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An "awesome music theory" kinda wiki with books, resources and courses for studying everything about music and sound

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Awesome Music Theory Awesome

Where to start

Play

  1. Pentatonic sequencer
  2. Music Mouse 🐭
  3. The Infinite Drum Machine 🥁 or Groove Pizza or Groove Pizzeria
  4. Chord Player (check out "Melody" and "Explore" tabs) or aQWERTYon
  5. Touch Pianist 🧙

Interact

  1. Go through Ableton's guide on music and Ableton's guide on synths
  2. Bartosz Ciechanowski. Sound
  3. Chrome Music Lab
  4. 🤖 AI demos: Magenta, MusicLM, LakhNES, Muzic, Jazz Transformer

Wander around

  1. See structures of Western music in rawl.rocks
  2. Explore Hooktheory's TheoryTab: search for your favorite songs and anime openings.
  3. Ishkur's evolution of electronic music
  4. Press Alt+"scan" at Every Noise 🌐
  5. Piano rolls in 12 colors: Famicom/NES 👾, popular music in MIDI
  6. TuttiTempi: Chopin's Funeral March ⚰️
  7. Click "Show Timeline" for patterns similar to octatonic used in jazz solos: upward, downward
  8. See how form can be visualized in MusicPlot and in BriFormer

Watch

  1. How a track emerges:
  2. Ravel's Bolero
  3. The Art of Mixing 🎚️
  4. Nopia 🎹 - a chord-based synthesizer
  5. 🍿 Two-chord changes typical for movie soundtracks: LP, H, T6, S, F and N
  6. Watch a gamelan multitrack and try to make sense of it, maybe with a help of a larger multitrack for another piece

Read

  1. 📚 Hooktheory 📚 - interactive books on pop harmony. A must-read for anyone
  2. Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
  3. Dig into the structure of Beethoven's sonata #5 movement #1, also see what we as a society know about it.
  4. Visualizations: classical, jazz harmony, jazz solos, rock

Sing

  1. Arabic maqamat
  2. 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):

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

Contacts

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.