Where to start
Play
- Pentatonic sequencer
- Music Mouse 🐭
- The Infinite Drum Machine 🥁 or Groove Pizza or Groove Pizzeria
- Chord Player (check out “Melody” and “Explore” tabs) or aQWERTYon
- Touch Pianist 🧙
Interact
- Go through Ableton’s guide on music and Ableton’s guide on synths
- Bartosz Ciechanowski. Sound
- Chrome Music Lab
- 🤖 AI demos: Magenta, MusicLM, LakhNES, Muzic, Jazz Transformer
Wander around
- See structures of Western music in rawl.rocks
- Explore Hooktheory’s TheoryTab: search for your favorite songs and anime openings.
- Ishkur’s evolution of electronic music
- Press Alt+“scan” at Every Noise 🌐
- Piano rolls in 12 colors: Famicom/NES 👾, popular music in MIDI
- TuttiTempi: Chopin’s Funeral March ⚰️
- Click “Show Timeline” for patterns similar to octatonic used in jazz solos: upward, downward
- See how form can be visualized in MusicPlot and in BriFormer
Watch
- How a track emerges:
- Ravel’s Bolero
- The Art of Mixing 🎚️
- Nopia 🎹 - a chord-based synthesizer
- 🍿 Two-chord changes typical for movie soundtracks: LP, H, T6, S, F and N
- Watch a gamelan multitrack and try to make sense of it, maybe with a help of a larger multitrack for another piece
Read
- 📚 Hooktheory 📚 - interactive books on pop harmony. A must-read for anyone
- Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
- Dig into the structure of Beethoven’s sonata #5 movement #1, also see what we as a society know about it.
- Visualizations: classical, jazz harmony, jazz solos, rock
Sing
- Arabic maqamat
- Indonesian gamelan
Лекции
Western music languages
Music languages can be divided into a number of families. Historically, the most dominant and influencial one is Western family of languages. Its languages share some common traits:
- 12 equal temperament
- major-minor tonality, limited modes (dorian/mixolydian) with limited harmonic schemata (shuttles)
- homophony: melody over chords, chords give a separate narrative, chords reuse schemata (functional harmony, cadences, progressions), chords shape a voice-leading space for melody and bass
- chords as stacked thirds
- any of the 12 notes can be a tonic
- after two repetitions of any idea there should be a contrasting idea
- mostly 4/4 and 3/4
- verbatim recital of scores by musicians, limited improvisation, expression in micropauses and velocity arcs, but not in extensive idiosyncratic ornamentations
The languages are (roughly speaking):
- Rock - probably worth exploring the first, as it’s the simplest and pretty popular. It makes sense to start here and expand into other Western languages later on - as they share a lot of concepts. Rock here is an umbrella term for pop, soul/RnB, blues rock, folk rock, alternative, punk, prog, and heavy metal. Advanced
- Classical - the biggest chapter here, as it’s the main focus of research and teaching until recently (despite its unpopularity according to streaming stats and decolonization ideas. Subtopics: pre-classical, advanced, Bach chorales
- Jazz. Subtopics: harmony, lego, solo
- Groove/blues - funk, R&B
- Barbershop
- Movies (neo-Riemannian)
- Video games
- EDM
- Other genres like country, gospel, contemporary worship music, rap
- Western regional traditions (eg. Latin, Flamenco)
Somewhat related to that are church chants: Gregorian, Byzantine, Armenian, Znamenny
Non-Western music languages
Non-Western music languages are different families. As they were developed all over the globe, they don’t share many common features.
The gradient of families is (roughly speaking):
Broad overview on non-Western languages
Topics
Topics on electronic music
I post updates and other rant on music theory on Twitter (in English) and on Telegram (in Russian)
I’m always happy to chat about visualisation-aided music education and research popularisation. Also, I constantly feel severely deprived of communication with the real academic theoretic community, so drop me a line ;)
Also, if you’re in the UK, and especially in London, drop me a line and let’s grab coffee.
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