Hey, thanks for sharing that! I find that very interesting, as I attended a teacher workshop on neuroscience recently. We discussed a few factors like field dependence and others.
Knowing that some people have higher/lower reactions to things like sounds, lights, patterns is helpful when you ask yourself why people become disengaged. It’s mostly a balance between asking for attention and allowing people to focus in their own way.
Speaking of music, I have a friend who learned and still plays everything just by ear. And he is a walking music encyclopedia. For me, learning a song note by note is a bunch of gibberish, I need some structure like “this is the verse” and theory helps tie that together.
When my friend and I jam, he’s might say “that doesn’t fit” and I would be able to say “oh, I was trying some chord tones there.” And that leads to him saying “let’s play this kind of thing” and me thinking “we let that sus chord hang unresolved … to annoy the listeners!”
What’s important is that people accomodate each other.
Yup. It came about for that very same reason. A session chart would have only the numbered progression and the key the song being recorded. That made it easy to transpose to whatever key was needed just as it is for us now playing live.
If you’re playing a jam and the leader call out “Shuffle in A from the V chord” you know what he’s instructing everyone to do. If a vocalist asks to drop that A to G you also know precisely what you’re gonna play. Saves a lot of time and confusion.
Thanks for this. As my only exposure to the Nashville system has been verbal, I wasn’t aware of how it’s notated. Upper and lower case Roman numerals makes total sense.
I understand and agree. Maybe there’s a better word than arbitrary to explain what I’m thinking.
Maybe this will make sense. Take oak vs pine for example. Oak in physically stronger due to it’s grain structure. It has naturally occurring chemicals in it that prevents insects from eating it. So there’s definitive, observable reasons to use species for one purpose or another. Some notes sounding better than others is definitely a more nuanced observation vs weak or strong.
As a beginner, I can hand you a piece of each ( oak and pine) and after telling you the names you could visually identify them from now on. Pluck an open E string for a beginner and 99.99% are not going to be able to now identify an E every time they hear one.
Yes, the sound waves exist and are measurable things, but music just isn’t a physical thing you can easily conceptualize.
I can hold a thing in my hand. I can play a song and it only exists in the ether in that moment. Naming something like that is a wild thing.
No, music, our representation of the rules and concepts of it, is pure math and physics. What’s an issue is our general, overarching problem with semantics and language when it comes to describing our conscious experience. Music isn’t hard to conceptualize because of how neat and rule-bound it is by physical limits, the conceptualization of our experience of music is hard, but that’s definitely not a “music-specific” issue. So, with that in mind, where’s there reason to ascribe such an ethereal quality, particularly to music? Frankly, it seems much more like a selective focus on one particular instance of the issue we have with communicating our experiences of qualia and internal states in general.
Well, because the medium of the subject is different. But with a measurement device, you can create an image that will represent some form of the subject. Both the thing you are holding and the sound waves. Both of these images will have the same level of permanence. Both of these images and what they show will be reducible to underlying atomics of physical reality.
I am really curious about the reason why music would be particularly different from any other subject of this nature.
I don’t really get why the “Nashville Number system” was invented versus in-key expected chords?
Whether I say “1 4 5” or “I IV V” in speech it means the same thing, the chord relative to the key/tonic.
When you get into blues rhythm making everything dominant, it makes a little more sense just to dumb it down to the roots, ie: “A7 D7 E7” or more simply “play the same pattern 1 4 5.”
I just don’t get if you understand the intervals to get the “NNS” the actual theory is just a stones throw away.
The Nashville Number System is an invaluable mode of communication for jazz and other genres of chord charts that are composed and based on higher orders of music theory.
It’s true that there’s little use for the NNS when calling out a simple I-IV-V blues/rock/country progression. In those situations, calling out chord names is just as fast. Most players will know what “Blues in E” (or any key) means and will play accordingly.
