Binah: It means "understanding," and is the Sephirot of deductive reasoning.
Krupskaya: The girl who married Lenin.
Freemasons: they have existed for centuries and no one is really sure where they came from. They share a declared belief in a Supreme Being.
Baphomet: supposedly a pagan deity, in reality, an invention of Christians after someone mistranslated Mohammed. It was also used to describe some pagan idols. Christians believed that it was a real deity, and it was drawn in cartoons as a kind of winged goat looking creature.
Manichean: a once very widespread and popular Iranian Gnostic religion in which there is a very elaborate cosmology about a fight between the good spiritual world of light and the evil, material world of darkness.
Cathars: perhaps inspired by the Manicheans, this heretic movement appeared in France in the 11th century and incorporated a belief about two gods (dualism). There was an all powerful, all-good god, that they worshipped, and a chaotic god, who actually created the world, which was evil.
Kundalini: In Indian yoga, the energy that resides at the base of the spine, sometimes associated with desire and libido and sometimes with the natural energy of the Self.
Teutonic Knights: a German order set up to help pilgrims on the way to the holy land and also to set up hospitals, and also to do fighting.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Hokhmah
Hokhmah: The sephirot of wisdom, the first manifestation of intellect in creation.
Abulafia: a Medieval philosopher whose ideas became the basis for prophetic Kabbalah. His writings talked a lot about meditation techniques to achieve this state of uniting with God, and also of manipulating the letters of the Torah. When he was alive, he promoted himself as a messiah of sorts, his ideas were banned in some places but posthumously adapted into Sufism.
Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade: the Maltese Falcon, supposedly a figurine covered with jewels, is a MacGuffin, never shows up in the course of the book, but motivates everyone's actions anyway.
Notarikon, temurah, gematria: the three techniques used by the Kabbalists to rearrange the words in the Torah to arrive at another meaning or find the name of God or something. Notarikon is taking the first and/or last letters of a word and using them to form other words, temurah is exchanging some letters in a word with other letters (like shifting all letters 12 down the alphabet), gematria is assigning a numerial value to words or letters. The Hebrews never developed their own way of writing down numbers, so it was all done with letters.
Tetragrammaton: the four-letter name of God (YHWH). The vowels are omitted in the Hebrew alphabet. Observant Jews write but do not speak this name aloud because it is too sacred to be used everyday.
St. Thomas and the five paths: St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who wrote the Summa Theologia in which he examines the justifications for the existence of God. He said there were five ways: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, etc. He is part of a tradition of scholasticism which was originally an attempt to temper classical philosophy with medieval theology, using reason.
Ennoia: talking around something without really explaining anything but still hinting at what is meant.
Exu: the god of chaos and trickery in the Yoruba mythology.
Abulafia: a Medieval philosopher whose ideas became the basis for prophetic Kabbalah. His writings talked a lot about meditation techniques to achieve this state of uniting with God, and also of manipulating the letters of the Torah. When he was alive, he promoted himself as a messiah of sorts, his ideas were banned in some places but posthumously adapted into Sufism.
Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade: the Maltese Falcon, supposedly a figurine covered with jewels, is a MacGuffin, never shows up in the course of the book, but motivates everyone's actions anyway.
Notarikon, temurah, gematria: the three techniques used by the Kabbalists to rearrange the words in the Torah to arrive at another meaning or find the name of God or something. Notarikon is taking the first and/or last letters of a word and using them to form other words, temurah is exchanging some letters in a word with other letters (like shifting all letters 12 down the alphabet), gematria is assigning a numerial value to words or letters. The Hebrews never developed their own way of writing down numbers, so it was all done with letters.
Tetragrammaton: the four-letter name of God (YHWH). The vowels are omitted in the Hebrew alphabet. Observant Jews write but do not speak this name aloud because it is too sacred to be used everyday.
St. Thomas and the five paths: St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who wrote the Summa Theologia in which he examines the justifications for the existence of God. He said there were five ways: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, etc. He is part of a tradition of scholasticism which was originally an attempt to temper classical philosophy with medieval theology, using reason.
Ennoia: talking around something without really explaining anything but still hinting at what is meant.
Exu: the god of chaos and trickery in the Yoruba mythology.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Keter
Keter: the topmost Sephiroth in the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. See, already we can't even have a normal conversation without having to define everything. All the chapters in this book are named after these Sephiroths, which are the "attributes" in Jewish mysticism of God, through which he reveals himself and expresses his creative force. If you look for a diagram of this Tree of Life paradigm, you'll see that the 10 Sephiroths are arranged in a very precise pattern, and this structure of relationships is supposed to reveal the essence of divinity and is the key to understanding the mystery of life, the Universe, and everything. So I gather. It's all a bit murky. The first Sephiroth, Keter, the topmost point, is the point which existed before there was anything else to call a creation, it existed before existence itself, and thus is completely incomprehensible. This bodes well for the book, indeed.
Foucault's Pendulum: This experiment was actually designed to prove the Earth's rotation. It is basically just a big pendulum that swings from a point suspended above the ground. As the Earth rotates, the plane of the swing seems to change (it makes these ellipses), but in reality, the plane of the swing doesn't move, the Earth moves under it, giving it the illusion of moving. At the poles, a full rotation in the plane of the swing takes 24 hours; everywhere else, it takes longer. Wikipedia has a nice animated gif about it.
The fixed point of reference seems to be treated with some special reverence in this first chapter, as it is a fixed point that in fixed with respect to...well, everything. Also, I suspect that it's featured because the pattern the swings make over the course of a full rotation draw out a rose pattern when viewed in time-lapse from directly overhead.
Atlantis and Mu: They are both fictional "lost continents" that sunk into the ocean. Sometimes Atlantis is identified as Mu. There was a theory that the people that fled the ruins of either/or continents migrated to other parts of the world and founded the Egyptians and the Mayans.
Agartha: A fictional city or country located at the Earth's core, with Shamballa or "Shangri-La" as its capital, supposedly located somewhere in Tibet or the Himalayas (although how it can be at the center of the world and in Tibet is anyone's guess. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough to understand). It is ruled by the Masters, the keepers of all the world's secrets. The concept is popular in Vajrayāna Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism. Supposedly, it was the location of the original Garden of Eden and all its wisdom will be shared with the world when we finally reach the state of purity in the Ten Commandments, "when the Anarchy which exists in our world is replaced by the Synarchy."
Avalon: The mythical island where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he went to rest and sleep to recover from his wounds. Supposedly it was where Morgan le Fay, who seems like one of the woman druids, a sort of Celtic shaman figure who worshipped female Earth and fertility goddesses, and her sisters lived (some kind of druidic commune?). The story about how King Arthur never really died but is only sleeping and will one day return sounds an awful lot like the Jesus myth (someone suggests later in the book that the Jesus myth is stolen from Celtic legends). It has parallels with the Greek Hesperides, a mythical garden where beautiful women tended apples. Apples have something to do with Avalon, too.
Panta Rei: Apparently Eco just made up this secret society. Its name, in Greek, means "everything flows" -- as in, everything is connected, there are no coincidences, everything has a meaning. Also, a great band name, if it's not already taken.
EinsOf: Kind of a name for God, in his incomprehensible form, in Kabbalah. It literally means the "infinite," or the "nonexistent," in the sense that God is so far above human comprehension that it is as if he doesn't exist.
Armand Dufaux: a famous Swiss aviator, one of the first, who flew Lake Geneva.
Baal: It is actually sort of an honorific title in Hebrew, but somehow things got twisted along the way. Baals were the names of the little idols that people worshipped back in the day of polytheism, before Judaism with its one God thing became popular; when the Bible was being assembled, the Baals were confused for all referring to the same persona (false gods, all of them),
and became associated with a high ranking lord of Hell, even Satan himself.
Maiden of Nuremberg: a famous Iron Maiden, which was a torture device with pointy sharp things in it, used to force people to confess to heinous crimes like praying to the wrong piece of wood.
Francis Bacon, House of Solomon, New Atlantis: Francis Bacon was a philosopher and politician who is credited with inventing the scientific method. He did a lot of things. Somehow he found time to write this book called the New Atlantis, which describes a utopian society governed by knowledge and reason. The House of Solomon was his design for a modern university where people learned things and conducted experiments and stuff. However, he also describes a section of the university that features exhibits meant to confuse the senses, show illusions, falsehoods, which is what Causubon is equating the museum he is hiding in to.
Legion of Honor: The highest decoration in France, established by Napoleon.
Empedocles: a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (apparently they were interested in finding a more reasonable explanation of how the world worked, and so wrote a lot about the essences of things) who wrote that the world was composed of four essential elements. He also believed in reincarcation. He supposedly died because he threw himself into a volcano, believing he would come back as a god afterwards. However, the volcano spit back one of his sandals, meaning that his body hadn't transcended after all, or something.
Alhazen: an Arab scientist who studied optics at the turn of the millenium, some people say he is the first real scientist. Long before Einstein, he was saying light had a finite speed and was made up of particles.
Demiurge: A Platonic concept for someone who is a kind of caretaker for the physical parts of creation, although not the supreme creator himself. The Gnostics, a bunch of mystics predating Christ who believed the Universe was created by an imperfect being who is either actually evil or is just imperfect, associate the God of the Hebrews with this Demiurge. According to them, there is an even higher God, an actual perfect Godhead, above this Demiurge. "Gnosis" means "to know," and it refers to someone achieving through mysticism and esoteric knowledge an understanding of eternity and creation and the perfection of the immaterial.
Basilides: an early Gnostic leader who is also associated with the origin of the Kabbalah.
Hermes Trismegistus: the blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom).
Notarikon: a method in the Kabbalah by which you take the first or last or whatever of a word and form new words out of it.
Yaldaboath: one of the Gnostic archons, the Demiurges who made the world but trapped man's essence in material form, with a lion's head and a serpent's body, sort of a demon.
Sophia: The all powerful all knowing mother-virgin-seat-of-all-mysteries goddess of the Gnostics. She was the good part of the "God", who wanted to create the world, and urged on the Demiurge, who, not able to correctly manipulate the base matter, trapped her inside the world.
Pleroma/ogdoades: the Gnostic word for the totality of all the divine powers. There is some concept of a heavenly pleroma, which is where all the divine beings live, and with the help of aeons like Jesus and Sophia, humans can reunite with these divines and learn their wisdom and the meaning of life. Or something like that.
Foucault's Pendulum: This experiment was actually designed to prove the Earth's rotation. It is basically just a big pendulum that swings from a point suspended above the ground. As the Earth rotates, the plane of the swing seems to change (it makes these ellipses), but in reality, the plane of the swing doesn't move, the Earth moves under it, giving it the illusion of moving. At the poles, a full rotation in the plane of the swing takes 24 hours; everywhere else, it takes longer. Wikipedia has a nice animated gif about it.
The fixed point of reference seems to be treated with some special reverence in this first chapter, as it is a fixed point that in fixed with respect to...well, everything. Also, I suspect that it's featured because the pattern the swings make over the course of a full rotation draw out a rose pattern when viewed in time-lapse from directly overhead.
Atlantis and Mu: They are both fictional "lost continents" that sunk into the ocean. Sometimes Atlantis is identified as Mu. There was a theory that the people that fled the ruins of either/or continents migrated to other parts of the world and founded the Egyptians and the Mayans.
Agartha: A fictional city or country located at the Earth's core, with Shamballa or "Shangri-La" as its capital, supposedly located somewhere in Tibet or the Himalayas (although how it can be at the center of the world and in Tibet is anyone's guess. Maybe I'm just not enlightened enough to understand). It is ruled by the Masters, the keepers of all the world's secrets. The concept is popular in Vajrayāna Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism. Supposedly, it was the location of the original Garden of Eden and all its wisdom will be shared with the world when we finally reach the state of purity in the Ten Commandments, "when the Anarchy which exists in our world is replaced by the Synarchy."
Avalon: The mythical island where King Arthur's sword Excalibur was forged and where he went to rest and sleep to recover from his wounds. Supposedly it was where Morgan le Fay, who seems like one of the woman druids, a sort of Celtic shaman figure who worshipped female Earth and fertility goddesses, and her sisters lived (some kind of druidic commune?). The story about how King Arthur never really died but is only sleeping and will one day return sounds an awful lot like the Jesus myth (someone suggests later in the book that the Jesus myth is stolen from Celtic legends). It has parallels with the Greek Hesperides, a mythical garden where beautiful women tended apples. Apples have something to do with Avalon, too.
Panta Rei: Apparently Eco just made up this secret society. Its name, in Greek, means "everything flows" -- as in, everything is connected, there are no coincidences, everything has a meaning. Also, a great band name, if it's not already taken.
EinsOf: Kind of a name for God, in his incomprehensible form, in Kabbalah. It literally means the "infinite," or the "nonexistent," in the sense that God is so far above human comprehension that it is as if he doesn't exist.
Armand Dufaux: a famous Swiss aviator, one of the first, who flew Lake Geneva.
Baal: It is actually sort of an honorific title in Hebrew, but somehow things got twisted along the way. Baals were the names of the little idols that people worshipped back in the day of polytheism, before Judaism with its one God thing became popular; when the Bible was being assembled, the Baals were confused for all referring to the same persona (false gods, all of them),
and became associated with a high ranking lord of Hell, even Satan himself.
Maiden of Nuremberg: a famous Iron Maiden, which was a torture device with pointy sharp things in it, used to force people to confess to heinous crimes like praying to the wrong piece of wood.
Francis Bacon, House of Solomon, New Atlantis: Francis Bacon was a philosopher and politician who is credited with inventing the scientific method. He did a lot of things. Somehow he found time to write this book called the New Atlantis, which describes a utopian society governed by knowledge and reason. The House of Solomon was his design for a modern university where people learned things and conducted experiments and stuff. However, he also describes a section of the university that features exhibits meant to confuse the senses, show illusions, falsehoods, which is what Causubon is equating the museum he is hiding in to.
Legion of Honor: The highest decoration in France, established by Napoleon.
Empedocles: a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (apparently they were interested in finding a more reasonable explanation of how the world worked, and so wrote a lot about the essences of things) who wrote that the world was composed of four essential elements. He also believed in reincarcation. He supposedly died because he threw himself into a volcano, believing he would come back as a god afterwards. However, the volcano spit back one of his sandals, meaning that his body hadn't transcended after all, or something.
Alhazen: an Arab scientist who studied optics at the turn of the millenium, some people say he is the first real scientist. Long before Einstein, he was saying light had a finite speed and was made up of particles.
Demiurge: A Platonic concept for someone who is a kind of caretaker for the physical parts of creation, although not the supreme creator himself. The Gnostics, a bunch of mystics predating Christ who believed the Universe was created by an imperfect being who is either actually evil or is just imperfect, associate the God of the Hebrews with this Demiurge. According to them, there is an even higher God, an actual perfect Godhead, above this Demiurge. "Gnosis" means "to know," and it refers to someone achieving through mysticism and esoteric knowledge an understanding of eternity and creation and the perfection of the immaterial.
Basilides: an early Gnostic leader who is also associated with the origin of the Kabbalah.
Hermes Trismegistus: the blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom).
Notarikon: a method in the Kabbalah by which you take the first or last or whatever of a word and form new words out of it.
Yaldaboath: one of the Gnostic archons, the Demiurges who made the world but trapped man's essence in material form, with a lion's head and a serpent's body, sort of a demon.
Sophia: The all powerful all knowing mother-virgin-seat-of-all-mysteries goddess of the Gnostics. She was the good part of the "God", who wanted to create the world, and urged on the Demiurge, who, not able to correctly manipulate the base matter, trapped her inside the world.
Pleroma/ogdoades: the Gnostic word for the totality of all the divine powers. There is some concept of a heavenly pleroma, which is where all the divine beings live, and with the help of aeons like Jesus and Sophia, humans can reunite with these divines and learn their wisdom and the meaning of life. Or something like that.
Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Intro
Foucault's Pendulum is a book by an Italian professor of philosophy named Umberto Eco, which has been described as "the thinking man's Da Vinci Code." It is littered with philosophical, historical, and literary references -- so many, in fact, that Anthony Burgess said it needed an index. None exist. Even Neuromancer has a high-page-ranked "study guide" on Google. Well, fair enough; these days, anyone can write a study guide.
Neuromancer merited a study guide for a variety of reasons, one being that the world in which it was set was as much a protagonist of the story as any of Gibson's actual characters. Another was that the informational overload in his prose style was symbolically meaningful as well as narratively load-bearing ; in the world of his creation, informational overload was the norm, as well as culture shock, generation gapping, and just about every other form of societal and personal alienation and neurosis that a world could inflict on a person. So it makes sense that you would feel like a foreigner, visiting his world.
Eco, on the other hand, littered his book with all these obscure references perhaps to make a point about the intellectual snobbery of people who, like his narrator, can argue about Kant in everyday conversation with a straight face but still believes that the world is united in this mystical enigma that has been a secret since the Middle Ages. Maybe he also did it to discourage casual readers, such as those who might enjoy the Da Vinci Code, for example, from reading his book. He liked Borges and wasn't above screwing with his readers in such a way, the entire premise of his book is that scholars of history invent a game that, unwittingly, changes history. The whole book is like a commentary about how even the most learned and elitist of intellectuals can still fall prey to the same beliefs in mysticism and magic that people in medieval times did. And then again, maybe he just actually writes like that.
So this is my poor man's Foucault's Pendulum study guide. I have no idea if I'm even going to be able to find all these references; I wouldn't even put it past this guy to just make some stuff up out of thin air. As usual, these posts will be more for myself than for anyone in particular. And you don't really need a study guide to enjoy the book, it's still a good read even if you don't know all the obscure people he name drops. You've been warned. So come, I dare you, turn the page.
Neuromancer merited a study guide for a variety of reasons, one being that the world in which it was set was as much a protagonist of the story as any of Gibson's actual characters. Another was that the informational overload in his prose style was symbolically meaningful as well as narratively load-bearing ; in the world of his creation, informational overload was the norm, as well as culture shock, generation gapping, and just about every other form of societal and personal alienation and neurosis that a world could inflict on a person. So it makes sense that you would feel like a foreigner, visiting his world.
Eco, on the other hand, littered his book with all these obscure references perhaps to make a point about the intellectual snobbery of people who, like his narrator, can argue about Kant in everyday conversation with a straight face but still believes that the world is united in this mystical enigma that has been a secret since the Middle Ages. Maybe he also did it to discourage casual readers, such as those who might enjoy the Da Vinci Code, for example, from reading his book. He liked Borges and wasn't above screwing with his readers in such a way, the entire premise of his book is that scholars of history invent a game that, unwittingly, changes history. The whole book is like a commentary about how even the most learned and elitist of intellectuals can still fall prey to the same beliefs in mysticism and magic that people in medieval times did. And then again, maybe he just actually writes like that.
So this is my poor man's Foucault's Pendulum study guide. I have no idea if I'm even going to be able to find all these references; I wouldn't even put it past this guy to just make some stuff up out of thin air. As usual, these posts will be more for myself than for anyone in particular. And you don't really need a study guide to enjoy the book, it's still a good read even if you don't know all the obscure people he name drops. You've been warned. So come, I dare you, turn the page.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Big Blog Of Music "Theory"
Sound is hard to write about. There's just no good literal approximation of what a sound is, which is why so many of our descriptive language surrounding sounds is onomatopoeic (like "screech" or "thump"). So really, trying to write about music theory is a little bit like trying to describe what water feels or pears taste like -- that is to say, you can only really do it through analogy.
Okay, here goes. Music theory is basically the study of all the different aspects of what makes music, music, and how people put those things together to form songs (how's that for a circular definition?). There doesn't seem to be any agreement on any common characteristics that music shares universally -- for example, some forms of non-Western music don't have a sense of rhythm in the sense that it lacks a basic beat, or "pulse," which is more or less a basic building block of most Western music. But it's more or less agreed that music has some or all of these traits:
...at least in the Western world. The less Anglo-centric categorization of musical aspects has four main traits:
Pitch
You'd think pitch would be fairly universal musical characteristic -- after all, all sounds have a frequency, right? Well...sort of. Actually, they have more than one frequency, and that all has to do with timbre and a lot of other things.
Pitch is definitely one of the three characteristics of any sound in general (the other two being intensity and timbre). It is basically how people map the tone of a sound they hear to a position on the musical scale, and it's based on the frequency, in Hz (and also, at really high or low Hz, on sound pressure, but I don't really care at this point). If you remember your physics, you will recall that frequency and wavelength are inverses of each other, so higher frequency (higher notes) means shorter wavelengths.
Some people have "perfect pitch," which means that they map tones really accurately (if you played a G on a guitar and assuming it was tuned in the "standard" way, they would recognize the note as a G) -- however, all heard or "perceived" pitch is more or less relative, because unless you're actually measuring the Hz of a sound, there are ways to throw off your innate perception of pitch. In particular, the overtones (more about this later, because it kind of deserves its own section, as it is really pretty interesting) of a sound may screw with the perception of pitch, however, in the case of well-made instruments and in most "normal" cases, perceived pitch is more or less pretty close to the "real" note.
There are exceptions; a famous example is the Shepard scale, which is basically a series of octaves that go up the scale but never seem to go higher, as a whole. There is a video of it here:
Most instruments that you think of as playing actual notes on a scale are said to have "definite pitch" (it also means they have "harmonic spectra", but we're going to cover that later in the overtones section). Things like percussion instruments don't have an easily discernible pitch, so they have "indefinite pitch." However, a sound with indefinite pitch can still sound higher or lower than other indefinite pitched sounds (the different drums in a drum set, for example), and that has to do with being comprised of higher frequencies.
The difference between two pitches is known as an "interval." An "octave" is an interval that corresponds to either doubling or halving the frequency. More about this in the scales part.
Historically the standard tuning of notes has changed a lot over time, but it has a lot to do with the physical medium and the physics of vibrations and tends to be not very interesting. Bach did a lot of work on this subject (see "The Well-Tempered Clavier)...etc, etc. Right now, the A above middle C is tuned to 440 Hz, and that's really all I care to say on the subject.
Scales and Modes
Here's the Circle of Fifths stuff. A scale is just a sequence of notes in ascending order (ascending meaning the frequency gets higher in some predictable way). There are a lot of different types of scales and we'll talk about three: chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic. In Western music, a 12-note scale makes up one octave. It's called the "chromatic scale" and each note goes up by one "half-step," or "semi-tone." The "tones" or "whole steps" are made of two half-steps (funny how that works). For example ... going from C to D takes two half steps -- C to C# and C# to D. Oh screw it -- here's a video.
Don't worry about the fingering, or anything after 0:45 seconds. It's just nice to see it on the piano because it's all laid out in front of you. If you're starting at C, a semi-tone or half-step is to the black key to the right of C (the C#/Db), another semi-tone takes you to D, and etc etc.
In the piano world, everything sort of revolves around middle C -- it's in the middle of the keyboard and you can play a C major scale without any black keys (on the piano, black keys represent sharps and flats). In other instruments, basing everything around C doesn't make as much sense. But it's what I use here because it's simple.
Anyway, the diatonic scale is the "7-tone scale." The major diatonic scale is the basic happy sounding scale and there are three minor scales: the harmonic, the natural, and the melodic, which are basically all different sad paths. The natural minor, if you write it out in a series of half and whole steps, looks exactly like the major scale with a different starting point. For example, if you start at C and play only white notes (no sharps or flats), you will play a C-major scale. If you start at A and play only white notes, you will play a natural A-minor (incidentally, moving from C down to A takes 3 half steps. To play a minor scale with the same number of sharps/flats as any major scale, go to the first note of the major scale and go down by 3 half steps. That's all in the Circle of Fifths). The harmonic minor has an augmented 7th note (the 7th note in the scale is sharp) -- it's found quite often in Arabic music. There are actually two melodic minors depending on whether you go up or down, and it's more complicated than I care to get into.
Here is a video on the minor scales, optimistically called "How to Play Piano." At about 3 minutes in he finally gets down to business, but then it's pretty good, and he explains the minors in terms of how they sound with the 7th note (the "leading seventh") which is supposed to sort of lead into the tone (the bottom note of the scale, but one octave higher) where you end, and a little bit of history surrounding the melodic minor, which is interesting if you happen to like that sort of thing:
The other really important scale is the pentatonic (5-note) scale, which is the basis of a huge amount of blues and hence, a lot of rock music. The very blatantly obvious example is the intro to the song "My Girl" by The Temptations.
If you built a song on the C-major scale (and that means C, the note the scale starts on, is your "tonic" or "tone" and has to do with harmonics and a bunch of stuff we'll discuss later), you say it's in the Key of C-major. Usually no one cares in the context of rock music what key you're in, but there are ways to determine what key any song is written in, along with if there are any modulations or key changes in the course of the song. What note something ends on (and to a lesser extend, the key it starts on) is generally a pretty good indication of the key. Also, sometimes the "dominant" or 5th note in a scale will tell the key, as it tends to be very prominent. Basically, if you want to figure out how to change the key of a song, you use the Circle of Fifths because it shows the relationships between all the notes on a chromatic scale and how by changing the key you're adding sharps or flats to your scale, etc. Here is a picture of the damn thing:
But instead of being in a key, you can also be in a mode. A "mode" is kind of confusing. Basically, if you take a C-major scale but instead of basing the song on the C note, you base it on a different note in the scale, only you still use the notes of the C scale, you're in a mode. There are a bunch of different names for different modes depending on which note from the tonic (bottom note of the scale) you start on (starting on the second note is called a Dorian mode, and so forth).
I'm not really sure, but I think the Radiohead song No Surprises is an example of an A modal Phrygian. That intro is using the notes of the F major scale but it's transposed to A.
Melody
So, having said all that, it's a lot easier to talk about melody (also called line or voice) now, because melodies are composed on the basis of scales and modes. Melodies are used in all sorts of ways: point and counterpoint (multiple melodic lines played at the same time -- again, Bach is the person to look at here, as he kind of wrote the manual on how to do counterpoint properly), verse-chorus (usually two different melodies around which sections are constructed), etc.
Melodies are generally built around several motifs, which are basically small musical ideas that are repeated and retain some kind of compositional importance -- they're easily recognized, the rest of the piece builds on them, or they represent a person or idea (a lietmotif). Basically, they're just a smaller unit of a musical phrase that is in itself a complete and well-formed idea.
I mention all this because a "riff" is a kind of motif that is a repeated musical phrase that forms the rhythmic basis of the composition -- like the riff of Ravel's Bolero or the intro to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." The main thing about a riff is the rhythmic aspect -- and if it is a memorable enough rhythm, it can also be a hook. A "hook" is basically a catchy motif (although a hook doesn't have to be melodic, it can also be rhythmic), usually in the chorus, and melody in general is huge in all forms of pop music. Obligatory Youtube links to follow:
I think this song pretty well illustrates both concepts. The main theme/motif is actually in the keyboard section in the beginning, and then she goes into a bridge, and then in the chorus ("Keep me closer/I'm a lazy dancer/When you move I move with you"), you have that nice synth-pop hook, which echoes the musical ideas of the main motif (the descending line). Also, it's a good song.
Metric - Collect Call
Harmony
So you have a melody, which is one pitch based on a tone (bottom note in the scale). Once you start adding in other pitches at the same time, you form chords. That is the basis of harmony, the "vertical" aspect of song structure (if you consider melody to be the "horizontal").
In Western music, the chord is usually based on the interval of thirds, for example, a C major chord is CEG, where CE is a major third, and EG is a major third. This CEG thing is an example of a "major triad." Why does this sound good? Because apparently the three tones have frequencies in a nice harmonious 4:5:6 ratio.
Anyway, chords are important because they influence how "relaxed" or "tense" a piece is. Certain chords sound relaxed (like that major triad) and other chords give tension to the piece, which can be "built up" (led into by a succession of relaxed chords) and then "resolved" by going back into relaxed chords, thereby creating a sense of forward movement and catharsis in the music, giving it kind of a structural storyline and making it more interesting. In technical terms, the names for this relaxed and tense is "consonance" and "dissonance."
Hmm, what can I link for an example of complex harmony? How about some Pink Floyd?
Tessitura
This is an Italian term which refers to the range for a singer or a musical instrument. It's not terribly pertinent to rock music, but it becomes kind of interesting when you get people like Mariah Carey who has apparently a seven octave range.
Tonality
Tone/tonic -- we already went over this. The tonic is the bottom note in a scale, which controls which key something is in.
Timbre
At the most basic level, timbre refers to the "color" of a sound -- how the physical details of what the sound comes from imparts certain characteristics that allows you to distinguish between the sound a saxophone makes and the sound a guitar makes, for instance. And it depends on a whole bunch of fairly technical things you probably never thought about.
The five attributes of timbre are:
The first one seems fairly obvious at least. Although it probably warrants mentioning that music in general makes use of "noise" in fairly inventive ways, including making them be integral parts of certain pieces. I think you all could come up with an example of music that you personally consider to be noise. Although that's not really the same thing, is it.
Spectral Envelope and Overtones
Remember when I said that a sound doesn't just consist of a single pitch? When you play middle A on an instrument, you're not just producing a frequency of 440 Hz -- you're actually producing an entire range of frequencies, most of which you can't hear distinctly (and all those other frequencies make up the overtones). The pitch is usually determined by the lowest frequency, which is called the fundamental frequency. Harmonics are the frequencies that are produced that are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, and partials are the non-integer frequencies. Most instruments that have definite pitches produces harmonics, and the other ones produce both partials and harmonics.
The different overtones usually decay at different speeds, so as the sound lasts longer, it is possible distinguish all these different frequencies in a single note (assuming you've been trained to hear them). That leads into a discussion of why sounds may sound different when played staccato or legato and all that sort of thing. For now, here's a video that pretty well demonstrates this whole business:
Cool, huh?
Time envelope
The timbre of a sound also depends on four variables called the ADSR - Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, that together determine a sound's "loudness" over time. Basically, if you ever wondered at a really fine-grained physical level what distinguishes a loud note played on the piano from a soft note -- it's how fast you strike the key. Your finger knows this inherently, but it's not immediately obvious to the mind. ADSR is that concept, applied to all instruments.
Pretty basic stuff: attack is how quickly the sound reaches full volume after you initiate it. Decay is how quickly it reaches the sustain volume. Sustain is, of course, the constant volume the sound attains until you stop playing the note, and release is how quickly the sound fades away when you stop playing it.
Different instruments all have different ADSR envelopes, which is one of the ways you can tell different instruments from each other. Their "loudness over time" variable is one way in which different instruments' sounds are unique. For example, a plucked string note has a different ADSR than an organ note (plucked string notes are loudest at the instant closest to when you plucked them and then they fade away slowly, organ notes are mostly at constant volume until you take your hand off the key, and then they fade away very quickly). On a synthesizer, these variables are all configurable; that's how you make a synthesizer sound like certain instruments. Woodwind instruments and other instruments that you blow into also allow you to vary the loudness in the middle of a note, and that's another thing synthesizers allow you to control, sometimes.
I'm not going to discuss the other things in that list, because it seems to me that spectra and ADSR are the two most important timbre elements (and also, the most interesting).
Intensity and Stress
This refers to the volume of sounds, but as we already know, that leads into also how you articulate notes (staccato vs legato) and also how fast you play things. There's a lot of technical Italian names for all the relative volumes. Forte -- loud. Piano -- soft. Crescendo -- getting louder. Decrescendo -- getting softer.
Fun fact: the piano was originally called the "fortepiano" because the harpsichord, the older version of the piano, didn't allow you to play with any changes in volume. The interior mechanism actually plucked the strings instead of using a hammer to hit the strings, so you only got one loudness. The piano was therefore a big technological step up.
I only mention this because a lot of musicians today seem to forget that they are allowed to work with the entire spectrum of volume and not just, you know, a single volume set to "generically loud". Just saying. Also, having your producer fade the song out at the end does not count. In fact, I hate fading out. It's such a lazy way to end your song. /endrant
Pulse
Pulse is the basic beat of a song, which doesn't have to be explicit, but it's definitely there, and it definitely repeats (for an example of a song that doesn't have an explicit beat but still has a pulse, see Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"). The tempo of a song is the tempo of the pulse. There is a natural tendency to group pulses into groups, such as strong-weak -- and if you have a pulse group that is distinct and repeats a lot, that's called a "meter." Like in poetry.
Beat
Beat is somewhat interchangeable with pulse but can also be applied in a wider sense to the basic unit of time in a song and also includes things like the speed of the song. It is usually divided into measures, which are indicated by the time signature, such as 4/4 time (4 beats to a measure, quarter note is one beat), 3/4 time (waltz time, three beats to a measure, quarter note is the one beat), etc. Some other definitions: "downbeat" is the impulse at the start of the bar. "Upbeat" is the something that leads into the downbeat.
Normally, our ear groups a series of beats into strong/weak pulses, no matter if they are actually stressed that way or not. In a measure of 4 beats, we tend to hear the first and third beats as stronger and the second and fourth as weaker. Those are called "onbeats" and "offbeats." If you frequently accent the offbeats or really anyplace where you wouldn't normally expect the stress, you use a lot of "syncopation." For example, in reggae music it is customary to stress the 2nd and 4th beats.
A "backbeat" is basically the accenting of the offbeat, which is usually done by the snare drum.
I guess everyone is familiar with what "rhythm" is. Wikipedia has a section on why human beings evolved to "appreciate" rhythm:
"In his series How Music Works, Howard Goodall presents theories that rhythm recalls how we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb. More likely is that a simple pulse or di-dah beat recalls the footsteps of another person. Our sympathetic urge to dance is designed to boost our energy levels in order to cope with someone, or some animal chasing us – a fight or flight response. From a less darwinist perspective, perceiving rhythm is the ability to master the otherwise invisible dimension, time. Rhythm is possibly also rooted in courtship ritual.[1] Neurologist Oliver Sacks posits that human affinity for rhythm is fundamental, so much that a person's sense of rhythm cannot be lost in the way that music and language can (e.g. by stroke). In addition, he states that chimpanzees and other animals show no similar appreciation for rhythm."
Western music has fairly simple rhythms in comparison with the rest of the world. Most of our music is grouped into measures that are divisible by 3 or 4 (really, also 2, but a measure of 2 is kind of awkward to work with). If it's divisible by 3, it's complex, if by 4 (or 2) it is simple. But African music makes use of a lot of "poly-rhythms," which are two or more rhythms playing at once (like a triplet played against a series of two), and lots of other types of music use more complex measure structure like 7 or 13.
Structure
The most basic units of structure are the beat and the motif, and above that, the phrase (which is just a higher level of organization of the two preceding things, whereby if you break it down any further, it looses its uniqueness). The main things to note when talking about structure are repetition and variation -- those are the bases upon which structure is composed.
Timbre
We've already been over this.
Dynamics
Not rocket science, except that apparently some musicians forget that other dynamics exist aside from "fucking loud." Not that I have anything against fucking loud, there's just...you know...all the other variances in volume in the world to play with, and hardly anyone does. Just saying.
Okay, here goes. Music theory is basically the study of all the different aspects of what makes music, music, and how people put those things together to form songs (how's that for a circular definition?). There doesn't seem to be any agreement on any common characteristics that music shares universally -- for example, some forms of non-Western music don't have a sense of rhythm in the sense that it lacks a basic beat, or "pulse," which is more or less a basic building block of most Western music. But it's more or less agreed that music has some or all of these traits:
- rhythm
- melody
- harmony
- structure
- timbre
- dynamics
...at least in the Western world. The less Anglo-centric categorization of musical aspects has four main traits:
- pitch (the frequency of a sound, or how high or low it is. Includes melody, harmony, tonality, tessitura, and tuning)
- timbre (this basically means the quality of a sound and includes words like fundamental, spectra, envelope, overtones, voices, tone color, articulation. I have no idea what most of this means)
- intensity (dynamics and stress. At least this one was easy)
- duration (anything having to do with the temporal traits of music, as John Cage would say. Includes pulse, beat, rhythm, rhythmic density, tempo, and meter)
- structure (includes motive, phrase, period, section, exposition, repetition, variation, development)
- texture (the interaction of temporal and pitch elements, include homophony, polyphony, heterophony, and simultaneity)
Pitch
You'd think pitch would be fairly universal musical characteristic -- after all, all sounds have a frequency, right? Well...sort of. Actually, they have more than one frequency, and that all has to do with timbre and a lot of other things.
Pitch is definitely one of the three characteristics of any sound in general (the other two being intensity and timbre). It is basically how people map the tone of a sound they hear to a position on the musical scale, and it's based on the frequency, in Hz (and also, at really high or low Hz, on sound pressure, but I don't really care at this point). If you remember your physics, you will recall that frequency and wavelength are inverses of each other, so higher frequency (higher notes) means shorter wavelengths.
Some people have "perfect pitch," which means that they map tones really accurately (if you played a G on a guitar and assuming it was tuned in the "standard" way, they would recognize the note as a G) -- however, all heard or "perceived" pitch is more or less relative, because unless you're actually measuring the Hz of a sound, there are ways to throw off your innate perception of pitch. In particular, the overtones (more about this later, because it kind of deserves its own section, as it is really pretty interesting) of a sound may screw with the perception of pitch, however, in the case of well-made instruments and in most "normal" cases, perceived pitch is more or less pretty close to the "real" note.
There are exceptions; a famous example is the Shepard scale, which is basically a series of octaves that go up the scale but never seem to go higher, as a whole. There is a video of it here:
Most instruments that you think of as playing actual notes on a scale are said to have "definite pitch" (it also means they have "harmonic spectra", but we're going to cover that later in the overtones section). Things like percussion instruments don't have an easily discernible pitch, so they have "indefinite pitch." However, a sound with indefinite pitch can still sound higher or lower than other indefinite pitched sounds (the different drums in a drum set, for example), and that has to do with being comprised of higher frequencies.
The difference between two pitches is known as an "interval." An "octave" is an interval that corresponds to either doubling or halving the frequency. More about this in the scales part.
Historically the standard tuning of notes has changed a lot over time, but it has a lot to do with the physical medium and the physics of vibrations and tends to be not very interesting. Bach did a lot of work on this subject (see "The Well-Tempered Clavier)...etc, etc. Right now, the A above middle C is tuned to 440 Hz, and that's really all I care to say on the subject.
Scales and Modes
Here's the Circle of Fifths stuff. A scale is just a sequence of notes in ascending order (ascending meaning the frequency gets higher in some predictable way). There are a lot of different types of scales and we'll talk about three: chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic. In Western music, a 12-note scale makes up one octave. It's called the "chromatic scale" and each note goes up by one "half-step," or "semi-tone." The "tones" or "whole steps" are made of two half-steps (funny how that works). For example ... going from C to D takes two half steps -- C to C# and C# to D. Oh screw it -- here's a video.
Don't worry about the fingering, or anything after 0:45 seconds. It's just nice to see it on the piano because it's all laid out in front of you. If you're starting at C, a semi-tone or half-step is to the black key to the right of C (the C#/Db), another semi-tone takes you to D, and etc etc.
In the piano world, everything sort of revolves around middle C -- it's in the middle of the keyboard and you can play a C major scale without any black keys (on the piano, black keys represent sharps and flats). In other instruments, basing everything around C doesn't make as much sense. But it's what I use here because it's simple.
Anyway, the diatonic scale is the "7-tone scale." The major diatonic scale is the basic happy sounding scale and there are three minor scales: the harmonic, the natural, and the melodic, which are basically all different sad paths. The natural minor, if you write it out in a series of half and whole steps, looks exactly like the major scale with a different starting point. For example, if you start at C and play only white notes (no sharps or flats), you will play a C-major scale. If you start at A and play only white notes, you will play a natural A-minor (incidentally, moving from C down to A takes 3 half steps. To play a minor scale with the same number of sharps/flats as any major scale, go to the first note of the major scale and go down by 3 half steps. That's all in the Circle of Fifths). The harmonic minor has an augmented 7th note (the 7th note in the scale is sharp) -- it's found quite often in Arabic music. There are actually two melodic minors depending on whether you go up or down, and it's more complicated than I care to get into.
Here is a video on the minor scales, optimistically called "How to Play Piano." At about 3 minutes in he finally gets down to business, but then it's pretty good, and he explains the minors in terms of how they sound with the 7th note (the "leading seventh") which is supposed to sort of lead into the tone (the bottom note of the scale, but one octave higher) where you end, and a little bit of history surrounding the melodic minor, which is interesting if you happen to like that sort of thing:
The other really important scale is the pentatonic (5-note) scale, which is the basis of a huge amount of blues and hence, a lot of rock music. The very blatantly obvious example is the intro to the song "My Girl" by The Temptations.
If you built a song on the C-major scale (and that means C, the note the scale starts on, is your "tonic" or "tone" and has to do with harmonics and a bunch of stuff we'll discuss later), you say it's in the Key of C-major. Usually no one cares in the context of rock music what key you're in, but there are ways to determine what key any song is written in, along with if there are any modulations or key changes in the course of the song. What note something ends on (and to a lesser extend, the key it starts on) is generally a pretty good indication of the key. Also, sometimes the "dominant" or 5th note in a scale will tell the key, as it tends to be very prominent. Basically, if you want to figure out how to change the key of a song, you use the Circle of Fifths because it shows the relationships between all the notes on a chromatic scale and how by changing the key you're adding sharps or flats to your scale, etc. Here is a picture of the damn thing:
But instead of being in a key, you can also be in a mode. A "mode" is kind of confusing. Basically, if you take a C-major scale but instead of basing the song on the C note, you base it on a different note in the scale, only you still use the notes of the C scale, you're in a mode. There are a bunch of different names for different modes depending on which note from the tonic (bottom note of the scale) you start on (starting on the second note is called a Dorian mode, and so forth).
I'm not really sure, but I think the Radiohead song No Surprises is an example of an A modal Phrygian. That intro is using the notes of the F major scale but it's transposed to A.
Melody
So, having said all that, it's a lot easier to talk about melody (also called line or voice) now, because melodies are composed on the basis of scales and modes. Melodies are used in all sorts of ways: point and counterpoint (multiple melodic lines played at the same time -- again, Bach is the person to look at here, as he kind of wrote the manual on how to do counterpoint properly), verse-chorus (usually two different melodies around which sections are constructed), etc.
Melodies are generally built around several motifs, which are basically small musical ideas that are repeated and retain some kind of compositional importance -- they're easily recognized, the rest of the piece builds on them, or they represent a person or idea (a lietmotif). Basically, they're just a smaller unit of a musical phrase that is in itself a complete and well-formed idea.
I mention all this because a "riff" is a kind of motif that is a repeated musical phrase that forms the rhythmic basis of the composition -- like the riff of Ravel's Bolero or the intro to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." The main thing about a riff is the rhythmic aspect -- and if it is a memorable enough rhythm, it can also be a hook. A "hook" is basically a catchy motif (although a hook doesn't have to be melodic, it can also be rhythmic), usually in the chorus, and melody in general is huge in all forms of pop music. Obligatory Youtube links to follow:
I think this song pretty well illustrates both concepts. The main theme/motif is actually in the keyboard section in the beginning, and then she goes into a bridge, and then in the chorus ("Keep me closer/I'm a lazy dancer/When you move I move with you"), you have that nice synth-pop hook, which echoes the musical ideas of the main motif (the descending line). Also, it's a good song.
Metric - Collect Call
Harmony
So you have a melody, which is one pitch based on a tone (bottom note in the scale). Once you start adding in other pitches at the same time, you form chords. That is the basis of harmony, the "vertical" aspect of song structure (if you consider melody to be the "horizontal").
In Western music, the chord is usually based on the interval of thirds, for example, a C major chord is CEG, where CE is a major third, and EG is a major third. This CEG thing is an example of a "major triad." Why does this sound good? Because apparently the three tones have frequencies in a nice harmonious 4:5:6 ratio.
Anyway, chords are important because they influence how "relaxed" or "tense" a piece is. Certain chords sound relaxed (like that major triad) and other chords give tension to the piece, which can be "built up" (led into by a succession of relaxed chords) and then "resolved" by going back into relaxed chords, thereby creating a sense of forward movement and catharsis in the music, giving it kind of a structural storyline and making it more interesting. In technical terms, the names for this relaxed and tense is "consonance" and "dissonance."
Hmm, what can I link for an example of complex harmony? How about some Pink Floyd?
Tessitura
This is an Italian term which refers to the range for a singer or a musical instrument. It's not terribly pertinent to rock music, but it becomes kind of interesting when you get people like Mariah Carey who has apparently a seven octave range.
Tonality
Tone/tonic -- we already went over this. The tonic is the bottom note in a scale, which controls which key something is in.
Timbre
At the most basic level, timbre refers to the "color" of a sound -- how the physical details of what the sound comes from imparts certain characteristics that allows you to distinguish between the sound a saxophone makes and the sound a guitar makes, for instance. And it depends on a whole bunch of fairly technical things you probably never thought about.
The five attributes of timbre are:
- difference between tones and noise
- spectral envelope
- time envelope
- changes in spectral envelope and fundamental frequency
- a sound's prefix
The first one seems fairly obvious at least. Although it probably warrants mentioning that music in general makes use of "noise" in fairly inventive ways, including making them be integral parts of certain pieces. I think you all could come up with an example of music that you personally consider to be noise. Although that's not really the same thing, is it.
Spectral Envelope and Overtones
Remember when I said that a sound doesn't just consist of a single pitch? When you play middle A on an instrument, you're not just producing a frequency of 440 Hz -- you're actually producing an entire range of frequencies, most of which you can't hear distinctly (and all those other frequencies make up the overtones). The pitch is usually determined by the lowest frequency, which is called the fundamental frequency. Harmonics are the frequencies that are produced that are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, and partials are the non-integer frequencies. Most instruments that have definite pitches produces harmonics, and the other ones produce both partials and harmonics.
The different overtones usually decay at different speeds, so as the sound lasts longer, it is possible distinguish all these different frequencies in a single note (assuming you've been trained to hear them). That leads into a discussion of why sounds may sound different when played staccato or legato and all that sort of thing. For now, here's a video that pretty well demonstrates this whole business:
Cool, huh?
Time envelope
The timbre of a sound also depends on four variables called the ADSR - Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, that together determine a sound's "loudness" over time. Basically, if you ever wondered at a really fine-grained physical level what distinguishes a loud note played on the piano from a soft note -- it's how fast you strike the key. Your finger knows this inherently, but it's not immediately obvious to the mind. ADSR is that concept, applied to all instruments.
Pretty basic stuff: attack is how quickly the sound reaches full volume after you initiate it. Decay is how quickly it reaches the sustain volume. Sustain is, of course, the constant volume the sound attains until you stop playing the note, and release is how quickly the sound fades away when you stop playing it.
Different instruments all have different ADSR envelopes, which is one of the ways you can tell different instruments from each other. Their "loudness over time" variable is one way in which different instruments' sounds are unique. For example, a plucked string note has a different ADSR than an organ note (plucked string notes are loudest at the instant closest to when you plucked them and then they fade away slowly, organ notes are mostly at constant volume until you take your hand off the key, and then they fade away very quickly). On a synthesizer, these variables are all configurable; that's how you make a synthesizer sound like certain instruments. Woodwind instruments and other instruments that you blow into also allow you to vary the loudness in the middle of a note, and that's another thing synthesizers allow you to control, sometimes.
I'm not going to discuss the other things in that list, because it seems to me that spectra and ADSR are the two most important timbre elements (and also, the most interesting).
Intensity and Stress
This refers to the volume of sounds, but as we already know, that leads into also how you articulate notes (staccato vs legato) and also how fast you play things. There's a lot of technical Italian names for all the relative volumes. Forte -- loud. Piano -- soft. Crescendo -- getting louder. Decrescendo -- getting softer.
Fun fact: the piano was originally called the "fortepiano" because the harpsichord, the older version of the piano, didn't allow you to play with any changes in volume. The interior mechanism actually plucked the strings instead of using a hammer to hit the strings, so you only got one loudness. The piano was therefore a big technological step up.
I only mention this because a lot of musicians today seem to forget that they are allowed to work with the entire spectrum of volume and not just, you know, a single volume set to "generically loud". Just saying. Also, having your producer fade the song out at the end does not count. In fact, I hate fading out. It's such a lazy way to end your song. /endrant
Pulse
Pulse is the basic beat of a song, which doesn't have to be explicit, but it's definitely there, and it definitely repeats (for an example of a song that doesn't have an explicit beat but still has a pulse, see Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"). The tempo of a song is the tempo of the pulse. There is a natural tendency to group pulses into groups, such as strong-weak -- and if you have a pulse group that is distinct and repeats a lot, that's called a "meter." Like in poetry.
Beat
Beat is somewhat interchangeable with pulse but can also be applied in a wider sense to the basic unit of time in a song and also includes things like the speed of the song. It is usually divided into measures, which are indicated by the time signature, such as 4/4 time (4 beats to a measure, quarter note is one beat), 3/4 time (waltz time, three beats to a measure, quarter note is the one beat), etc. Some other definitions: "downbeat" is the impulse at the start of the bar. "Upbeat" is the something that leads into the downbeat.
Normally, our ear groups a series of beats into strong/weak pulses, no matter if they are actually stressed that way or not. In a measure of 4 beats, we tend to hear the first and third beats as stronger and the second and fourth as weaker. Those are called "onbeats" and "offbeats." If you frequently accent the offbeats or really anyplace where you wouldn't normally expect the stress, you use a lot of "syncopation." For example, in reggae music it is customary to stress the 2nd and 4th beats.
A "backbeat" is basically the accenting of the offbeat, which is usually done by the snare drum.
I guess everyone is familiar with what "rhythm" is. Wikipedia has a section on why human beings evolved to "appreciate" rhythm:
"In his series How Music Works, Howard Goodall presents theories that rhythm recalls how we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb. More likely is that a simple pulse or di-dah beat recalls the footsteps of another person. Our sympathetic urge to dance is designed to boost our energy levels in order to cope with someone, or some animal chasing us – a fight or flight response. From a less darwinist perspective, perceiving rhythm is the ability to master the otherwise invisible dimension, time. Rhythm is possibly also rooted in courtship ritual.[1] Neurologist Oliver Sacks posits that human affinity for rhythm is fundamental, so much that a person's sense of rhythm cannot be lost in the way that music and language can (e.g. by stroke). In addition, he states that chimpanzees and other animals show no similar appreciation for rhythm."
Western music has fairly simple rhythms in comparison with the rest of the world. Most of our music is grouped into measures that are divisible by 3 or 4 (really, also 2, but a measure of 2 is kind of awkward to work with). If it's divisible by 3, it's complex, if by 4 (or 2) it is simple. But African music makes use of a lot of "poly-rhythms," which are two or more rhythms playing at once (like a triplet played against a series of two), and lots of other types of music use more complex measure structure like 7 or 13.
Structure
The most basic units of structure are the beat and the motif, and above that, the phrase (which is just a higher level of organization of the two preceding things, whereby if you break it down any further, it looses its uniqueness). The main things to note when talking about structure are repetition and variation -- those are the bases upon which structure is composed.
Timbre
We've already been over this.
Dynamics
Not rocket science, except that apparently some musicians forget that other dynamics exist aside from "fucking loud." Not that I have anything against fucking loud, there's just...you know...all the other variances in volume in the world to play with, and hardly anyone does. Just saying.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 8: Covers, Remixes, Samples
Now that the history lesson is over, it's time to have some fun. This section will feature remixes and covers with an emphasis on genre-crossing examples.
"Come Together" and "Closer," Beatles and Nine Inch Nails. Apparently this mashup is so popular that it's now dubbed "Come Closer Together" on the interwebs.
Dirt off Your Wonderwall, Jay-Z and Oasis. This one's not that hard to conceptualize, actually. Isn't this what rap basically does all the time anyway?
KT Tunstall - Get Your Freak On (Missy Elliot cover)
White Rabbit - by Living Legends
Stairway to Heaven - Dolly Parton covers Led Zeppelin
Matthew Good - Moon Over Marin (Dead Kennedys cover)
Thriller - Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson
Newton Faulkner covers Teardrop (Massive Attack)
Apocalyptica - Nothing Else Matters (this is a cello band that does classical covers of Metallica songs)
And finally, because every party should end with this song, here is Sparklehorse covering Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."
"Come Together" and "Closer," Beatles and Nine Inch Nails. Apparently this mashup is so popular that it's now dubbed "Come Closer Together" on the interwebs.
Dirt off Your Wonderwall, Jay-Z and Oasis. This one's not that hard to conceptualize, actually. Isn't this what rap basically does all the time anyway?
KT Tunstall - Get Your Freak On (Missy Elliot cover)
White Rabbit - by Living Legends
Stairway to Heaven - Dolly Parton covers Led Zeppelin
Matthew Good - Moon Over Marin (Dead Kennedys cover)
Thriller - Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson
Newton Faulkner covers Teardrop (Massive Attack)
Apocalyptica - Nothing Else Matters (this is a cello band that does classical covers of Metallica songs)
And finally, because every party should end with this song, here is Sparklehorse covering Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 7: 2000s
Now, unfortunately, we get to the 2000s. I know I promised not to do this, but I really can't help remarking on how patently awful most of the popular music of this decade is. I mean, seriously. What happened?
Oh, well. Only time will tell.
Post-Grunge
Even as rock and alternative are becoming increasingly less popular as hip hop/R&B/rap take over airwaves, the post-grunge genre keeps chugging along with bands like Creed and Nickleback. The good news was that Creed disbanded in 2004. The bad news is that they're supposedly back together. Nickleback (actually a Canadian band, and named for some reason after the amount of change you get back after ordering a coffee from Starbucks, which is probably the most un-grunge like concept for a band name that I can think of) is probably the most successful post-grunge act thus far, with 40 million sales. The Foo Fighters, formed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, is technically also a post-grunge act; the difference being that they are actually...good. Here is a Foo Fighters song from The Colour and the Shape, which is actually from the 90s.
Foo Fighters - Everlong
Metal
There is a renewed interest in metal during this period, and older acts like Slayer and Metallica are popular again, along with a slew of new ones such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God. Also, metalcore, a fusion of metal and hardcore punk, becomes popular.
Killswitch Engage - My Last Serenade
British Invasion
Coldplay's single "Yellow" comes out in 2000. They head the popularity of British bands during the decade -- other bands include Radiohead and Muse.
Muse - Hysteria
Pop Punk
Pop Punk remains popular. Fall Out Boy's "Sugar We're Going Down" came out in 2005.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Numetal
Numetal (a fusion of metal with hip hop) bands enjoy a slew of hit singles. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out in 2000, and they are credited with being one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Other artists from this trend are Evanescence and Staind.
Linkin Park - In the End
Emo
Emo isn't really a musical style; it's more of a term that describes the people that listen to the bands rather than the bands themselves. Popular "emo" bands include Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance, even though they themselves repudiate the term.
Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated
New New Wave/synthpop/post punk
There is a renewed interest in synthesizer music and 1980s music during this time, as bands such as The Killers become popular as numetal fades away in the later part of the decade.
The Killers - Human
Indie
With the increased commercialization of alternative music, the indie music scene burgeons, helped considerably by technology that enables better advertising and distribution for bands not signed to major labels. There isn't really a particular style of indie music, it has been associated with a huge variety of different sounds and aesthetics, including lo-fi, post-rock (rock instrumentation, like Mogwai), sadcore, C86, math rock (featuring complex rhythms, like Dillinger Escape Plan), shoegaze/dream pop (My Bloody Valentine), indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, twee pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, garage rock revival, dance-punk, indie folk, baroque pop (classical music elements brought to rock, like Arcade Fire), and indietronica.
Arcade Fire - Wake Up (with David Bowie)
New Pornographers - Challengers
The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together
Death Cab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body
The Strokes - Reptilia
Teen Pop Rock
Boy bands fade out of popularity by the middle of the decade and a new slew of pop artists targeting a tween audience achieve success, like Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.
Dance Music
Dance music is becoming the dominant force on the radio. Along with dance music comes Auto-Tune. See Black Eyed Peas.
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (I could swear he's actually just saying Boom Boom Boom but whatever)
Ethnic Music (what a terrible genre name)
World music in general enjoys more widespread success. Shakira and MIA achieve mainstream popularity.
MIA - Paper Planes (theme is actually a Clash song)
Hip Hop/R&B/Rap
This decade pretty much belongs to this kind of music. Eninem is considered the best-selling artist of the decade. This is the era of Kanye West, Destiny's Child, and Beyonce.
Eninem - Forget About Dre
Country
Country music is becoming increasingly popular also in this decade. Carrie Underwood became the first American Idol winner to go into country instead of pop. Taylor Swift ushers in the popularity of country pop.
Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me
Changes in the Music Industry
Whereas before, the major entertainment networks used to hold the reins of distribution and fame, changes in technology are making it increasingly possible for musicians to control distribution themselves. With the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the music industry is fighting a losing war against the increased piracy of music, despite studies that have shown that people who pirate the most music also tend to buy the most music. The response from the musicians has been mixed, some are extremely against piracy and others have come to terms with the 21st century. Radiohead released In Rainbows on a "pay for it if you like it" basis, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free on their website, and many artists are releasing material directly in MP3 format (such as on a flash drive). My personal opinion is that the music industry in general needs to come to grips with this new paradigm instead of fighting it. People also need to realize that most listeners are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as it's actually good.
And we'll end with this, for good measure:
Video Killed the Radio Star
Oh, well. Only time will tell.
Post-Grunge
Even as rock and alternative are becoming increasingly less popular as hip hop/R&B/rap take over airwaves, the post-grunge genre keeps chugging along with bands like Creed and Nickleback. The good news was that Creed disbanded in 2004. The bad news is that they're supposedly back together. Nickleback (actually a Canadian band, and named for some reason after the amount of change you get back after ordering a coffee from Starbucks, which is probably the most un-grunge like concept for a band name that I can think of) is probably the most successful post-grunge act thus far, with 40 million sales. The Foo Fighters, formed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, is technically also a post-grunge act; the difference being that they are actually...good. Here is a Foo Fighters song from The Colour and the Shape, which is actually from the 90s.
Foo Fighters - Everlong
Metal
There is a renewed interest in metal during this period, and older acts like Slayer and Metallica are popular again, along with a slew of new ones such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God. Also, metalcore, a fusion of metal and hardcore punk, becomes popular.
Killswitch Engage - My Last Serenade
British Invasion
Coldplay's single "Yellow" comes out in 2000. They head the popularity of British bands during the decade -- other bands include Radiohead and Muse.
Muse - Hysteria
Pop Punk
Pop Punk remains popular. Fall Out Boy's "Sugar We're Going Down" came out in 2005.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Numetal
Numetal (a fusion of metal with hip hop) bands enjoy a slew of hit singles. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out in 2000, and they are credited with being one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Other artists from this trend are Evanescence and Staind.
Linkin Park - In the End
Emo
Emo isn't really a musical style; it's more of a term that describes the people that listen to the bands rather than the bands themselves. Popular "emo" bands include Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance, even though they themselves repudiate the term.
Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated
New New Wave/synthpop/post punk
There is a renewed interest in synthesizer music and 1980s music during this time, as bands such as The Killers become popular as numetal fades away in the later part of the decade.
The Killers - Human
Indie
With the increased commercialization of alternative music, the indie music scene burgeons, helped considerably by technology that enables better advertising and distribution for bands not signed to major labels. There isn't really a particular style of indie music, it has been associated with a huge variety of different sounds and aesthetics, including lo-fi, post-rock (rock instrumentation, like Mogwai), sadcore, C86, math rock (featuring complex rhythms, like Dillinger Escape Plan), shoegaze/dream pop (My Bloody Valentine), indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, twee pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, garage rock revival, dance-punk, indie folk, baroque pop (classical music elements brought to rock, like Arcade Fire), and indietronica.
Arcade Fire - Wake Up (with David Bowie)
New Pornographers - Challengers
The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together
Death Cab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body
The Strokes - Reptilia
Teen Pop Rock
Boy bands fade out of popularity by the middle of the decade and a new slew of pop artists targeting a tween audience achieve success, like Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.
Dance Music
Dance music is becoming the dominant force on the radio. Along with dance music comes Auto-Tune. See Black Eyed Peas.
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (I could swear he's actually just saying Boom Boom Boom but whatever)
Ethnic Music (what a terrible genre name)
World music in general enjoys more widespread success. Shakira and MIA achieve mainstream popularity.
MIA - Paper Planes (theme is actually a Clash song)
Hip Hop/R&B/Rap
This decade pretty much belongs to this kind of music. Eninem is considered the best-selling artist of the decade. This is the era of Kanye West, Destiny's Child, and Beyonce.
Eninem - Forget About Dre
Country
Country music is becoming increasingly popular also in this decade. Carrie Underwood became the first American Idol winner to go into country instead of pop. Taylor Swift ushers in the popularity of country pop.
Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me
Changes in the Music Industry
Whereas before, the major entertainment networks used to hold the reins of distribution and fame, changes in technology are making it increasingly possible for musicians to control distribution themselves. With the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the music industry is fighting a losing war against the increased piracy of music, despite studies that have shown that people who pirate the most music also tend to buy the most music. The response from the musicians has been mixed, some are extremely against piracy and others have come to terms with the 21st century. Radiohead released In Rainbows on a "pay for it if you like it" basis, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free on their website, and many artists are releasing material directly in MP3 format (such as on a flash drive). My personal opinion is that the music industry in general needs to come to grips with this new paradigm instead of fighting it. People also need to realize that most listeners are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as it's actually good.
And we'll end with this, for good measure:
Video Killed the Radio Star
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