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Questions from last time redressed:
Indent with [4] spaces.
You mention 12 distinct tones and manipulations...?
If you pluck a string of a certain length and Tension density, it will sound a specific frequency, let's say frequency
a. All frequencies
a2n have a name: that's the
note. A specific note is a
pitch. Most music you hear is comprised of 12 tones, which are a part of an "equal-temperament," as opposed to "just-temperament"; the word temperament means the tuning. The difference between the two is that equal temperament allows us to modulate through a jungle gym of
keys with minimal loss in ideal
intervals. The 7 pitch names are {A, B, C, D, E, F, G}. The rest of the pitches are formed by modifying one of these notes.
Lesson < 0 <
Now, kindly pick a set from the group {1,2,3,4}, then read the following list in that order. Or go with the default, or read it at random.
1.
Melody - this is the line, this is the tune, it's what you hum, it's a sentence. Think Brahms, think the Beatles. Melody is like hair.
2.
Harmony - this refers to the coincidence of multiple tones. When two or more notes sound together, they form a whole of a sum of parts. We can classify these chords and explore the intervals between them. Intervals are an important component of melody as well. Think C#m7. Then think F9. I tease. Think of the last burst from the next favorite song you find yourself listening to.
3.
Rhythm - , you have it or you don't, (that's a fallacy); this is the time dimension, and I would argue the single most polarizing factor of music.
4.
Timbre - pronounced "TAM-buhr", this term refers to the voice or medium, the forces, the instruments, the [workers] in the play. Think Sufjan Stevens, think Prokofiev's
Peter and the Wolf, if you've heard it. This frontier is the fundamental distinction between electronic music and old school mechanical forces.
Lesson [1-(0.999...)] If Music Theory is gravity, then these are the four prongs of Western inspection. If I were a Western mystic, I'd say that an alternate, 3-fold attack would instead be "Sound x Silence vs Tradition". And binary would be "Music ∪ Noise".
More relevantly, we might try to classify any work of music by the priority or relationship between these four dimensions. Using these terms, we can analyze and recognize more and more about the music we listen to, although ultimately you are polishing a mirror in the composer's powder room. So considering a piece by these facets, {Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Timbre}, should ideally give 4 interesting silhouettes of the work. If you're a robot, you might use highly-structured algorithms for each of these parameters to synthesize your own organized sound! But I wouldn't go into the music business if I were a robot. Or I would, and collect royalties whenever I ever saw my minimalist piece "
01001000".
Things get less theoretical if we use a little trick, and pair up these four parameters. If you're writing or listening intently, how does the melody relate to the tempo and swing, and these two together as a single half of the piece, how does the thickness of the sound, or mood, compare to the instruments they used or could have used? You can do this 6 times - you can divide them into 3 pairs. If you decide to single in on one, say harmony, you can try to develop a harmonic palate, or palette, or you can decide you've used the tritone entirely too many times in your new catchy autotune jamm. If we had a class exercise, we could explore these quadrants of the Cartesian plane of music theory. Perhaps we will return to this in Lesson 4. For the rest of the this lesson, I'd introduce the most basic example of each pillar.
Contemporary rhythm as it concerns the layperson is an extended cacophonous parade of Big Brother 4. That's totally fine. Big Brother 4 is that steady beat with your feet, or headnod in your seat, or "this drop's hella sweet" or that new remix is neat or this song is complete. Incidentally, Big Brother 4 is a member of the Aryan brotherhood. Totally acceptable. The younger, effete brother of Brother 4 is actually a headstrong woman who likes to waltz to work. Musical divisions of time are ultimately in some grouping of 2 or 3. Unless your skin tone is darker than a potato.
Harmony constitutes grammar in musical work. These are the rules in this house, and I have 12 children, two are adopted, and if you don't abide by the rules, it's either going to get raucous or no one is going to graduate high school. If harmony is at the forefront of the musical work, then weak or inconsistent harmonic language is the cringe factor, or the contrived, or the stumbling factor. If your harmonic experience is nascent, then you at least know the difference between major and minor tonalities, and if you ever wanted to have a musical relationship with anyone, you should get wise to blues changes, where the root (sonic homebase) travels a "
fifth" away in either direction. If I get a graphic for this, it might make you smile. I'll try to remember.
Melody comes like the outstretched 3' end of a strand of someone's musical scarf. After you first notice it, you notice its friends, which are slight variations or [consequences] of the main sequence. If the melody is standing in a room, there might three people that know each other named Verse, Chorus, and Bridge. Since the term is so simplistic (in that it refers to the germ-thing that makes the whole musical anyway), maybe you can consider any transformable sequence of [atoms] as melodic. I'm bound to take that perception for granted, so here I'll mention it.
Timbre seems like an antiquated, maybe anachronistic, maybe redundant checksum kind of arena. Well, the concept itself presents itself to me as a self-similar landscape, where even if you have one timbre for 20 minutes, you can zoom in and consider the variation in sounds. As indispensable as it is, it could be a trivial set.
Another Mother-term I haven't yet introduced is that of
form. Form is the architecture of the musical tour. Poetry has rhyme schemes and form; music form is equivalent. If people in the melody-room, Verse, Chorus, and Bridge described their typical form, they could say "Verse, Chorus, Verse, Bridge, Chorus, Verse, Chorus", or AB ACB AB. Since we're using variables now, we're technically engaging in algebra. I'm sorry.
"But my dear author, I don't see anything in here about lyrics. Like, nowhere. What box of stick-music do you um listen to?"
Ouch, touché. Hmm. Maybe I'll start off the lessons properly by including lyrics as part of the music theory. Therein, I can specify music that is
a capella, (unaccompanied), instrumental (without words), and full-on complete music, with the themes spoken and unspoken. Stay justly tuned for Lesson 1, coming eventually -
Gərrætt
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Here's that same extra food for thought, for if you wanted to get into a violent altercation with a friend; it has since become compostable, so here is:
Vomit for Thought
"Also, who do you know that can do this sound theory calculus, which you mentioned as Ω-level sorcery?"
First thought was Scriabin, second was Wagner, and then trying to relate it to some less extremist examples, I thought of Beethoven. Of course, the magic of music theory, as I discovered in high school, is that it is a good way of describing the past. It doesn't exactly prescribe the future, the same way our constants and integers don't exactly self-assemble into TOEs like some kind of Andromeda strain. All the punks show up to class and punch music theory in the teeth anyway, and textbooks are rewritten and recontextualized by angry professors.
Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer, and I know him because he wrote a lot of solo piano things, and his harmonic language succeeded the Romanticism of Rachmaninoff (although Rach outlived him by 20 years). Before he died, he was set on bringing about the end of the world with a massive multi-media work that would incorporate all of the senses in an magnum operatic orgy. Incense was involved.
Wagner was a German and an anti-Semite with meaningful Jewish acquaintances, and he worked on a level of Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning his large scale compositions offered an equally grandiose vision and formidable articulation. He incorporated legends and leitmotif, which is one way of conflating musical phrases with objective meaning, and this man pushed out operas pardon the comparison like a mastodon would pass a massive Utopian boulder of shit for all insect-kind.
Once in a while, a human being invents a chord. This guy is one of them. In a sentence, there was an opera house built expressly for the production of his works.
And fourthly, it occurs to me presently that Aphex Twin is a Sorceror of Rhythm. In the same way I mentioned Brahms the melodyman, you find a transcendent variety of color in this kind of musician, where you might deduce that the nucleus of a certain work should be a rhythmic motif.
What is noise? Like, is is... "Noise is an extreme on every continuum that has anything to do with signals or meaning, so your favorite song at the wrong loudness and time or place could be noise. Noise is probably just the stuff we aren't actively understanding." "Like bitcrushed negative space."
(version 3)
What's the Venn diagram of the human senses look like around the auditory circle? "Hearing overlaps with sight and touch sometimes, extends our range of musical perception down to at least 0.5 Hz. And music theory wouldn't help in any place where you're trying to smell or taste it."
Why is my taste in listening to things objectively more intimate than [your] objectively more passionate opinions? "Maybe because you hear an undertone in that song that I don't hear. Then again, my favorite genre is 440 Hz
(laughs)."
What does Graham's number and 'music' have in common?" "This isn't a proper riddle... But Graham's number is a member of a set of cataclysmically large numbers. I guess the only thing they could have in common would be being inspired by an encyclopedia article about it. Otherwise we could pursue this as a e-class exercise." "It would bring an old nerd flame back, pure mathematics, so that would be fun, I hope we do this."
If I call everything 'organized sound,' am I being a repugnant shitball? "If you haven't forgotten what 'music' and 'DJing' actually mean, you should be good."
I don't want you to be a mystic! - what are some 5-ary expansions of music theory?
'Wait what?"
<object <a href=Piano Concerto No. 2 - III by Ashkenazy - Rachmaninov on Grooveshark</a></span></object> And that's a wrap. Next time</ps>
Notes:
Indent paragraphs with multiple spaces. This is called whitespace, and it is a notorious thorn for multi-platform writers.
A pitch is a person, and your life is a song[, if your name is *].
Lesson 1 is about [subver]ting every[ ].
I just found out my roommate doesn't know what Rachmaninoff is. I'm getting my security deposit back and relocating tomorrow.