Play
- Pentatonic sequencer
- Music Mouse 🐭
- Drum Machine 🥁
- Chord Player (check out "Melody" and "Explore" tabs)
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
- Explore Hooktheory's TheoryTab: search for your favorite songs and anime openings.
- Ishkur's evolution of electronic music
- Press "scan" at Every Noise 🌐
- 👾🕹 Music theory for Famicom/NES soundtracks 🕹👾
- TuttiTempi: Chopin's Funeral March ⚰️
- Click "Show Timeline" for patterns similar to octatonic used in jazz solos: upward, downward
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 and jazz solos
Sing
Лекции
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-tone temperament
- major/minor keys
- homophony: melody over chords, chords give a separate narrative
- chords as stacked thirds
- any of the 12 notes can be a tonic
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. By the way, pop music (structure-wise) it a super-genre combining bits of rock, jazz and other stuff
- Classical - the biggest chapter here, as it's the main focus of all research and teaching (despite its unpopularity according to streaming stats). Subtopics: pre-classical, advanced, Bach chorales
- Jazz. Subtopics: harmony, lego, solo
- Barbershop
- Movies
- Video games
- Other genres like R&B, country, dance electronic, gospel
- Western regional traditions (eg. Latin)
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):
- Balkan languages
- Maqam languages
- Indian music
- Gamelan, piphat and other gong chime languages
- many other traditions
Broad overview on non-Western languages
- Research
- Composition
- Visualizations
- Maps of genres
- Listening guides - how to enjoy classical music without a deep commitment to learn theory
- Ear training
- Piano
- Rhythm
- Pseudoscience
- Improvisation
- Neural networks
- Sociology
- Psychology
- YouTube, podcasts and lists of resources
- Sound design
- Digital composition
- 🔥 Transcription
- Mixing
- Microtonal music
- Notable instruments
- Institute of Sonology: One-Year Course
I post updates and other rant on music theory on Telegram (in Russian)
Do you know how to enroll in a music theory program after a computer science BSc and two years of jazz college? Please, let me know: cxielamiko@gmail.com, t.me/vitalypavlenko (asking for myself)
I'm always happy to chat about visualisation-aided music education and research popularisation