I feel for you on this. I was in the same boat. Even talking to musicians, they couldn't explain it to me with the rigor I wanted.
For me, the real insight came when I understood why the 12 note chromatic scale was chosen, why chords "sound good" and that a lot of the confusing terminology hides pretty simple concepts.
I don't feel like I could make any music, generative or otherwise, that sounds passable but here's what I've learned so far:
* As a good approximation of the human auditory system, frequencies are perceived on a logarithmic scale
* Rhythm is tied heavily with language and the tempo of speech, word length and frequency [0]
* Note combinations sound more "pleasing" when the ration of their frequencies are small as reduced fractions [1]
* The 12 note chromatic scale is a good compromise of number of notes and enough pleasantly sounding note combinations
* The 12 note chromatic scale is generated from a base frequency of 440Hz multiplied by the twelfth roots of 2
* The 12 note chromatic scale can be further restricted to the diatonic scales to help further restrict the note
set to allow for ease of composition
As far as I can tell, a lot of music theory centers around the different diatonic scales ("Ionian", "Aeolian", etc.), which are just restrictions of the chromatic 12 note scale to some notes that sound reasonable together. I have some very rough notes on it [2], though I'm not sure how readable it is.
I'm also in the same boat in terms of "instrument choice", though I would much rather invest in some live coding environment, like Gibber or Sonic Pi, or some software DAW system like LMMS. I still haven't found something that gets at the right level of functionality and abstraction that I want.
For me, the real insight came when I understood why the 12 note chromatic scale was chosen, why chords "sound good" and that a lot of the confusing terminology hides pretty simple concepts.
I don't feel like I could make any music, generative or otherwise, that sounds passable but here's what I've learned so far:
* As a good approximation of the human auditory system, frequencies are perceived on a logarithmic scale
* Rhythm is tied heavily with language and the tempo of speech, word length and frequency [0]
* Note combinations sound more "pleasing" when the ration of their frequencies are small as reduced fractions [1]
* The 12 note chromatic scale is a good compromise of number of notes and enough pleasantly sounding note combinations
* The 12 note chromatic scale is generated from a base frequency of 440Hz multiplied by the twelfth roots of 2
* The 12 note chromatic scale can be further restricted to the diatonic scales to help further restrict the note set to allow for ease of composition
As far as I can tell, a lot of music theory centers around the different diatonic scales ("Ionian", "Aeolian", etc.), which are just restrictions of the chromatic 12 note scale to some notes that sound reasonable together. I have some very rough notes on it [2], though I'm not sure how readable it is.
I'm also in the same boat in terms of "instrument choice", though I would much rather invest in some live coding environment, like Gibber or Sonic Pi, or some software DAW system like LMMS. I still haven't found something that gets at the right level of functionality and abstraction that I want.
[0] https://github.com/abetusk/papers/blob/release/Music/patel20...
[1] https://github.com/abetusk/papers/blob/release/Music/measure...
[2] https://github.com/abetusk/dev/blob/release/notes/MusicNotes...