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
5. Touch Pianist 🧙

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:
   • 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 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):

• 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 - rooted in maqam (scales like hijaz and rhythms like 7/8, 9/8), shaped by 12 equal temperament and Western harmonization strategies
• Maqam languages - microtonal scales, monophony and heterophony
• Indian music
• Gamelan, piphat and other gong chime languages
• many other traditions: Chinese, Kyrgyz komuz, Georgian polyphonic singing, Japanese, Baka, Amazonian etc etc

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)

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.