Awesome Music Theory

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

Watch

1. How a track emerges:
   • on the OP-1 🎛️
   • in a studio with live instruments 🎻
   • on a vocal looper 🎤
   • in TidalCycles 💻
   • Also, a Piano Phase jam in TidalCycles
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

• 🎥 Есть мои видеолекции

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
• after two repetitions of any idea there should be a contrasting idea
• mostly 4/4 and 3/4
• cadences are chord patterns

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):

• Balkan languages
• Maqam languages
• Indian music
• Gamelan, piphat and other gong chime languages
• many other traditions: Chinese, Kyrgyz komuz, Georgian polyphonic singing, Japanese

Broad overview on non-Western languages

Topics

• Research
  • MusoRepo: a Directory of Resources for Computational Musicology - curated by Mark Gotham
  • corpus studies
  • expressive performance
  • interactive harmonic analysis
• Composition, orchestration, conducting
• Visualizations and notation
• Maps of genres
• Listening guides - how to enjoy classical music without a deep commitment to learn theory
• Ear training
• Piano, guitar
• Rhythm
• Topics, tropes, meaning
• Pseudoscience
• Improvisation
• Sociology
• Psychology
• YouTube, podcasts and lists of resources

Topics on electronic music

• Sound design
• Digital composition
• Neural networks, 🔥 tokenization
• 🔥 Transcription
• Mixing
• Microtonal music
• Notable instruments
• Institute of Sonology: One-Year Course

Contacts

I post updates and other rant on music theory on Twitter (in English) and on Telegram (in Russian)

Do you know how to enroll in a music theory program (master's/PhD) after a computer science BSc and two years of jazz college (linkedin)? Please, let me know: [email protected], t.me/vitalypavlenko (asking for myself)

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.