i like to say "with age comes wisdom" about things i realized over time when i'm less than 30
in my defense this was a thing that i did try to have a conversation with a teacher about and i tihnk she didn't quite understand my confusion so she just said "you don't understand it because you're not a master of this craft" and like, i KNOW i'm not, but i never WILL be if i don't understand this
it was about features of music notation that i found "redundant". like 3/4 time and 6/8 time. i didn't have the vocabulary to express this at the time but my confusion about things like that was like. "if you transcribed a piece of sheet music into MIDI, if you recreated it in a DAW, you'd get exactly the same piano roll whether you wrote the original sheet music in 3/4 or 6/8" etc. because to me, that midi file was "correct". that's how the music is "supposed" to sound, and any deviation from that, even if done intentionally, is in some sense an "error"
i know now that that last part is not so simple. but more broadly, even if we accept that as true, it doesn't follow that "redundant" choices made when writing the original notation are pointless. because, while this wasn't true for me at the time, an experienced musician sees "3/4" and feels something different than they would if it said "6/8". and that feeling will give them a heads up about how the music that's coming up is going to sound. notation is communication and hints about what's going to be communicated make the notation easier to read
@monorail oh yeah the "redundancy" of 3/4 and 6/8 confused the hell outta middle school me as well
@wallhackio @monorail use a metronome
@wallhackio @monorail (this is terse but what i mean is that i think the difference between middle school understanding of music and high school understanding of music is in high school you (should) appreciate good conducting and the use of a metronome a lot more, and the way 3/4 and 6/8 are conducted and set to a metronome is totally different)
(remembering of course that our musical notation was largely developed for classical music where conducting is an essential part of the performance)
(the difference between 4/4 and 2/2, on the other hand, is all vibes)
@Lady @monorail i looked into the difference between 3/4 and 6/8 recently and the point is the number of "pulses" in each measure
if there are three pulses per measure then we use 3/4. consider your typical waltz or something like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OmzEQzaaU4
if each measure has only two pulses then we use 6/8. consider the following song--the bass riff is clearly thought of coming in two parts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyuJNfQwt4Y
@wallhackio @monorail yes which if you are conducting, that's three waves of the baton versus two, and if you are using a metronome, likewise, because those indicate the “down” beats (which are also, incidentally, the steps when dancing)
if you set a waltz in 6/8 the waltzers will be moving 2/3 as fast
@wallhackio @monorail (this last point is the contemporary difference between 4/4 and 2/2—2/2 is used for marches where 4/4 would require people to be marching way too fast. historically the picture is more complicated tho)
@wallhackio @monorail my point is that it’s not “just” mathematical equivalency because the time signature itself denotes important things: how the conductor should conduct, how the dancers should dance, etc. of course, the music also needs to convey this (the dancers cannot see the sheet music), but the music conveys it BECAUSE the conductor and performers, who can see the sheet music and know the time signature, correctly articulate the notes to get the time signature across
