Music Theory

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http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/troyapeterson/harmonium-grammatika We're making an app, 3 videos and a poster that will help you turn your guitar, bass, piano or ukelele into a musical light saber by connecting it to the Force. Well, the Circle of Fifths and Nashville #'s. You'll still need a music teacher to become a Jedi but the app, vids and poster are guaranteed to raise your musiclorean levels.

Grammatika by Troy A Peterson

http://bestthing.flyingpudding.com/2008/05/12/the-mathematics-in-music/

the best thing i learned today – The Mathematics in Music

I went to a very interesting performance today: “The Mathematics in Music: a concert-conversation with Elaine Chew”, in Killian Hall at MIT . Elaine is visiting Harvard for the year from USC , where she is a professor. She has an amazingly broad background that is super-pleasing… having studied math, computer science, music performance, and operations research. Elaine performed four piano pieces, three of which were composed just for her, that use playful tricks in math as compositional inspiration. Some of these tricks included: Composing with a meter determined by the numbers in a row (or column) of a completed Sudoku puzzle.

Universal property of music discovered

Mar. 25, 2011 — Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave. The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval. Almost all music in the world is based on an underlying scale from which compositions are built. In Western music, the major scale ( do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do ) is the best known scale. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110325102008.htm
Music Theory

http://www.skytopia.com/project/rating.html

Music theory and art aesthetics. Can melody be rated?

I'm not exactly sure of the general consensus, but I have often heard the opinion that with music for example: "There can be no final, or definitive judgement" or that "One person's subjective opinion is just as valid as another - and that it's only a matter of personal preference" . In other words, many believe that music is only good because our minds are individually (and in different ways) - 'programmed' or 'geared' (for whatever reasons) to enjoy it from their perspective. This is called the "Subjective or Relative Aesthetics View" Well, no doubt people's 'taste' is biased (to varying degrees) due to a number of reasons:- what they're 'used to' hearing, 'cultural trend', simply their quality of taste in music, or even 'nostalgia' (though obviously a tune could still be nostalgic to someone and good).