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Awesome Music Theory Awesome

Where to start

Play

  1. Pentatonic sequencer
  2. Music Mouse 🐭
  3. Drum Machine 🥁
  4. Chord Player (check out "Melody" and "Explore" tabs)

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. Explore Hooktheory's TheoryTab: search for your favorite songs and anime openings.
  2. Ishkur's evolution of electronic music
  3. Press "scan" at Every Noise 🌐
  4. 👾🕹 Music theory for Famicom/NES soundtracks 🕹👾
  5. TuttiTempi: Chopin's Funeral March ⚰️
  6. Click "Show Timeline" for patterns similar to octatonic used in jazz solos: upward, downward

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 and jazz solos

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-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

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 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