Overview

This piece was my first attempt at creative writing on Medium. As a beginner musician, I am just starting to be introduced to music theory and its complications. This writing, which became my first piece of writing on Medium, discusses how music theory is created, the reasons behind it, and the potential faults. I take a mathematical and analytical view of music theory and discuss where it fails new music learners.

During this project, I was introduced to musical concepts such as exact versus just temperament and had many heated debates with musicians. The piece is a good overview of how someone would construct musical theory and finishes with a crude attempt to design an alternative system. The notation is described in the table above. The key idea behind this notation is that each note is represented by a symbol intended to relate to other notes visually. This alternative approach incorporates the relative differences in frequencies into the design of the symbols used to describe them. This new notation allows beginners to understand the relationships between notes immediately and independently of direct memorization.