theory' will close one day in one wholesome understanding, but for now 'imperfect' state is good enough i guess)
This is really interesting. I don’t have amnesia but I also have a hard time hearing intervals as intervals, I hear them as their constituent absolute pitches and have to try and reconstruct the relationship after the fact. Which definitely makes communication more difficult, but it also means I notice transpositions without even thinking and that’s apparently a thing people who predominantly hear intervals have to try and reconstruct after the fact to grasp? I don’t know because I can’t really say, since I don’t experience that.
I really appreciated this break down. I played flute in band but my knowledge of music is so very very small but I just enjoy listening to people talk about things they love and deeply understand even if I can only sort of keep up.
I thought you were going to mention the harmonic series. I often find myself trying to explain concepts to a a listener from the ground up. it's a very interesting effort. great video!
This is totally the simplest answer, in my opinion. The ratio of the 5th (3/2) and the 3rd (5/4) are easily derivable from the first five harmonics. You take a given root and find the notes a 5th above and a 5th below, and then find the 5th and the 3rd for each of these three notes. This gives you all the notes in the major scale. It's just a major triad (the most easily derived collection of three notes from the harmonic series) and the two other "closest" major triads, which are each a 5th away. Humans like this scale because it has a bunch of simple ratios in it and we like sounds that mathematically relate to each other.
This is how Star Trek did it too. Uhura: “Of course! They communicate with harmonics!” La’an: “Uh… sorry, I failed music class, what are harmonics?” Spock: “Put simply, the ratio between frequencies. Vulcans study music for its mathematical properties. Double the frequency gets an octave, triple the frequency gets a perfect fifth. Perhaps we can derive a code from this.” I’m sure I could look up a transcript but the framing and specific examples are thus. It also implies Vulcans use pure pythagorean tuning, without even the compromises of latter just intonation, and I like that because it’s very in-keeping with their other Greek philosopher aesthetic inspirations.
@kaitlyn__L they did it again in Voyager.... the void creatures learned to communicate with devices the doctor gave them. In " Fantomes musical language"
@@Patrick-ryan-collins was that based on the harmonic series? They sounded like fairly arbitrary pitches to me (at least to start, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “composition” conversation later-on was synthesised on something tuned to 12TET, haven’t listened to it closely.) I suppose it’s a somewhat subtle distinction, but that sounds like frequency shift keying to me moreso than a “musical language”, but maybe that’s just because of the dialogue the Doctor has about it being conversation not composition.
Thank you for teaching me some things today. I really appreciate that. I've been trying to study music, but there's some basic concepts that I've been just kind of setting aside if they were not immediately understood, and trying to remember to circle back. Trying to see the parts of the picture I could, and piecing it together gradually. This video really helped me understand these foundational bits and see more of the picture. Thank you!
I returned to college in middle age and got a degree in music. I learned music theory is confusing. Watching you lay out these details gave me such a wonderful sense of joy! Thank you for clearing some things up for me.
This is interesting to me. We think very differently, you and I: where you began by starting at the end result (the full major scale) and working backwards to describe it, I had paused the video (because it seemed like a fun challenge to try and explain the major scale to an alien) and started by defining sound. Then I moved into defining the frequency spectrum, then the concept of notes as tones, then the concept of relationship between notes being the basis of music, then the idea of collections of notes and their relationship to each other being the basis of a scale, then defined the 12 tone equal temperament system as the basis for 18th century western music (which we still seem to be stuck on today, trying to shove everything musical into that model, instead of revising the model), then the classical modes as collections of 7 of the 12 notes with a specific pattern of note relationships as the basis for it, then the concept of the major scale being the sort of starting point of these modes that all the other ones revolve around (again, in 18th century western music), and finally the idea of using this collection of notes with this relationship being the basis for the composition of a piece of music (or a portion thereof).
i suppose i was feeling the same-the desire to turn the explanation to the foundation. i think i am trying to understand it all for my whole life and deep dives to real 'why' is a greatest source of knowledge, even if it takes time to get to the gold-bearing vein and extract it. i agree with you on defining the sound itself first and work from the frequencies to arrange them in certain patterns (that depends not on the frequencies themselves but on the ratios). it is all models of course (approximations) with a lot of cultural layers as you pointed it out, but i believe raw bones of 'beginnings' and 'fundamentals' really do exists - even if they seem to be at the different starting point for all of us (as this video demonstrates)
When you talked about the human voice at 18:59, that would have been the perfect time to segue into the song "Do Re Mi" from "The Sound of Music." That's how I learned about the major scale when I was 7-8 years old, a year before I started taking piano lessons.
I like how the illustration for "I'm not sure how to take this deeper" was a spade. Had you drawn it inverted (as a literalization of "my spade is turned") it would have been Wittgensteinian perfection. To explain a musical convention (game?) is to explain a form of life and, after all, all explanations end somewhere...
@@bludfyre i wouldn't even mention that stuff tbh. I'd explain a minor "scale" as just a mode of this major scale. A minor=C Major=D dorian etc. Really not worth calling modes scales imo. Especially when we're just trying to talk about the major scale. We can leave it at: we can make different sounds depending on the context and how we play this scale. Theres lots of combinations to try. Most valuable tool to teaching people is knowing when to leave out information. To teach someone how to cook we don't need to teach them chemistry.
The issue with the "happy/sad" and "bright/dark" dichotomy is that it is subjective and cultural. You can have a bright sounding happy sounding minor peice in a minor scale that sou ds dark and sad to someone from the western musical culture
It can't be just a set because sets are not ordered, unlike scales. For example, C major and D Dorian are the same set of pitch classes, but they are not the same scale. Sets don't have any information regarding the most important members, unlike scales. Also, sets are not arranged in order from lowest to highest, unlike scales. So, the set approach is not very helpful.
Thank you for making a video specifically for me. It occurred to me a few years back that I didn't actually know what a chord was, let alone most of the other nitty gritty concepts so common in your videos, but I was literally to afraid to ask because it's a word that's used so frequently in tv and movies, surely everyone knows it, I was just absent or something that day.
The good news is that a chord has a very precise definition: a line segment between any two points on a circle. The bad news is that this definition has nothing to do with music.
3:10 I wasn't expecting to see a snakebird on a music theory video lmao, but it was a nice surprise! Out of curiosity, what other puzzle games have you played?
I think using a guitar and a capo is simplifying this more into saying each step up with a capo along the neck using the same chord shapes create a new set of emotions and not just pitching the song up or down for a singer, it also changes the feeling of the scale. Major being the highest (most correct in tune maybe is the word) before it starts over again because of how tuning is not accurate to true "fractal" temperament instead we just use equal temperament instead, or something like that is how I think of scales when I choose to write songs in different modes calls for playing with the capo in different places for a sad or a happy song and inbetween modes. Meaning all major scales do not sound as equally majory if that makes sense but they sound the best to our ears and thus become the major keys loved by the poeple to brighten the day.
I'd probably take a more physics/math based approach: 1. Define what an octave is: for a given frequency, double it. 2. Define the perfect fifth: the first harmonic of your given frequency. 3. Use the circle of fifths to create the chromatic scale. 4. Define a perfect fourth (which for me, as a hobby musician, is just a perfect fifth "flipped"). 4. Define a whole step and a half step on the chromatic scale. 5. To create the major scale, take the octave, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth of your given frequency. Starting at your given frequency, take whole steps until you bump into the fourth, the fifth, or the octave. For example, if our frequency is C, our perfect fifth and fourth intervals involve G and F. Starting at C, we take whole steps until we bump into the perfect fourth: D, E. From F to G is a whole step, so it's trivial. Starting from G, we continue until we bump into the octave: A, B. And that's it. Edit: Yeah, I should've listened until the end. I definitely wouldn't explain it like this to a child.
_"3. Use the circle of fifths to create the chromatic scale."_ You could also just take 7 notes a 5th apart and build the diatonic scale out of them. There's really no need to go chromatic to explain diatonic stuff. And this actually also explains why the notes are named the way they are. The 7 notes are the main notes, and you extend the string of 5ths to get the chromatic notes. But the chromatic notes are not needed for explaining the diatonic scale. Also, a 7-note stack of 5ths gives a more intuitive reason to why the half and whole steps are where they are. This way, the half/whole step pattern isn't totally arbitrary. It is the result of organizing those 7 notes (that were derived from a stack of 5ths) as a scale. Why I like my explanation is because it only requires defining two things: an octave and a fifth. Of course this resulting scale is not the major scale yet. It's the diatonic scale and doesn't yet have a tonic. You need to choose C as the tonic for it to function as the major scale. But that's the important thing - you find the diatonic scale first and understand that you can derive different scales from that same collection of notes. The major scale is only one of them.
I would love to see, or hear at least, other people from different musical traditions try this as I'd like to get to know those systems but for an outsider they can seem impenetreble especially as one who exclusively speaks English and spanish.
I would start with the natural overtone series from a scientific stand point and then break each note into their interval and voila instant major scale. I am saying this after seeing it presented in that manner initially and it worked pretty well, so a pretty good starting point.
I appreciate this a lot! I have a ton of trouble comprehending basic music concepts; like, however much you can imagine a person not comprehending about music, it's even more than that. I only partway understand what the major scale is after watching this entire video, and I consider that very good progress. I have, in the past, learned what an octave is, but it never sticks. So this kind of thought exercise is basically exactly up my alley. Thank you for this video!
I'd probably involve a wire, fishing line or thread somewhere in explaining the basics. It would be hard to actually play a major scale on it, but easy enough to explain what the fundamentals of frequencies are. Most kids have played with can telephones or or noticed that a wire fastened between two objects will play a different pitch when struck depending on how loose it is. Even to a deaf kid the concept of the octave could be explained by blocking the wire in the middle and striking one side and showing the physical difference in how quickly it vibrates.
Honestly, one of your best video yet. It is both infornativ and shakes up what you think you know quite fundamentally. And the doodles were just top tier. I once took a class were we had to come up with experiments to explain basic everyday physics stuff to 5-8 year olds. And you feel pretty stupid when you realize how quickly your explenations run out...
I think of it as a physical colour palette. Regardless of the overall hue chosen (aka the particular key), if the palette’s composition contains a certain ratio of “gentle” to “intense” pigments, the art will feel a certain way. This analogy can be extended quite far if the person inquiring about the major scale has more familiarity with visual arts.
Wow! I love this!! I understand logically that some/many people with absolute pitch perceive note classes similarly to how most people experience colors, but that’s always been very abstract and cerebral. Your framing of scales/major that way makes that concept concrete and awesome for me. I can right away see some of the ways you can extend it like you mentioned. For example, with palettes, you have colors that help reinforce the baseline, and then you usually have one or a few that are used for emphasis because of how different they are - just like scale functions!
I know you intended this video to be a hypothetical exercise to help you examine your underlying assumptions about music, but it was actually a MASSIVE help for my understanding of scales. I am a lot like your alien; I have almost no understand of music (at 16:35 I assumed D major was all the white keys between two D keys until you implied that was incorrect) but can handle some pretty abstract concepts (octave equivalency makes perfect sense as a form of modular math). Having you explain how to construct the major scale in a few different ways sincerely helped me understand where scales in general come from and what they mean. If you could do more videos like this, or videos that explore how other cultures categories music, I would be really grateful.
I think your guess about D major was what 12 was going for! (Check the pinned comment). I think that was entirely the point. What’s cool is that if you start on D and play all white notes, you get my favorite scale - “Dorian” (that it starts with “D” is just a nice coincidence). It’s criminally underused :)
I think tetra-/pentachord construction could also be helpful: the two most important/consonant intervals are the octave (2:1) and the fifth (3:2). If you start on the root, add the fifth and octave above, and try to fill out both gaps as evenly as possible while making sure they match (parallel fifths), you get the major scale. This, paired with the Pythagorean construction (11:48), helps explain why we would have one fifth that goes "the wrong way" compared to Lydian which is all ascending fifths.
If you were explaining to a deaf & blind child, I'd suggest starting with a ruler and a resonant table that the child could feel vibrating. Maybe expand with clamps & multiple rulers for comparisons and feeling beats. With a deaf child, I'd start with amphlified bass guitar, which can be felt. I think dissonant pitches would attenuate quicker and consonant pitches would inter-resonate, have beats that could be felt, and last longer.
In the same vein, there is a trendy test to give kids to explain/write down instructions for a pb&j then you have to follow it to a tee without any assumptions. A couple great youtube vids of dad's trying this out with great laughter and frustration from the kids.
My 5 cents: a way to divide an octave interval that has been particularly successful, established as a social norm in the western world over several centuries, partly as an historical accident (the piano white keys adopted almost universally) , partly because it reflects some kind of natural harmony.
Oh my. I love it, love it, love it! IMHO, you're the only one who's really getting close to the crux. The “crux”, as I've preached ad nauseum, is that music isn't just about sound (that would be physics, specifically “acoustics”). No, music is about _us;_ it's about _human psychology,_ how humans (many or most of them) respond psychologically and emotionally to sound of various kinds. That's why discussions of music so often return to words like “feels”, “tension”, “release”, “wants to resolve”, “dissonant”, “at rest”, etc etc.
I’m a drummer and I love your channel man!! I would have loved to hear a minor scale played right after your brief playing of a major scale. Just to hear the difference musically… as I’m applying it to my drum mindset. I so dig you deep dives into the music as a function.
I loved it. Thank you for taking the time to make this video. I know all of the 12 major and minor scales as well as all of the modes, so I understood everything you were talking about. However, tonic vs. root... thank you so much! Now, I won't seem like an idiot when I use one word for the other incorrectly.
@@Chris-MusicTheoryAndFretboard Ahh... Well I was calling the G minor chord the 'tonic' as it was the first chord in the progression - Now I know, tonic = scales / keys and roots = chords / inversions. I guess it all depends on how it is worded in a sentence. I guess I would call the 'first' note of a scale the 'key'. 🤔
another option would be to describe a way to actually see the patterns, I was thinking a cup of liquid like water and singing can make the difference between the pitch visibly apparent in a way that makes describing the intervals make some sense - the distances are then visible, the interactions are visible if you sing two notes as well
What do you do with the pages you've drawn on after you're done with each video? Do you throw them out or do you have boxes of pages in a closet somewhere in your home?
I very strongly agree with your teaching point (root > tonic)about what words to use when trying to communicate ideas to non-experts. As a teacher myself (not music) I think a LOT about how to explain things so that the key points get transmitted clearly. Th language fellow experts use in exchanging ideas is jargon. And among fellow experts jargon is an efficiency in sharing ideas. But as soon as your communication needs to travel outside the academy borders, its a potential barrier.
But it's just one word and doesn't take much to learn it. The problem I've seen with beginners who think root = tonic and tonic = root is that when they see multiple Major chords (like a 1-4-5) in a song, they think they need to switch keys. This is because they've been taught that root = tonic. But the truth is that every note is a root note. Each scale degree has its own name, namely: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and leading tone. I learned them! Others can too!
thank you so much for the video-it is the most prolific area of knowledge-digging, those basic questions that calls us to go deep down to real 'why'. after spending a lot of time trying to explain the same thing to myself, i came up with something that is an old tried and trusted montessory-based. as an acalculic person with 'bad ears' i can never rely on what i hear and i cant count, so i prefer visual representation that can be turned into even more basic - sensual one. spending time creating different layouts for keyboard not only showed me why it is layered as it is and why this UI is maybe not perfect, but functional, lead me to 'a mode' with visual gaps between piano keys as we should concentrate on counting intervals between the notes and not notes themselves. visualizing thing that is 'not there' allowed to 'work' with it visually. so for anyone who can't hear/play/count i would suggest a string of beads - better if they make one for themselves) each bead is a note and the gaps between them being the same-as a basis. now we just string beads in a certain order generating scale patterns (it can be expanded with differently colored beads and strings or patterned beads and different gauges of strings for 'sensing-only' experience)
16:09 Being able to break musical concepts down like this is so difficult! I remember in college when I started working with younger students who would make me think: when was the last time I spoke to someone who didn’t know what [insert musical concept] is? It’d been so long since I had to think about how to explain certain things.
Writing for a Deaf child, you might relate back to a time they may have felt the floor or a piece of furniture shake when a vehicle drove by, or the wind was blowing really hard, or someone was playing very "loud" music. They may remember how at different times the speed of that shaking changed, or simply was different between occurrences. That's what a note is, or sound for that matter, except the vibrations are so fast you can usually only feel them in your ears. Then to show how different vibrations can interact to create definitive intervals and chords, just demonstrate on your pipe organ's 32' registers, simple as that.
I love the idea that a scale needn't start/end on the same note and when you put them together you might end up with a ton of interesting harmonic relationships between registers. I am not the right person to explain the Ionian.😂
As a non-musician, if you had left out the explanation of where the question came from, I would think of this as snobbish ranting. But the fact that you described the pain of simplifying the terminology, and universalizing it while simplifying showed me how strong your passion is for this. Not up my alley, but I really Really appreciate your passion and want you to be successful. Updooting, and watching all the way through for your analytics.
A great exercise in learning. Reminds me of the Feynman Technique. Fun fact: besides being a physicist, among other things, Richard Feynman was also a bongo player during his trips to Brazil. I wonder how he would teach Bongo playing to someone with no knowledge of playing music.
18:24 - actually I'd like to see you work with a trumpet. How would that work out? How do explain what a major scale is, using only a single trumpet? Beyond simply playing examples of "this is a major scale. And so is this. And so is this. This _isn't_ a major scale" etc. etc.
This is a case where the question is not actually the question and the problem is not actually answering the question but putting it into a form of communication that is almost totally incompatible with the normal form of communication for the answer, and how much the context defines the question more than the words in the question
Here's an idea: The major scale is a collection of inter-related sound wave frequencies. They aren't a set of specific frequencies, rather it is about the relationships between them as perceived in a human's ears linear pitch perception; the spacings between pitches must be preserved in order for the major scale to be recognised. The relationships between these pitches are the basis of most music from Western Europe and places where Europe's empires have exerted influence, plus popular music influenced by Euro-American popular music.
Since the major scale was not created in a vacuum, we can explain it is a way of explaining what is commonly done in music. It came after the music to explain it. (And of course add it isn’t the only way, but one of the most common. All theory comes after the music to explain it and be able to share it. May be oversimplified, but it’s where it starts. And then you can go over the info in the video.
In my band class I demonstrate to my students the different frequencies to explain why 12 notes. If we go to close from one frequency to another, you can't hear a big difference in actual pitch if the frequencies are too close.
Start from any note (that is, any frequency), that is going to be your root note, and add the notes that have a frequency of 2^(2/12), 2^(4/12), 2^(5/12), 2^(7/12), 2^(9/12) and 2^(11/12) times the frequency of your root note. Those 7 notes are your major scale. You can also use any note that has a frequency 2^n and (1/2)^n times the frequency of any of the 7 original notes (that will be the same notes that the original 7 but in a higher or lower octave). This is the major scale by definition.
i think this really displays what einstein meant when he said “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." this kind of thing is a great way to make sure *you* actually understand what you're talking about.
One distinction that one encounters less often is that of the, "pitch class." When one differentiates between the pitch and the pitch class, it can make these kinds of technical descriptions a little easier to construct.
I love this video, especially the jump from guitar to voice. I like digital music, all those different wave shapes on the oscillator but I love acoustic. The whole thing with the strings ringing clear and loud. I guess my explanation is just sound go up-down.
I've wanted this for so long, more specifically I want to unite what my ears hear with years of solving wave equations. The terminology of music has been a huge roadblock, just explain it to me like I'm an alien, or a physicist, or a child... All three are accurate
Explaining the major scale to me seems pretty easy. I always explain it as a ladder. You can go up and you can go down. The intervalls are the steps you take as you go up or down. Every step get's a number from 1 to 12. Then you start at 1 and go up 2 steps, 2 more steps, 1 step, 2 steps, 2 steps, 2 steps and then 1 more to end up on the 12th step and then you start over. If you want to go down you go backwards. Hope this helps annyone. By the way i love your content, have been watching for quite some time now and you are really clear about stuf and i love the drawings. Hope to see much more in the future.
I'm working on my master's in music theory and we have talked about this and also how to make visuals of the major scale that anyone can understand with varying levels of information
I was like on this will be easy... then got more than 100 words deep and realized its not so easy to explain 😅 Ahhhhh if i were to keep it as simple as possible, i would say: Notes are like colors. Just as taking a set of colors gives you pallet, taking a set of notes gives you a scale, chord or set. The major scale is the most commonly uses set of notes for melodies and harmonies in traditional music of the west.
As a person with no formal musical education, and scattershot knowledge acquired through reading and listening, I found this fascinating. Even though I know most of the terms you used, I enjoyed how you dug deeper as you disqualified every explanation you expounded. I loved that every "alien" was different, and of course that the covered penny farthing bicycle for good old Number 6 showed up. Thanks!
Hi, great video as always. Quick note: There is another much easier explanation, if you use a theoretical basic concept, that is not yet so well known out of Europe (maybe even out of Poland and Germany). It is called "interne Quintenbreite" witch means internal fifths width if translated word by word. It ist absolutely plausible and super easy to understand. If you are interested, led me know. I am a german professor for music theory (mainly jazz) and I am sure, I can convince you in a minute. It is about the fundamental question "Y".
Drawing a strawberry with a crown for "fairly simple sounding challenge" is DEVIOUS! I've been binging Celeste again and oh my gosh does that picture get across the idea of "sounds simple but sure isn't" really well.
Hello, I love your videos! You put into words the reasons behind why music evokes certain emotions in a way that's easy to understand, and it only heightens my appreciation for music as a whole. A song that never fails to evoke emotions from me is "Lazy Eye" by Silversun Pickups, and I would love if you could make a video on it. It's one of my favorites, and I feel like it'd be the perfect song to analyze for the type of videos you make. Keep up the good work!
16:37 That bit right there is why childhood piano lessons failed for me. Rote memorisation of lists of notes with no structure to put them in context. And why I'm finally beginning - just beginning - to understand music in my late 40's.
Take any frequency and call it a root note. An octave is double the frequency of the root note, and we divide the range between the root and the octave into a sequence of 12 frequencies we call half steps. To find the next frequency in the sequence, multiply any frequency by the 12th root of 2. The movement from one frequency to the next one in the sequence is a half step. There is also a whole step, where one frequency in the sequence is skipped. The whole step is the movement from one frequency to the frequency after the next in the sequence. A major scale is defined by a different sequence of frequencies, starting from the root and ending on the octave, consisting of a whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.
I took guitar lessons many years ago, but never really picked up much of any music theory, and have just been casually learning songs from tabs since (playing clarinet in school for a couple years didn't help much either, other than learning basic music notation). I've been trying to better understand concepts like scales and chords for a while, but it's been difficult to connect with in a practical way that I can make use of - a lot of lessons seem to be just "play this scale a lot, and it will make sense", but that's pretty boring and it hasn't. I appreciated the explanations in this video - I'm not quite there yet, but it feels like this filled in a few gaps that will help it piece together better for me eventually.
I can sympathize. Music theory always defaults to, and thus "speaks" in major. Because of the musical genres I like/write and got my start thinking about, I default to the minor key, and "speak" in minor. We always have or foundation in what we started with. Let me put it this way: When I started looking at traditional music theory, I had trouble wrapping my head around something very "straight forward:" transposing instruments. Until I realized that since I was playing guitar and bass, tabbing it and referring ot the chords by the shape, but tuning down to D or drop D, I *was already doing it.* It was just that every "explanation" that I saw seemed like it was describing something a lot more complex that what I was already doing. I do think that it does change how we look at things. All the white keys on the piano? For me, that's A minor.
9:24 I've always assumed we used high and low because higher pitches have frequencies with higher numerical values and vice versa for low. Though I suppose its also quite possible that other cultures don't use high and low to compare numbers either.
If you ask a person who did not train to do music, they probably will repeat same pitch over and over. Or shif by tone or semitone at most. No way any person without vocal training will eventually do an octave, that is unnatural. When I started vocal lessons and tried to replicate what my teacher ask me , I repeated same pitch over and over. So it is a valid concern at 21:30
I just got to where you’re talking about the perfect forth as dissonant, but that’s a function of harmony - if you are coming from a “scales not harmony” position the fourth is very consonant. The third is an important note in harmony but in scalar terms it’s not nearly as strong a note.
Fascinating pedagogical challenge. We’re trying to step down levels of abstraction until we arrive at a concept the audience already grasps, in order to move forward from there. In assuming the audience has no prior knowledge, it’s a hopeless endeavor I think. Definitions are ultimately circular.
As an exercise, it serves to illustrate how any teacher/explainer essentially MUST travel back until the find the terra firma of common ground, because only then can you reason forward together.
i'd try by explaining frequency, pitch, maybe Hz, then octaves, cents and then telling: 'the major scale is 200 200 100 200 200 200 100, loop it every octave and do what you want with the pitches you get'
I really enjoyed this video, but I do have one nitpick at 19:24 - There *is* a reason to call them high and low notes, because that's how language describes magnitude and that's ultimately all pitches are. I think most people would agree that the thing that defines pitch is the frequency of a vibration. A high note has a higher frequency of vibration, and a low note has a lower frequency of vibration. To me, the descriptors of magnitude when referring to frequency and therefore pitch is fairly prescribed as the words for high and low, and not just a "colour" word that is built through cultural weight like, for example, sharp and flat. What's interesting is there's another definition I think would work and be pretty consistent in the same manner, which is faster and slower. If I placed a ruler on the end of a table and flicked it, you would be able to demonstrate the differences in pitches by how fast and how slow the ruler vibrates visually. Even then though, the concept of fast relies on two components, "high speed", and we're back to the word high. Admittedly I'm not the best writer so I don't know if I can get across what I'm trying to say clearly, but I do believe that High and Low, since they relate to frequency outside of the domain of music, are fundamentally different as descriptors compared to your examples.
Technical writer with Western musical training here, and my first thought was approximately where you ended up, but hopefully with slightly kid-friendlier wording: 1. Show that there are distances between notes (pitch intervals); introduce half (small) steps and whole (big) steps. 2. Introduce octaves: here are two notes that kind of sound the same. 3. Scales are combinations of small steps and big steps that go from one note to a note that kind of sounds the same. Different orders of small steps and big steps make scales that sound different, and those different sounds make you feel different things. 4. The major scale is this particular order of small steps and big steps. Kinda sounds happy, doesn't it? 5. And then if the kid is still interested, move on to how you can mix up the notes in a scale to make songs. Maybe bring in Julie Andrews here.
Fold a slip of paper ( assuming this is available --- since you are writing a book ) If you ask them to start with a page that is square,, you ask they make 2 folds crosswise resulting in a smaller square - now unfold the paper... give each corner a number (in order) 1,2,3,4 with 1& 2 being "UP and 3 & 4 being "down" create 16 evenly spaced lines between 1& 2 (eight on either side of your center fold call these lines NOTES (i am using 16 as that gives you room to discuss Octives etc..) start labeling these lines -- you get the idea .. we have them CREATE an instrument to learn on. although the instrument does not make a sound -- once you have explained the intervals you can then return to "now imagine this is not folding on paper - but folds in the air -- I e SOUNDS .. the paper will have 16 vertical lines + a center fold also, a horizontal fold should give you the ability to both explain concepts and also avoid "bad patterns" that might need to be unlearned -- as you can just say "Leave that blank for now" letting them know more complexity should be expected ( at least as a retired teacher of special programs -- this is how I would do it .. )
after some discussion ... I would like to modify my suggestion to include a diagonal fold. such that some of my graphable spaces are longer and others shorter. following that - I would also start the discussion with the center of the page . give that center point the label "middle C" and work outward. -- I have a friend thinking about utilizing this method, so please give any relevant input
Hi. I have my MMus, and this is a pet question of mine. I believe there is a better answer to this, from something a lot closer to first principles. Would you be interested in a video essay response? It involves some pretty neat references to deep music history (think Ancient Greece), but it’s also something you can demonstrate to kids in a few minutes, even with some hands on participation. Your friend might like it, too. 😊
I love that idea of "how to explain the Major Scale to a child" 'cuz that was me a few months ago except replace "child" with 20-somthing year old with no knowledge of music theory. Disclaimer that I'm all self-taught and I gotta agree with the part about assumptions. Like, dear goodness, it was just so hard to get my head around so many concepts 'cuz they put Ionian mode as the center. Everything just really started to click when I got introduced to the Lydian chromatic concept and having Lydian as a reference point. The explanation of scales using the piano keys makes more sense starting from F , having 6 ascending fifths instead of the weird 5 fifths up and 1 down (then you would have to explain inversions), using the overtone series as a way to justify why the octave and the perfect fifth are such cornerstones. Other concepts like the circle of fifths and modes are much more easy to digest with circle starting on F (it also looks nicer). Going down one direction (F-C-G-D-A-E-B) sharpens, and adds, the previous tone while going down the other direction (F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb-Cb) already flattens and adds the tone you're in. Just overall an easier way to learn it. While with modes, instead of considering Lydian having a #4, Ionian having a b4 just makes more sense since the other modes all are taught to have another flattened degree added until Locrian is all flattened minus the tonic. So yeah, I particulary like the explanation of going by perfect 5ths and that, while it gets us Lydian, in western tradition we just like our 4 flattened.
_"Like, dear goodness, it was just so hard to get my head around so many concepts 'cuz they put Ionian mode as the center. Everything just really started to click when I got introduced to the Lydian chromatic concept and having Lydian as a reference point."_ The reason why Ionian is the "center" is because of musical practice. Theory is easiest to understand from musical context. If you are used to playing Western music, you know that the major scale is used all the time, whereas the Lydian scale is quite rare. You learn theory as you learn music. The reason why theory may feel difficult is that people are learning it separately from music. They are learning these weird abstract concepts, but not actually getting familiar with musical practice. The issue is learning theory theoretically and not practically. Most music theory is based on musical practice, and isn't some kind of a separate "rule book of music" that exists outside of actual music. Music theory is based on music. Music isn't based on music theory. And that's why major and minor are taught first - most music is in major and minor keys, even if some other scales might make more "logical" sense. Find me a piece of music that's in Lydian. That's actually not easy. Find me a piece of music that's in major or minor. That's really easy - you hear them every day. This is why I don't think a "Lydian-centric" system makes much sense, at least if you want to understand how tonality works (because basic tonality with V7 - I resolutions is pretty much built into the major scale). My argument would be that stacking 5ths doesn't actually give you any particular mode - it only gives you a collection of notes that on its own doesn't have a tonic. This is the diatonic scale: The notes A B C D E F G, but only as a collection of notes, and not as a mode that has a specific hierarchy. Then, from that diatonic collection, you can derive 7 scales (that are the diatonic modes). Aeolian is the A mode, Locrian is the B mode, Ionian is the C mode, Dorian is the D mode, Phrygian is the E mode, Lydian is the F mode, and Mixolydian is the G mode. It is true, though, that understanding the basic pattern behind the circle of fifths as starting from F makes sense. But this doesn't require thinking in Lydian. The circle of 5ths is a pattern that works in any diatonic mode. You simply use different notes for different modes as the starting point. The circle of fifths in the ascending direction is Fb Cb Gb Db Ab Eb Bb F C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# E# B#. The order is always the same. For major key, you start from C. For minor key, you start from A. For Lydian, you start from F. For Phrygian, you start from E. Works the same way for any mode.
I’m new to your channel and I love your art work and explanation of music. I’m not a musician or in the musical theory industry but I am a huge fan of music and I like learning about it. Do you have a video that is sort of a glossary or beginners guide to some of these terms and concepts you’re explaining?
In terms of explaining a major scale, I think I would base my description of it around two intervals which you hardly mentioned at all - the major second, and the perfect fourth. I'd define the major second (the "tone") as a note which is comfortably and definitely different to the first note (key centre), but which can be be divided into smaller parts (at least two). If you were using the metaphor of going from place to place, it is a normal walking "pace", or a "step". I'd not sure how I'd define a perfect fourth!! In terms of metaphor, it's a leap, appreciably bigger than a a step, and bigger than a double step, but not by much, perhaps half a step bigger. Then a major scale, ascending (going higher in frequency or pitch) becomes: The key centre / tonic; a step up; another step of the same size up; another smaller step up, so that you are now a perfect fourth above the key centre / tonic (these four notes are called the major tetrachord); A step up (this becomes the dominant, the second most important note of the key); From the dominant; a step up; another step of the same size up; and finally a smaller step up to take you to the note an octave above the original key centre note (note that the last four notes form another major tetrachord) to give a new key centre note, which, with octave equivalence is the "same" as the original key centre note.
A pattern of notes (sounds "highness" or "lowness") which generally sound happy or energetic. We're not sure, but we think they sound nice together because the note sounds vibrations fit into simple fractions. We can build one by choosing any root note and building up those fractions to get the other notes. If the vibration is double or half it sounds like the same note but higher or lower, so we can create all the white notes on a piano from simple, easy to match up fractions. And so on, I don't have the attention span to know what else to explain. 😅
I think a good middle ground between relying on existing western musical instruments, and trying to explain to people how to use their voice, you could get them to construct a basic tonal noisemaker. The obvious example to me is the classic "ruler sticking off a table" approach. It's simple enough that you can explain it it clearly using only words, and you can explicitly describe how to produce different pitches, and you get a nice visual confirmation of the octave concept when the distance the ruler sticks out is twice as big.
Some additional thoughts/corrections:
1) Nate's original question was more oriented toward explaining to children, but I mostly swapped it out for an alien metaphor because I didn't want the TH-cam algorithm to incorrectly assume the video was _for_ children. It does weird things when it thinks it's dealing with children's content. (It also lets me cover the more complex details in order to contextualize why I chose to do the things I did in the final explanations.)
2) I think the final episode actually only has me stumbling over this for a couple minutes 'cause the long pauses of basically dead air weren't interesting so the editor cut them down, but checking the raw files, it's about 5 minutes.
3) Throughout this video, when I say things like "This can explain why…" what I mean is "This is an easy way to understand why…" not "This is the exact historical and theoretical origin for…". In this sort of exercise it helps to provide as many hooks as possible, and some of those are gonna be post hoc justifications. That's fine.
4) There are some points in here where I glossed over a more technical explanation for the sake of my actual audience: If I were explaining pitch perception to an actual alien, for example, I'd probably double-check that they understand why I'm talking about frequency ratios, and what it means for human pitch perception to be logarithmic. But my actual viewers probably have the context for that already, and including every diversion like that felt like it dragged down the pacing of the script too much, so I cut them.
5) It's very possible that most of my viewers got bored and left during my rant about the word "tonic", but if I manage to convince even one theory teacher to reconsider their use of that term, it will have all been worth it.
6) Honestly if I really wanted to drill deep, I probably should've included a discussion of why we associate an entire note, which typically has many constituent frequencies, with a single fundamental one when doing our math, but I had to take some license in order to keep the video from being an hour long.
7) A couple of these explanations are kinda contradictory: Early on, when talking directly about functions, I sorted the 3rd into the "definitely stable" category, whereas when I was doing the ladder of 5ths, it fell more into the "colorful" middle ground, putting it in a different position relative to the 2nd. This is largely because, in the former case, I'm more thinking of it in terms of triadic construction, whereas in the latter I'm building a different model. That's maybe confusing, but honestly I think it's kinda neat. Both explanations make sense, and they give slightly different (but largely compatible) results. Music is complicated!
8) To be clear, I do actually know why we use 12 notes per octave.
9) I probably could've been clearer on what pattern I expected you to pick up in the D major question, but honestly I like leaving it kinda vague there because it's so obvious in retrospect that if you _do_ miss it at first, that does a great job demonstrating my point about how hard it is to unlearn your own musical knowledge.
10) It was probably obvious to most of y'all that when I started talking about instruments, it wasn't actually gonna work, but I wanted to include it anyway because playing it on an instrument is, I think, how most of us first learn scales. I know it was for me: To this day, my mental model of most scales is still built on bass fingering. That's why it can be a hard thing to break down: We learn it as a physical pattern, and then derive musical meaning from that pattern, so if you break the physical connection it can be hard to recover the underlying meaning.
11) My final explanation is definitely a bit lacking in nuance and constructability, but again, that's because it's meant to be understood by a child. If I wanted to build it up further, I'd go back to some of that dividing-the-octave stuff I was doing before I had to stop doing math.
0:32 it's alright questions are better than answers anyway.
'cause an answer can always be made better but you need the question to do it.
the nebula link is broken :((
Re (7). The major 3rd with a 5/4 ratio isn't the same as the note found from successive 5ths, which is 81/64. So you are kind of right both ways!
doesn't #1 create a category mistake though? explaining the major scale to an alien isn't a problem with a definition of the major scale, it's a problem with explaining anything at all to an alien. if you're going to rule out assumptions about basic familiarity with the sonority of western music, why not familiarity with spoken or written english? or even the ability to experience sound waves propagating at the frequencies human hearing? (even among terrestrial organisms there is a huge variety of auditory sense organs) all human knowledge is based on experience and context, not only because it happens to be that way but also because it can't be otherwise. if we swap the concept of alien for a human "novice" or "wild children" who have grown up isolated from all human contact, most or all of this hang-wringing goes away. You would just play them music. At some point if the person is curious and wants to learn more, you might use the major scale as a tool to explain western music in more detail, but you would never start there. You would play them music.
As for explaining the major scale to people who already have a sufficient cultural context to learn it, music teachers do that every day. Even that is still contextual, experiential, and gradual. You learn things like "all the white keys" or "whole-whole-half, whole-whole-whole-half" long before you can provide a definition for a major scale. By the time you are trying to define it (high school intro to music theory maybe?) you are already quite familiar with its sound and use in context. You're just moving from intuitive to discrete comprehension. This is essentially the stalemate you arrive at at 22min. Definitions are much like deductive logic proofs, they can't arrive at a conclusion that wasn't already contained in the premises. They simply articulate existing knowledge in new ways or in relation to other known concepts. No one trying to understand the major scale will be coming to it completely naive.
one of my favorite parts about your work is your willingness to call out music theory debates as irrelevant to the human experience of music, so this video really stuck out to me. it is a fascinating exercise for us theory nerds who want to dive really deep into theoretical minutia, but the premise is a straw man and will essentially never come up. what we're really doing here is playing a game of "try to define the major scale with as few starting premises as possible." in that realm, my personal favorites are the physics of sound waves and frequency ratios concept or the idea that it's two major tetrachords a whole step apart.
Hey there!
Very interesting explanation.
The question ties into a question of mine I always had.
(I'm a complete music illiterate, who never played any instrument beside the "recorder" flute in grade school, with zero understanding of the "music" they had us play with it back then, when that's the whole lot of musical education we got in public school here in Italy when I was of the appropriate age to attend it)
A question with a pretty long premise...
- Premise
I clearly remember how as a kid, when in school they tried to give me and the other little students a very first idea of just major and minor scales/sounds, I didn't get it at all: they said that the major one was more "happy", or "peaceful", or "solar", while the minor was more "sad", or "unsettled", or "dark".
Not only those concept seemed very different one to the other internally (is "happy" also "peaceful", for example? I wouldn't have said it was, back then...), but the sounds/chords they were illustrating it with didn't reflect any of those concepts to me.
Indeed I couldn't actually feel any of those human feelings in whole musical pieces based on major or minor scales at all. They all sounded relatively good, coherent in their musical piece form too, but to me a blues song didn't sound sadder or more unsettling than a military march in major scale: it was quite the opposite (it actually still is, but possibly for different reasons).
Then I grew up and I experienced music in many shapes and forms, most of the time coupled with lyrics, quite often with images of some sort (movies, video games, visual art pieces, natural environments or landscapes, and so on). Now I get what they were telling me back then, and indeed I think I would find it difficult to dissociate the sound of a scale from its canonically associated emotion or mood, especially when such music is performed over the particular rhythmic cadence canonically used in the specific music genre it's featured in.
- Question (finally!)
Do musicians remember when their perception of music wasn't yet influenced by their acquired and studied musical culture?
Or, more widely: to what extent is music actually linked to human emotions and moods "naturally", vs "culturally"?
- Comment and thanks (LOL!)
I don't know if you'll be interested into answering this question I carry with me since childhood.
But after watching this video of yours, I think the personal experience with music I speak about in my "premise" could be of interest for your own thoughts to some extent.
(That's why I felt like building this wall of text might not have been a complete waste of time and space, btw)
Thanks for your videos!
"If you wish to explain the major scale, you must first explain the universe." - Carl Sagan
On that note, imagine explaining apple pie to an alien.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 bald eagle screeches in the background
Even explaining something simple like our counting system and basic math would be quite a challenge
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 is this a challenge?
*inhales
There is a form of life that can use the power of a star to create C6H12O6 this is a common form of energy among earth lifeforms. on the topic of reproduction, there are some plants that create "fruits" that entice other lifeforms to eat it, and they have "seeds" of their offspring within the fruits, because the seeds are inedible they are dispersed far away from the mother plant and allows for the plant to further reproduce and spread.
One of these "fruits" is an apple and its natural sugars and juices make for a delicious treat for homo sapiens, the apple can take many forms and a popular one is to use convection heating the apple within an outer edible crust
I feel like this challenge is equivalent to attempting to describe what chocolate tastes like. You could spend all day trying to describe it, or you could just give them some chocolate to eat. Same for the major scale, or any music for that matter, the moment they start experiencing it for themselves, they’ll start to realise why we organise it and label it the way we do. 😊
If that were the case - That as soon as someone experiences music they'll work out why we organise and label it the way we do - why does only the Western musical tradition organise and label music the way the Western musical tradition labels music, specifically in regards to the major scale? Because all (I think) cultures have music. Not all organize and label music in this specific way.
@@Stephen-Fox true! east asian music culture is mainly in the pentatonic scale so they definitely organised differently from western classical music
@@JunuKR People from two different cultures can hear the same music and understand it in completely different ways.
@@Stephen-Fox obviously he means hearing music from a group as an explanation of that group, and that might seem to presuppose knowledge of music outside the group. But giving examples is a very effective way of explaining what fits within a group. That doesn’t in any way imply that the groupings in question are the only relevant ones.
As you seem to have a somewhat hard time with the concept, perhaps it’s easier if we relate it to colours or visual art? Let’s say hypothetically that I encounter someone from a culture that doesn’t have the colour red: The easiest way to explain the color to them is through showing them hues that fit within the group I/we define as red.
Or say I have to explain impressionistic painting to someone I might start by saying something about what they were trying to achieve stylistically (the formal criteria if you will), but I’d rely on the paintings to convey the concept . If I was aware the person I was explaining it to had little prior knowledge of western/European art I would include paintings from other genres as context. But normally I’d presuppose that they had this knowledge. The interesting thing though, is that regardless of whether or not they know anything about western art, they’d still learn more about impressionist painting from watching the images than me explaining it at length.
Does this mean that impressionist paintings have to be grouped together? Of course not. I can group images in a myriad of different but equally valid ways, and while some would perhaps be easier to explain in words even the simplest ones like a system with groupings based on colours (that’s why the red example) would benefit immensely from the use of examples.
I have to disagree with you since the context and background you come from has an enormous effect on how you would perceive "the major scale".
The alien's culture may be more interested and invested in timbre and so then the instrument you'd play the scale on, have a much larger effect that you'd expect (coming from a western background)
"but here's the thing ... I don't care." 😂
You're so collected and methodical most of the time and then it ... breaks. The spicy sarcasm kills me.
This is a very good exercise, no matter the discipline. It can be helpful to explain anything you're good at this way, not just music!
It's been too long since I've seen a good ol' scout bird profile picture
yes true. There's nothing to better show how little one understands anything than trying to explain it to a child.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
@@tiyenin yes thats true. But only up to a point. It depends on how compilcated the thing being explained is. Can you explain Calculus, Relativity, Electrodynamics, Global Warming, Infinity, The Expanding Universe, Entropy, Love, Hate, Economics? Or can you imagine any of those being explained simply without relying on prior relevant knowledge of the recipient?
This a brilliant example of how to break down concepts, musical or otherwise. There are so many times when people assume a certain level of prior knowledge, and cannot even imagine explaining the idea to someone without that. Considering the huge number of backgrounds, abilities, and other factors, no one can have all the background on everything. Finding where that missing step is really opens up the ability to explain and understand any concept.
Despite what my wife and friends may suggest, I'm neither an alien nor a child. That being said, this was the most informative video I've watched about music ever.
Lmao
The short answer is to explain the 12 notes we use to divide up the octave, and then define the intervals between the notes. The problem is that the 12 notes (as you touched on) are not easy to explain due to temperament. I grew up thinking that the intervals between the notes were some magical mathematical equation, but I learned that those numbers don't quite work that way, and it took us hundreds of years to agree on the current temperament of the notes.
I'd actually refer to ViHart's description of sound and use a vibrating ruler to show pitch changes and scale.
when in doubt, refer to ViHart's description
Always difficult to explain what something is rather than what it's for. What is water? What is spicy? What is evil?
You did a great job, though. I have often thought about questions like this. A linked one is about the 12 tone equal tempered scale and how we choose which notes to use. As you say, the major 7th is more dissonant than the minor 7th and neither are especially close to the harmonic 7th, which would sound "better" with the tonic.
I like the concept of forcing yourself to explain things assuming no prior knowledge. I had a roommate once who would try to explain complex theory to me and he’d almost always come from a place of, “okay, so you know how XYZ?”. No. No, I don’t. And therefore I’m totally lost in the sauce.
Fantastic exercise! Had a professor in college throw questions like this at us student composers from time to time. The question that created the most debate during my senior year was, "What is Music"? The answer we came up with has stuck with me all these 40 years later. How would you define Music?
He talks about "what is music" in his video about Ben Shapiro
I mean, the only answer I can really come up with to that question is a kind of smart aleck riff on Forrest Gump: Music is as music does.
Sound either created with or listened to with attention to certain expressive elements that might include rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, and more. That covers Bach and birdsong, but not everyday speech. Car horns are a tossup
a very general definition i like that doesn't exclude more experimental works from being music is "the art of arranging sounds in time". makes sense and fits,, pretty much everything, no?
Music is a sound-based artform with focus on tone, pitch, and timing. Like all art, it's a form of communication - contexts give meaning to pieces of shared vocabulary.
As someone who not only can't read music, but can't play _any_ instruments either, but with aspirations to do so, this is probably the most useful music theory YT video I have ever seen. ... I few more basic theory videos like this, and I might have half an idea what Rick Beato is talking about in his basic theory videos!
As a person who suffered brain trauma resulting in retrograde amnesia at the age of 20 and then really got into music, I find I am constantly asking myself these exact kinds of questions while trying to learn. While it is most definitely true that my cultural immersion pre & post injury had non-conscious impact on my perceptions, I seem to find it almost impossible to grasp the reasoning behind things such as interval functions and chord inversion equivalency; I can make memorize the pseudo-math, but they just don't sound to me like they are often explained. While such has had very little impact on my enjoyment, playing, or writing, it does make it very difficult to communicate with other musicians. This has gotten a little easier as some of the more obscure concepts I've seen on your channel have aligned more closely with what I hear (like scales on a clock, but my equivalency allows for functions to counter-clockwise also, and stuff like that). Anyway, thanks for making content.
yes, exactly-purely mathematical concepts turned into explanation doesn't work for me either, besides, it the math is never as straightforward in musical scales and pitches as one may wish) i do believe it is beneficial to have 'one musical language' - and it is as you said a way of communication, but descriptive tools are always not encompassing, and as i never felt 'grammar' can explain 'language' music theory can't explain music as a living thing. maybe this gap between 'practical application' and 'theory' will close one day in one wholesome understanding, but for now 'imperfect' state is good enough i guess)
This is really interesting. I don’t have amnesia but I also have a hard time hearing intervals as intervals, I hear them as their constituent absolute pitches and have to try and reconstruct the relationship after the fact.
Which definitely makes communication more difficult, but it also means I notice transpositions without even thinking and that’s apparently a thing people who predominantly hear intervals have to try and reconstruct after the fact to grasp? I don’t know because I can’t really say, since I don’t experience that.
scales on a clock for the win
I really appreciated this break down. I played flute in band but my knowledge of music is so very very small but I just enjoy listening to people talk about things they love and deeply understand even if I can only sort of keep up.
I thought you were going to mention the harmonic series.
I often find myself trying to explain concepts to a a listener from the ground up. it's a very interesting effort. great video!
I thought the same thing. The Harmonic series is my go-to starting point for this sort of thing because it shows many of the consonant intervals
This is totally the simplest answer, in my opinion. The ratio of the 5th (3/2) and the 3rd (5/4) are easily derivable from the first five harmonics. You take a given root and find the notes a 5th above and a 5th below, and then find the 5th and the 3rd for each of these three notes. This gives you all the notes in the major scale. It's just a major triad (the most easily derived collection of three notes from the harmonic series) and the two other "closest" major triads, which are each a 5th away.
Humans like this scale because it has a bunch of simple ratios in it and we like sounds that mathematically relate to each other.
This is how Star Trek did it too.
Uhura: “Of course! They communicate with harmonics!”
La’an: “Uh… sorry, I failed music class, what are harmonics?”
Spock: “Put simply, the ratio between frequencies. Vulcans study music for its mathematical properties. Double the frequency gets an octave, triple the frequency gets a perfect fifth. Perhaps we can derive a code from this.”
I’m sure I could look up a transcript but the framing and specific examples are thus. It also implies Vulcans use pure pythagorean tuning, without even the compromises of latter just intonation, and I like that because it’s very in-keeping with their other Greek philosopher aesthetic inspirations.
@kaitlyn__L they did it again in Voyager.... the void creatures learned to communicate with devices the doctor gave them. In " Fantomes musical language"
@@Patrick-ryan-collins was that based on the harmonic series? They sounded like fairly arbitrary pitches to me (at least to start, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “composition” conversation later-on was synthesised on something tuned to 12TET, haven’t listened to it closely.) I suppose it’s a somewhat subtle distinction, but that sounds like frequency shift keying to me moreso than a “musical language”, but maybe that’s just because of the dialogue the Doctor has about it being conversation not composition.
Thank you for teaching me some things today. I really appreciate that. I've been trying to study music, but there's some basic concepts that I've been just kind of setting aside if they were not immediately understood, and trying to remember to circle back. Trying to see the parts of the picture I could, and piecing it together gradually. This video really helped me understand these foundational bits and see more of the picture. Thank you!
I returned to college in middle age and got a degree in music. I learned music theory is confusing. Watching you lay out these details gave me such a wonderful sense of joy! Thank you for clearing some things up for me.
18:32 the absolute dunking on the Astros lol, I love it!😂
I have been asked this question before and I've always felt like im missing something more important to explain. This video is really good dawg
8:49 as a long time student of language, this approach to root vs tonic is fantastic and much appreciated
This is interesting to me. We think very differently, you and I: where you began by starting at the end result (the full major scale) and working backwards to describe it, I had paused the video (because it seemed like a fun challenge to try and explain the major scale to an alien) and started by defining sound. Then I moved into defining the frequency spectrum, then the concept of notes as tones, then the concept of relationship between notes being the basis of music, then the idea of collections of notes and their relationship to each other being the basis of a scale, then defined the 12 tone equal temperament system as the basis for 18th century western music (which we still seem to be stuck on today, trying to shove everything musical into that model, instead of revising the model), then the classical modes as collections of 7 of the 12 notes with a specific pattern of note relationships as the basis for it, then the concept of the major scale being the sort of starting point of these modes that all the other ones revolve around (again, in 18th century western music), and finally the idea of using this collection of notes with this relationship being the basis for the composition of a piece of music (or a portion thereof).
i suppose i was feeling the same-the desire to turn the explanation to the foundation. i think i am trying to understand it all for my whole life and deep dives to real 'why' is a greatest source of knowledge, even if it takes time to get to the gold-bearing vein and extract it. i agree with you on defining the sound itself first and work from the frequencies to arrange them in certain patterns (that depends not on the frequencies themselves but on the ratios). it is all models of course (approximations) with a lot of cultural layers as you pointed it out, but i believe raw bones of 'beginnings' and 'fundamentals' really do exists - even if they seem to be at the different starting point for all of us (as this video demonstrates)
When you talked about the human voice at 18:59, that would have been the perfect time to segue into the song "Do Re Mi" from "The Sound of Music." That's how I learned about the major scale when I was 7-8 years old, a year before I started taking piano lessons.
I like how the illustration for "I'm not sure how to take this deeper" was a spade. Had you drawn it inverted (as a literalization of "my spade is turned") it would have been Wittgensteinian perfection. To explain a musical convention (game?) is to explain a form of life and, after all, all explanations end somewhere...
I'd just explain it as a set. A group of 7 notes out of 12 we chose to group together because it sounds a certain way.
You could say it sounds happy, and a minor scale sounds sad.
@@bludfyre Less “happy and sad” and more “bright and dark”.
@@bludfyre i wouldn't even mention that stuff tbh. I'd explain a minor "scale" as just a mode of this major scale. A minor=C Major=D dorian etc.
Really not worth calling modes scales imo. Especially when we're just trying to talk about the major scale. We can leave it at: we can make different sounds depending on the context and how we play this scale. Theres lots of combinations to try.
Most valuable tool to teaching people is knowing when to leave out information. To teach someone how to cook we don't need to teach them chemistry.
The issue with the "happy/sad" and "bright/dark" dichotomy is that it is subjective and cultural. You can have a bright sounding happy sounding minor peice in a minor scale that sou ds dark and sad to someone from the western musical culture
It can't be just a set because sets are not ordered, unlike scales. For example, C major and D Dorian are the same set of pitch classes, but they are not the same scale. Sets don't have any information regarding the most important members, unlike scales. Also, sets are not arranged in order from lowest to highest, unlike scales. So, the set approach is not very helpful.
Thank you for making a video specifically for me. It occurred to me a few years back that I didn't actually know what a chord was, let alone most of the other nitty gritty concepts so common in your videos, but I was literally to afraid to ask because it's a word that's used so frequently in tv and movies, surely everyone knows it, I was just absent or something that day.
The good news is that a chord has a very precise definition: a line segment between any two points on a circle.
The bad news is that this definition has nothing to do with music.
It’s also 128 cubic feet of wood, though spelled differently.
This is fun. For a long time I've had a mild obsession with explaining modern computers to my imagination's version of Ben Franklin or similar
3:10 I wasn't expecting to see a snakebird on a music theory video lmao, but it was a nice surprise! Out of curiosity, what other puzzle games have you played?
I think using a guitar and a capo is simplifying this more into saying each step up with a capo along the neck using the same chord shapes create a new set of emotions and not just pitching the song up or down for a singer, it also changes the feeling of the scale. Major being the highest (most correct in tune maybe is the word) before it starts over again because of how tuning is not accurate to true "fractal" temperament instead we just use equal temperament instead, or something like that is how I think of scales when I choose to write songs in different modes calls for playing with the capo in different places for a sad or a happy song and inbetween modes. Meaning all major scales do not sound as equally majory if that makes sense but they sound the best to our ears and thus become the major keys loved by the poeple to brighten the day.
D minor, the saddest of all the keys, really. You play it, and people just start to weep.
I'd probably take a more physics/math based approach:
1. Define what an octave is: for a given frequency, double it.
2. Define the perfect fifth: the first harmonic of your given frequency.
3. Use the circle of fifths to create the chromatic scale.
4. Define a perfect fourth (which for me, as a hobby musician, is just a perfect fifth "flipped").
4. Define a whole step and a half step on the chromatic scale.
5. To create the major scale, take the octave, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth of your given frequency. Starting at your given frequency, take whole steps until you bump into the fourth, the fifth, or the octave.
For example, if our frequency is C, our perfect fifth and fourth intervals involve G and F. Starting at C, we take whole steps until we bump into the perfect fourth: D, E. From F to G is a whole step, so it's trivial. Starting from G, we continue until we bump into the octave: A, B.
And that's it.
Edit: Yeah, I should've listened until the end. I definitely wouldn't explain it like this to a child.
Except, we don't use pure ratios for most intervals, we use equalized logarithmic steps between each notes.
_"3. Use the circle of fifths to create the chromatic scale."_
You could also just take 7 notes a 5th apart and build the diatonic scale out of them. There's really no need to go chromatic to explain diatonic stuff. And this actually also explains why the notes are named the way they are. The 7 notes are the main notes, and you extend the string of 5ths to get the chromatic notes. But the chromatic notes are not needed for explaining the diatonic scale.
Also, a 7-note stack of 5ths gives a more intuitive reason to why the half and whole steps are where they are. This way, the half/whole step pattern isn't totally arbitrary. It is the result of organizing those 7 notes (that were derived from a stack of 5ths) as a scale.
Why I like my explanation is because it only requires defining two things: an octave and a fifth.
Of course this resulting scale is not the major scale yet. It's the diatonic scale and doesn't yet have a tonic. You need to choose C as the tonic for it to function as the major scale. But that's the important thing - you find the diatonic scale first and understand that you can derive different scales from that same collection of notes. The major scale is only one of them.
I would love to see, or hear at least, other people from different musical traditions try this as I'd like to get to know those systems but for an outsider they can seem impenetreble especially as one who exclusively speaks English and spanish.
I would start with the natural overtone series from a scientific stand point and then break each note into their interval and voila instant major scale. I am saying this after seeing it presented in that manner initially and it worked pretty well, so a pretty good starting point.
I appreciate this a lot! I have a ton of trouble comprehending basic music concepts; like, however much you can imagine a person not comprehending about music, it's even more than that. I only partway understand what the major scale is after watching this entire video, and I consider that very good progress. I have, in the past, learned what an octave is, but it never sticks. So this kind of thought exercise is basically exactly up my alley. Thank you for this video!
I'd probably involve a wire, fishing line or thread somewhere in explaining the basics. It would be hard to actually play a major scale on it, but easy enough to explain what the fundamentals of frequencies are. Most kids have played with can telephones or or noticed that a wire fastened between two objects will play a different pitch when struck depending on how loose it is. Even to a deaf kid the concept of the octave could be explained by blocking the wire in the middle and striking one side and showing the physical difference in how quickly it vibrates.
Honestly, one of your best video yet. It is both infornativ and shakes up what you think you know quite fundamentally. And the doodles were just top tier.
I once took a class were we had to come up with experiments to explain basic everyday physics stuff to 5-8 year olds. And you feel pretty stupid when you realize how quickly your explenations run out...
I think of it as a physical colour palette. Regardless of the overall hue chosen (aka the particular key), if the palette’s composition contains a certain ratio of “gentle” to “intense” pigments, the art will feel a certain way.
This analogy can be extended quite far if the person inquiring about the major scale has more familiarity with visual arts.
Wow! I love this!! I understand logically that some/many people with absolute pitch perceive note classes similarly to how most people experience colors, but that’s always been very abstract and cerebral. Your framing of scales/major that way makes that concept concrete and awesome for me. I can right away see some of the ways you can extend it like you mentioned. For example, with palettes, you have colors that help reinforce the baseline, and then you usually have one or a few that are used for emphasis because of how different they are - just like scale functions!
I know you intended this video to be a hypothetical exercise to help you examine your underlying assumptions about music, but it was actually a MASSIVE help for my understanding of scales. I am a lot like your alien; I have almost no understand of music (at 16:35 I assumed D major was all the white keys between two D keys until you implied that was incorrect) but can handle some pretty abstract concepts (octave equivalency makes perfect sense as a form of modular math). Having you explain how to construct the major scale in a few different ways sincerely helped me understand where scales in general come from and what they mean. If you could do more videos like this, or videos that explore how other cultures categories music, I would be really grateful.
I think your guess about D major was what 12 was going for! (Check the pinned comment). I think that was entirely the point. What’s cool is that if you start on D and play all white notes, you get my favorite scale - “Dorian” (that it starts with “D” is just a nice coincidence). It’s criminally underused :)
I think tetra-/pentachord construction could also be helpful: the two most important/consonant intervals are the octave (2:1) and the fifth (3:2). If you start on the root, add the fifth and octave above, and try to fill out both gaps as evenly as possible while making sure they match (parallel fifths), you get the major scale. This, paired with the Pythagorean construction (11:48), helps explain why we would have one fifth that goes "the wrong way" compared to Lydian which is all ascending fifths.
If you were explaining to a deaf & blind child, I'd suggest starting with a ruler and a resonant table that the child could feel vibrating. Maybe expand with clamps & multiple rulers for comparisons and feeling beats. With a deaf child, I'd start with amphlified bass guitar, which can be felt. I think dissonant pitches would attenuate quicker and consonant pitches would inter-resonate, have beats that could be felt, and last longer.
In the same vein, there is a trendy test to give kids to explain/write down instructions for a pb&j then you have to follow it to a tee without any assumptions. A couple great youtube vids of dad's trying this out with great laughter and frustration from the kids.
My 5 cents: a way to divide an octave interval that has been particularly successful, established as a social norm in the western world over several centuries, partly as an historical accident (the piano white keys adopted almost universally) , partly because it reflects some kind of natural harmony.
Oh my. I love it, love it, love it! IMHO, you're the only one who's really getting close to the crux. The “crux”, as I've preached ad nauseum, is that music isn't just about sound (that would be physics, specifically “acoustics”). No, music is about _us;_ it's about _human psychology,_ how humans (many or most of them) respond psychologically and emotionally to sound of various kinds. That's why discussions of music so often return to words like “feels”, “tension”, “release”, “wants to resolve”, “dissonant”, “at rest”, etc etc.
Bro, you broke out all the references!
That is the best rendition of wishbone I’ve seen in 15 years
I’m a drummer and I love your channel man!! I would have loved to hear a minor scale played right after your brief playing of a major scale. Just to hear the difference musically… as I’m applying it to my drum mindset. I so dig you deep dives into the music as a function.
I loved it. Thank you for taking the time to make this video. I know all of the 12 major and minor scales as well as all of the modes, so I understood everything you were talking about. However, tonic vs. root... thank you so much! Now, I won't seem like an idiot when I use one word for the other incorrectly.
The reason why I don't call the first note of a scale "root" is because every note is a root note.
@@Chris-MusicTheoryAndFretboard Ahh... Well I was calling the G minor chord the 'tonic' as it was the first chord in the progression -
Now I know, tonic = scales / keys and roots = chords / inversions. I guess it all depends on how it is worded in a sentence. I guess I would call the 'first' note of a scale the 'key'. 🤔
another option would be to describe a way to actually see the patterns, I was thinking a cup of liquid like water and singing can make the difference between the pitch visibly apparent in a way that makes describing the intervals make some sense - the distances are then visible, the interactions are visible if you sing two notes as well
What do you do with the pages you've drawn on after you're done with each video? Do you throw them out or do you have boxes of pages in a closet somewhere in your home?
2:09 I almost spit out my drink onto the screen. The images you come up with to tie into the audio are always fun. "The cow sayyyyys: Mooooooo!"
17:40 thus, teach scales on a bass guitar
I very strongly agree with your teaching point (root > tonic)about what words to use when trying to communicate ideas to non-experts. As a teacher myself (not music) I think a LOT about how to explain things so that the key points get transmitted clearly.
Th language fellow experts use in exchanging ideas is jargon. And among fellow experts jargon is an efficiency in sharing ideas. But as soon as your communication needs to travel outside the academy borders, its a potential barrier.
But it's just one word and doesn't take much to learn it. The problem I've seen with beginners who think root = tonic and tonic = root is that when they see multiple Major chords (like a 1-4-5) in a song, they think they need to switch keys. This is because they've been taught that root = tonic. But the truth is that every note is a root note. Each scale degree has its own name, namely: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and leading tone. I learned them! Others can too!
thank you so much for the video-it is the most prolific area of knowledge-digging, those basic questions that calls us to go deep down to real 'why'. after spending a lot of time trying to explain the same thing to myself, i came up with something that is an old tried and trusted montessory-based. as an acalculic person with 'bad ears' i can never rely on what i hear and i cant count, so i prefer visual representation that can be turned into even more basic - sensual one. spending time creating different layouts for keyboard not only showed me why it is layered as it is and why this UI is maybe not perfect, but functional, lead me to 'a mode' with visual gaps between piano keys as we should concentrate on counting intervals between the notes and not notes themselves. visualizing thing that is 'not there' allowed to 'work' with it visually. so for anyone who can't hear/play/count i would suggest a string of beads - better if they make one for themselves) each bead is a note and the gaps between them being the same-as a basis. now we just string beads in a certain order generating scale patterns (it can be expanded with differently colored beads and strings or patterned beads and different gauges of strings for 'sensing-only' experience)
16:09 Being able to break musical concepts down like this is so difficult! I remember in college when I started working with younger students who would make me think: when was the last time I spoke to someone who didn’t know what [insert musical concept] is? It’d been so long since I had to think about how to explain certain things.
As someone who doesnt actually know what a major scale is this was extremely interesting to watch
Do you feel any closer to knowing?
I knew what a major scale was but i didnt fully understand it. Still don’t
How to turn a simple question into a 23 minute video. Well done. Love your content.
Writing for a Deaf child, you might relate back to a time they may have felt the floor or a piece of furniture shake when a vehicle drove by, or the wind was blowing really hard, or someone was playing very "loud" music. They may remember how at different times the speed of that shaking changed, or simply was different between occurrences. That's what a note is, or sound for that matter, except the vibrations are so fast you can usually only feel them in your ears.
Then to show how different vibrations can interact to create definitive intervals and chords, just demonstrate on your pipe organ's 32' registers, simple as that.
Does the slinky visualization of a sound wave work for combining notes?
I love the idea that a scale needn't start/end on the same note and when you put them together you might end up with a ton of interesting harmonic relationships between registers. I am not the right person to explain the Ionian.😂
As a non-musician, if you had left out the explanation of where the question came from, I would think of this as snobbish ranting. But the fact that you described the pain of simplifying the terminology, and universalizing it while simplifying showed me how strong your passion is for this. Not up my alley, but I really Really appreciate your passion and want you to be successful. Updooting, and watching all the way through for your analytics.
A great exercise in learning. Reminds me of the Feynman Technique. Fun fact: besides being a physicist, among other things, Richard Feynman was also a bongo player during his trips to Brazil. I wonder how he would teach Bongo playing to someone with no knowledge of playing music.
18:24 - actually I'd like to see you work with a trumpet. How would that work out? How do explain what a major scale is, using only a single trumpet? Beyond simply playing examples of "this is a major scale. And so is this. And so is this. This _isn't_ a major scale" etc. etc.
I love your stuff!! It makes me miss music a lot. Been on a hiatus for... A long time.
This is a case where the question is not actually the question and the problem is not actually answering the question but putting it into a form of communication that is almost totally incompatible with the normal form of communication for the answer, and how much the context defines the question more than the words in the question
Here's an idea:
The major scale is a collection of inter-related sound wave frequencies. They aren't a set of specific frequencies, rather it is about the relationships between them as perceived in a human's ears linear pitch perception; the spacings between pitches must be preserved in order for the major scale to be recognised. The relationships between these pitches are the basis of most music from Western Europe and places where Europe's empires have exerted influence, plus popular music influenced by Euro-American popular music.
Pitch perception isnt linear though
Octaves double every time like 2 4 8 16 32 64 etc
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Since the major scale was not created in a vacuum, we can explain it is a way of explaining what is commonly done in music. It came after the music to explain it. (And of course add it isn’t the only way, but one of the most common.
All theory comes after the music to explain it and be able to share it.
May be oversimplified, but it’s where it starts.
And then you can go over the info in the video.
In my band class I demonstrate to my students the different frequencies to explain why 12 notes. If we go to close from one frequency to another, you can't hear a big difference in actual pitch if the frequencies are too close.
Tonic is not just soda water; it's also a post-grunge band from the mid-90s.
I don't understand music theory so please treat me like an alien. The more explanations you can put into your videos the more we can enjoy them.
Start from any note (that is, any frequency), that is going to be your root note, and add the notes that have a frequency of 2^(2/12), 2^(4/12), 2^(5/12), 2^(7/12), 2^(9/12) and 2^(11/12) times the frequency of your root note. Those 7 notes are your major scale. You can also use any note that has a frequency 2^n and (1/2)^n times the frequency of any of the 7 original notes (that will be the same notes that the original 7 but in a higher or lower octave). This is the major scale by definition.
i think this really displays what einstein meant when he said “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." this kind of thing is a great way to make sure *you* actually understand what you're talking about.
One distinction that one encounters less often is that of the, "pitch class." When one differentiates between the pitch and the pitch class, it can make these kinds of technical descriptions a little easier to construct.
I love this video, especially the jump from guitar to voice. I like digital music, all those different wave shapes on the oscillator but I love acoustic. The whole thing with the strings ringing clear and loud. I guess my explanation is just sound go up-down.
I've wanted this for so long, more specifically I want to unite what my ears hear with years of solving wave equations. The terminology of music has been a huge roadblock, just explain it to me like I'm an alien, or a physicist, or a child... All three are accurate
Explaining the major scale to me seems pretty easy. I always explain it as a ladder. You can go up and you can go down. The intervalls are the steps you take as you go up or down. Every step get's a number from 1 to 12. Then you start at 1 and go up 2 steps, 2 more steps, 1 step, 2 steps, 2 steps, 2 steps and then 1 more to end up on the 12th step and then you start over. If you want to go down you go backwards.
Hope this helps annyone.
By the way i love your content, have been watching for quite some time now and you are really clear about stuf and i love the drawings. Hope to see much more in the future.
I'm working on my master's in music theory and we have talked about this and also how to make visuals of the major scale that anyone can understand with varying levels of information
"for most people, tonic means soda" I nearly choked on my tonic water just from that.
I was like on this will be easy... then got more than 100 words deep and realized its not so easy to explain 😅
Ahhhhh if i were to keep it as simple as possible, i would say:
Notes are like colors. Just as taking a set of colors gives you pallet, taking a set of notes gives you a scale, chord or set. The major scale is the most commonly uses set of notes for melodies and harmonies in traditional music of the west.
But what if the child is blind? ;)
@@evildevi1 🤣 true, i would maybe try to use flavor analogy? If i cant use the other senses this could be tough
As a person with no formal musical education, and scattershot knowledge acquired through reading and listening, I found this fascinating. Even though I know most of the terms you used, I enjoyed how you dug deeper as you disqualified every explanation you expounded. I loved that every "alien" was different, and of course that the covered penny farthing bicycle for good old Number 6 showed up. Thanks!
Hi, great video as always. Quick note: There is another much easier explanation, if you use a theoretical basic concept, that is not yet so well known out of Europe (maybe even out of Poland and Germany). It is called "interne Quintenbreite" witch means internal fifths width if translated word by word. It ist absolutely plausible and super easy to understand. If you are interested, led me know. I am a german professor for music theory (mainly jazz) and I am sure, I can convince you in a minute. It is about the fundamental question "Y".
Drawing a strawberry with a crown for "fairly simple sounding challenge" is DEVIOUS! I've been binging Celeste again and oh my gosh does that picture get across the idea of "sounds simple but sure isn't" really well.
Hello, I love your videos! You put into words the reasons behind why music evokes certain emotions in a way that's easy to understand, and it only heightens my appreciation for music as a whole. A song that never fails to evoke emotions from me is "Lazy Eye" by Silversun Pickups, and I would love if you could make a video on it. It's one of my favorites, and I feel like it'd be the perfect song to analyze for the type of videos you make. Keep up the good work!
16:37 That bit right there is why childhood piano lessons failed for me. Rote memorisation of lists of notes with no structure to put them in context. And why I'm finally beginning - just beginning - to understand music in my late 40's.
Take any frequency and call it a root note. An octave is double the frequency of the root note, and we divide the range between the root and the octave into a sequence of 12 frequencies we call half steps. To find the next frequency in the sequence, multiply any frequency by the 12th root of 2. The movement from one frequency to the next one in the sequence is a half step. There is also a whole step, where one frequency in the sequence is skipped. The whole step is the movement from one frequency to the frequency after the next in the sequence. A major scale is defined by a different sequence of frequencies, starting from the root and ending on the octave, consisting of a whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.
I took guitar lessons many years ago, but never really picked up much of any music theory, and have just been casually learning songs from tabs since (playing clarinet in school for a couple years didn't help much either, other than learning basic music notation). I've been trying to better understand concepts like scales and chords for a while, but it's been difficult to connect with in a practical way that I can make use of - a lot of lessons seem to be just "play this scale a lot, and it will make sense", but that's pretty boring and it hasn't.
I appreciated the explanations in this video - I'm not quite there yet, but it feels like this filled in a few gaps that will help it piece together better for me eventually.
I can sympathize. Music theory always defaults to, and thus "speaks" in major. Because of the musical genres I like/write and got my start thinking about, I default to the minor key, and "speak" in minor. We always have or foundation in what we started with. Let me put it this way: When I started looking at traditional music theory, I had trouble wrapping my head around something very "straight forward:" transposing instruments. Until I realized that since I was playing guitar and bass, tabbing it and referring ot the chords by the shape, but tuning down to D or drop D, I *was already doing it.* It was just that every "explanation" that I saw seemed like it was describing something a lot more complex that what I was already doing. I do think that it does change how we look at things. All the white keys on the piano? For me, that's A minor.
9:24 I've always assumed we used high and low because higher pitches have frequencies with higher numerical values and vice versa for low. Though I suppose its also quite possible that other cultures don't use high and low to compare numbers either.
It's so interesting to be confronted with so many of my own assumptions about what music is and how it works
If you ask a person who did not train to do music, they probably will repeat same pitch over and over. Or shif by tone or semitone at most. No way any person without vocal training will eventually do an octave, that is unnatural. When I started vocal lessons and tried to replicate what my teacher ask me , I repeated same pitch over and over. So it is a valid concern at 21:30
I just got to where you’re talking about the perfect forth as dissonant, but that’s a function of harmony - if you are coming from a “scales not harmony” position the fourth is very consonant. The third is an important note in harmony but in scalar terms it’s not nearly as strong a note.
Fascinating pedagogical challenge. We’re trying to step down levels of abstraction until we arrive at a concept the audience already grasps, in order to move forward from there. In assuming the audience has no prior knowledge, it’s a hopeless endeavor I think. Definitions are ultimately circular.
As an exercise, it serves to illustrate how any teacher/explainer essentially MUST travel back until the find the terra firma of common ground, because only then can you reason forward together.
i'd try by explaining frequency, pitch, maybe Hz, then octaves, cents and then telling: 'the major scale is 200 200 100 200 200 200 100, loop it every octave and do what you want with the pitches you get'
I really enjoyed this video, but I do have one nitpick at 19:24 - There *is* a reason to call them high and low notes, because that's how language describes magnitude and that's ultimately all pitches are.
I think most people would agree that the thing that defines pitch is the frequency of a vibration. A high note has a higher frequency of vibration, and a low note has a lower frequency of vibration. To me, the descriptors of magnitude when referring to frequency and therefore pitch is fairly prescribed as the words for high and low, and not just a "colour" word that is built through cultural weight like, for example, sharp and flat.
What's interesting is there's another definition I think would work and be pretty consistent in the same manner, which is faster and slower. If I placed a ruler on the end of a table and flicked it, you would be able to demonstrate the differences in pitches by how fast and how slow the ruler vibrates visually.
Even then though, the concept of fast relies on two components, "high speed", and we're back to the word high.
Admittedly I'm not the best writer so I don't know if I can get across what I'm trying to say clearly, but I do believe that High and Low, since they relate to frequency outside of the domain of music, are fundamentally different as descriptors compared to your examples.
Technical writer with Western musical training here, and my first thought was approximately where you ended up, but hopefully with slightly kid-friendlier wording:
1. Show that there are distances between notes (pitch intervals); introduce half (small) steps and whole (big) steps.
2. Introduce octaves: here are two notes that kind of sound the same.
3. Scales are combinations of small steps and big steps that go from one note to a note that kind of sounds the same. Different orders of small steps and big steps make scales that sound different, and those different sounds make you feel different things.
4. The major scale is this particular order of small steps and big steps. Kinda sounds happy, doesn't it?
5. And then if the kid is still interested, move on to how you can mix up the notes in a scale to make songs. Maybe bring in Julie Andrews here.
Fold a slip of paper ( assuming this is available --- since you are writing a book )
If you ask them to start with a page that is square,,
you ask they make 2 folds crosswise resulting in a smaller square - now unfold the paper...
give each corner a number (in order) 1,2,3,4
with 1& 2 being "UP and 3 & 4 being "down"
create 16 evenly spaced lines between 1& 2 (eight on either side of your center fold call these lines NOTES
(i am using 16 as that gives you room to discuss Octives etc..)
start labeling these lines -- you get the idea .. we have them CREATE an instrument to learn on.
although the instrument does not make a sound -- once you have explained the intervals
you can then return to "now imagine this is not folding on paper - but folds in the air -- I e SOUNDS
.. the paper will have 16 vertical lines + a center fold
also, a horizontal fold should give you the ability to both explain concepts and also avoid "bad patterns" that might need to be unlearned -- as you can just say "Leave that blank for now" letting them know more complexity should be expected
( at least as a retired teacher of special programs -- this is how I would do it .. )
after some discussion ... I would like to modify my suggestion to include a diagonal fold.
such that some of my graphable spaces are longer and others shorter.
following that - I would also start the discussion with the center of the page .
give that center point the label "middle C" and work outward.
-- I have a friend thinking about utilizing this method, so please give any relevant input
It's like when an interviewer asked Richard Feynman how a magnet works. The answer consists of many of the fundamentals of our entire reality.
I would define "Major Scale" as "the set of musical intervals (pitches with space between them) that is the basis for much of Western European music."
Hi. I have my MMus, and this is a pet question of mine. I believe there is a better answer to this, from something a lot closer to first principles. Would you be interested in a video essay response? It involves some pretty neat references to deep music history (think Ancient Greece), but it’s also something you can demonstrate to kids in a few minutes, even with some hands on participation. Your friend might like it, too. 😊
I think I've said this before, but I love your brain so much. Thank you for all of your videos. Awesome!
I love that idea of "how to explain the Major Scale to a child" 'cuz that was me a few months ago except replace "child" with 20-somthing year old with no knowledge of music theory. Disclaimer that I'm all self-taught and I gotta agree with the part about assumptions. Like, dear goodness, it was just so hard to get my head around so many concepts 'cuz they put Ionian mode as the center. Everything just really started to click when I got introduced to the Lydian chromatic concept and having Lydian as a reference point.
The explanation of scales using the piano keys makes more sense starting from F , having 6 ascending fifths instead of the weird 5 fifths up and 1 down (then you would have to explain inversions), using the overtone series as a way to justify why the octave and the perfect fifth are such cornerstones.
Other concepts like the circle of fifths and modes are much more easy to digest with circle starting on F (it also looks nicer). Going down one direction (F-C-G-D-A-E-B) sharpens, and adds, the previous tone while going down the other direction (F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb-Cb) already flattens and adds the tone you're in. Just overall an easier way to learn it.
While with modes, instead of considering Lydian having a #4, Ionian having a b4 just makes more sense since the other modes all are taught to have another flattened degree added until Locrian is all flattened minus the tonic.
So yeah, I particulary like the explanation of going by perfect 5ths and that, while it gets us Lydian, in western tradition we just like our 4 flattened.
Berklee Press has some books on music theory that approach things quite differently than traditional theory pedagogy - you might find them useful.
_"Like, dear goodness, it was just so hard to get my head around so many concepts 'cuz they put Ionian mode as the center. Everything just really started to click when I got introduced to the Lydian chromatic concept and having Lydian as a reference point."_
The reason why Ionian is the "center" is because of musical practice. Theory is easiest to understand from musical context. If you are used to playing Western music, you know that the major scale is used all the time, whereas the Lydian scale is quite rare. You learn theory as you learn music. The reason why theory may feel difficult is that people are learning it separately from music. They are learning these weird abstract concepts, but not actually getting familiar with musical practice. The issue is learning theory theoretically and not practically.
Most music theory is based on musical practice, and isn't some kind of a separate "rule book of music" that exists outside of actual music. Music theory is based on music. Music isn't based on music theory. And that's why major and minor are taught first - most music is in major and minor keys, even if some other scales might make more "logical" sense. Find me a piece of music that's in Lydian. That's actually not easy. Find me a piece of music that's in major or minor. That's really easy - you hear them every day. This is why I don't think a "Lydian-centric" system makes much sense, at least if you want to understand how tonality works (because basic tonality with V7 - I resolutions is pretty much built into the major scale).
My argument would be that stacking 5ths doesn't actually give you any particular mode - it only gives you a collection of notes that on its own doesn't have a tonic. This is the diatonic scale: The notes A B C D E F G, but only as a collection of notes, and not as a mode that has a specific hierarchy. Then, from that diatonic collection, you can derive 7 scales (that are the diatonic modes). Aeolian is the A mode, Locrian is the B mode, Ionian is the C mode, Dorian is the D mode, Phrygian is the E mode, Lydian is the F mode, and Mixolydian is the G mode.
It is true, though, that understanding the basic pattern behind the circle of fifths as starting from F makes sense. But this doesn't require thinking in Lydian. The circle of 5ths is a pattern that works in any diatonic mode. You simply use different notes for different modes as the starting point.
The circle of fifths in the ascending direction is Fb Cb Gb Db Ab Eb Bb F C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# E# B#. The order is always the same. For major key, you start from C. For minor key, you start from A. For Lydian, you start from F. For Phrygian, you start from E. Works the same way for any mode.
I’m new to your channel and I love your art work and explanation of music. I’m not a musician or in the musical theory industry but I am a huge fan of music and I like learning about it. Do you have a video that is sort of a glossary or beginners guide to some of these terms and concepts you’re explaining?
In terms of explaining a major scale, I think I would base my description of it around two intervals which you hardly mentioned at all - the major second, and the perfect fourth.
I'd define the major second (the "tone") as a note which is comfortably and definitely different to the first note (key centre), but which can be be divided into smaller parts (at least two). If you were using the metaphor of going from place to place, it is a normal walking "pace", or a "step".
I'd not sure how I'd define a perfect fourth!! In terms of metaphor, it's a leap, appreciably bigger than a a step, and bigger than a double step, but not by much, perhaps half a step bigger.
Then a major scale, ascending (going higher in frequency or pitch) becomes:
The key centre / tonic; a step up; another step of the same size up; another smaller step up, so that you are now a perfect fourth above the key centre / tonic (these four notes are called the major tetrachord);
A step up (this becomes the dominant, the second most important note of the key);
From the dominant; a step up; another step of the same size up; and finally a smaller step up to take you to the note an octave above the original key centre note (note that the last four notes form another major tetrachord) to give a new key centre note, which, with octave equivalence is the "same" as the original key centre note.
A pattern of notes (sounds "highness" or "lowness") which generally sound happy or energetic. We're not sure, but we think they sound nice together because the note sounds vibrations fit into simple fractions. We can build one by choosing any root note and building up those fractions to get the other notes. If the vibration is double or half it sounds like the same note but higher or lower, so we can create all the white notes on a piano from simple, easy to match up fractions.
And so on, I don't have the attention span to know what else to explain. 😅
I think a good middle ground between relying on existing western musical instruments, and trying to explain to people how to use their voice, you could get them to construct a basic tonal noisemaker. The obvious example to me is the classic "ruler sticking off a table" approach. It's simple enough that you can explain it it clearly using only words, and you can explicitly describe how to produce different pitches, and you get a nice visual confirmation of the octave concept when the distance the ruler sticks out is twice as big.