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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

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.