So I'm learning all this cool stuff about how to make Pd patches and make awesome synths and all that. There's heaps of help here and all over the net.

But where do I go to learn about the basic music theory that underpins it all?

thanks in advance

music noob.

Do you mean music theory or DSP?

Well, I mean music theory, but not just notes, mathematical relationships between notes, chords, timing, etc. The underlying patterns. Does that clear it up?

Yeah, what you are asking about would all be covered in first year music theory in college. I'm not recommending you do that but maybe finding a college student who is studying that stuff would be a place to start. It is a fairly easy system once you find
your way into it. You need to be looking at music theory as it is applied to jazz and pop music, where instead of note names you are dealing with numbers. I'm tempted to write out the whole system here, but I won't...
Just remember that most of the more interesting things you can do with pd could never be described in terms of music theory

@Simon2 said:

You need to be looking at music theory as it is applied to jazz and pop music, where instead of note names you are dealing with numbers.

Why do you say this? Analysis of traditional common practice music (which is what you'd learn your first year in a music theory class) uses numeric relationships as well.

why does anyone ever say anything wrong? ...I went to school for that a long time ago. I do seem to remember a bit of Bach popping up in the program. The system is the same regardless. It would be most easily explained with a keyboard in front of you.

Thanks Simon.

@Simon2 said:

Just remember that most of the more interesting things you can do with pd could never be described in terms of music theory

What do you mean by this? Care to get specific?

well, imagine a sample of someone screaming, being played backwards through a granular synthesizer - if you did come up with some kind of notation for this it would be so complex it wouldn't make any sense.Probably the best you could do would be to draw it out as a picture, or a flow chart.

Ah I see what you mean now. Good point. Some of the early synth experiments had expressive notation to go with them. Pretty cool looking stuff, but yeh not exactly readable.

This is a good book to learn the mustic theory and math involved:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/h5vk0vszxf76hb7/music.pdf

If you are interested in sounds e.g. bouncing ball or engine sound or bees buzzing and so on, please see the book by Farnell

Sound Design, MIT press.

It removes the myth off the sound engineering and since it is Pd based you can see how powerful and useful Pd is.

D

NOT TRUE! lots of art involves math! lookup italian or indian patterns, or even knitting and embroidery.