You can’t really talk about “units” in any sensible fashion. Notes are single discrete frequencies and the ratio between nearby notes depends upon a whole range of stuff (see my post above.)
The way we count the notes in the basic do re mi scale is more accidents of history, and little else. The accident of history is that that is the scale we anointed as the basic one to count over. It could have been any scale at all, but that one was at the core of music at the time someone decided to give the intervals numbers. And really, that is all there is to it.
There is no consistency in the size of the intervals, a second is two semi tones, second to third two semitones, yet third to fourth is one semitone. And that is only in an equal tempered scale, where it is as simple as you can get.
So we simply accept that we start numbering from one (another accident of history, no reason we coudn’t have denoted the unison as zero) and count up the notes in a chosen scale. That it turns out to be the major scale and we have to invent additional counting notation to cope with notes in other scales is also just luck.
Not really. It’s just that your starting point is one rather than zero, which is why it’s hard to quantify intervals as distance. A to C is two units, but the interval is a third.
I did a big update on the Interval information. Reorganized it.
I know some musicians will feel that I over simplified. I tried to use easily understood examples and kept any special terminology to a bare minimum.
It was a good refresher for me. 
I had to think long and hard how to explain this material.
The first page and half explains Intervals and a little bit about keys. There’s another page of optional material with examples of scale building. Some people may be interested and others not.
I hope people find it useful.
No account needed. give it a junk email address and check email to retrieve the link for the PDF.
It’s not easy to find an anonymous file host anymore.
http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/714280/Understanding%20Intervals.pdf
Isn’t it amazing how everything jelled and came together? We can all enjoy all sorts of music.
Jim Morrison died over forty years ago, but bands can still play his music. We have a system to notate everything needed to perform it.
Shrug, transposition is what we had to do for at least one of the exercises whenever a music exam included theory (in the first year we used it to figure scales, like in your example; by the third we were expected to do it with songs), and if you tell me that having short names for the note positions makes it easier I believe you, but it was pretty easy once you understood the difference between notes and tones. That question was there because it was the question even the dog would have gotten right (and we didn’t have a dog).
And this concept of “relative do” is yet another piece which explains why I’ve always found it so confusing to hear Anglos speak about music. It’s a huge false friend, where words which according to a dictionary are each other’s translations turn out to have completely different meanings, but in the two groups of cultures which use one or the other very few people would think such a difference is possible.
pohjonen - aren’t you glad you asked? 
To paraphrase, notating and discussing music is like dancing about architecture.
I was in a band with a French singer for a while, and it took a little while to wrap my mind around sentences like “this song is in la,” or, “start on mi,” where he didn’t mean the third tone in relation to the tonic, but literally E.
Oh, transposition is a part of any musician’s training. If by “short names” you mean CDEFG vs do re mi fa sol, then, no, that shouldn’t make any difference in the difficulty or ease of transposition. After all, it’s the same thing.
While I think I get what you’re getting at (something like don’t talk about music, play it), this is a really unfair analogy. Notating and discussing music can give you a good idea of what a piece is supposed to sound like and how to create it. Dance will not do that with architecture. It’s more like – let’s go back to the language analogy – notating and discussing music is like writing down and discussing The Gettysburg Address. Sure, we don’t know the exact intonation of all the words, but we have the words behind it and descriptions of the speech to recreate it. If it weren’t for musical notation and discussion, we’d have lost centuries and centuries of beautiful music.
Exactly! Think of it like traditional Chinese birthdays. (You’re “one year old” the moment you’re born, and “two years old” one year later.)
Sorry, to expand on this, what I find easier in terms of aiding transposition is notating chord progressions by their function rather than the actual chords themselves. For example, if I learn a piece as I-iii-IV-V, I find it easier to play it in any key versus learning a song with fixed chords, like Eb-Gm-Ab-Bb7 (which is I-iii-IV-V in Eb). My brain first has to take the step in realizing that those chords are I-iii-IV-V in Eb before translating it to C, where it’s C-Em-F-G7). So it saves a step and doesn’t fix me as much in a certain key. That’s why roman numeral notation is useful and why Nashville notation became such a standard for many session musicians. The notation is not tied to any key, so if one singer wants to perform it in A and another in F to better suit their range, the chord charts remain the same. Of course, excellent musicians can do this on the fly even with fixed chords, but many find it easier not to tie themselves down to notating it in a certain key to begin with (nobody would accuse Nashville session musicians as being anything but excellent, but they do prefer the relative system, too, for this reason.)
And, of course, transposition is easier on certain instruments than others.
The other thing that’s nice about the relative system is that the vast majority of people do not have absolute pitch (aka “perfect pitch”). This includes musicians, as well. I could listen to a song on the radio and pick out the chord progression for later, even though I have no idea what key it’s in (besides an educated guess) and remember it for later when I get back to my instrument. It also emphasizes the fact that the actual pitches themselves are not so important for the vast majority of music so much so as the relationship between the pitches that’s important. Frere Jacques still sounds like Frere Jacque whether it starts on an E or G or Bb.
I’ve never found it confusing, but it’s probably because I think of it ordinally. The C major scale is CDEFGABC. What’s the third in C major? Well, it’s the third note, the E. What’s a third above G? Well, it’s the third note in the scale, starting with G, a B. Now, there is the complication of major and minor (whether it’s a “big” third or a “small” third–plus there can be other modifiers), but that’s how my brain has always dealt with the numbers. YMMV, of course, but that’s what worked for me as a kid.
Fair point.
“False Friend”? Roman numeral chord functions let you think analytically beyond named pitch identities, so you can apply it to all the keys. It’s a technology that we invented, just like the all others we need now, and it’s very powerful for understanding what you’re doing in music. Maybe someone with perfect pitch and a photographic memory would be an exception to this, but I’d need proof of that. In almost all vernacular music those chord functions are being used and thought of in real time, but pitch identities are dispensable.
Let’s put it this way: You have a method for making direct relationships and identifications with all points on a machine, and using that knowledge to shift the mode or function of some point to operate in different keys or modes, even to change keys within one piece. Or you can name each byte and remember each relationship it has in the system with all relevant bytes.
Which is the more powerful idea?
All “false friend” is, basically, is a word that has a homonym in another language that means something different.
So, “do re mi” seem like they should be the same for an English speaker as a Spanish or French speaker, but in fact they do not.
It’s not a judgment about which meaning is “better” than the other.
Maybe you’re misreading her “false friend” terminology. It means when two words in a language look the same, but have very different meanings. Like how, I dunno, “bombero” looks like it should mean something like “bomber” but means “firefighter” in Spanish. It’s not a critique of the system. (That said, whether you use absolute or relative solmiazation/solfege, they refer to exactly the same concept, only difference is whether “do” is affixed to C or can float. For someone who grew up with the relative solfege, it’s really easy to translate to fixed. It’s just based on C. I could see it being a bit confusing coming at it from the other direction, though. That said, I’ve played music for over 30 years and I don’t ever remember talking in terms of solfege to other musicians. Perhaps it’s more common in other parts of the world, or in particular genres of music, or with particular types of musicians, like vocalists.)
ETA: ninja’d
Wordman is right.
Playing music and enjoying yourself is the priority.
I set aside time every day to study music. I have books on rhythm, harmony, voice etc. I try to get in a hour a day. Unless I get too sleepy.
I spend much more time with an instrument in my hands practicing. I love learning new songs and trying out techniques.
I took you to mean that it was reducing understanding, or increasing obfuscation, for you. But to me it looks like it is a technology that increases functionality by leaps. So maybe I didn’t get what you meant there.
This is predicated on musicians using “doremifa…” in their process. I don’t know any that do.
If I don’t, then this controversy just passes me by. To me they just are a sequence of the major scale notes, which may occur at different pitches. I can’t ID the notes by ear, and I don’t need to or want to. The observation of how many cycles the note is is not relevant to my process. Is this what you are talking about?
I don’t think there’s anything “wrong with you”. Maybe because you know how to play, you expect theory to be simpler. When you were 7, you spoke English, but did you automatically know how to talk about grammar? No, someone had to teach you.
I think as an adult, you could easily teach yourself. First, without any music, learn to play some scales and arpeggios (major and minor). With your experience, this should take a week or so. Then make sure you have basic music reading skill. (Not playing from music, just identifying A, B, C… on the staff.
After that, get a music theory 101 book, and I truly think you could work through it yourself in a few months. In fact, probably less, because you might look at things like voice leading and decide you don’t really need it (which you really don’t, unless you are composing multi-instrument arrangements). Probably in a month or so you will have an “aha” moment, and realize how everything fits with what you already know.
I really think you can do it. Pick up a book, knuckle down, see how far you get.
When I was learning, this helped me a lot. Learn the meaning of “whole step” and “half step” interval. Then learn that a major scale goes by steps: whole, whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Now you know that a major third interval is from 1st to 3rd steps in that sequence. Then you can intuit 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. Repeat the study for a minor scale, and you pretty much know the diatonic intervals. Knowing the intervals, you can start building chords, and then your guitar-hero experience kicks in to help.
I love music theory because it makes listening to music more fun. This is how I listen to the opening bars of the “Game of Thrones” theme and think “sneaky bastards, putting a picardy third right at the beginning. The show’s barely started and things are already already getting awesomer!” I just love that shit.