Arts & Culture
Organised sound — theory, practice, history and the technology that keeps redefining it.
10 fields · 111 topics · 87 curated works
The grammar of music — notation, scales, harmony and counterpoint — which described what composers did before it prescribed.
Foundations & Overviews · Notation & Rhythm · Scales & Modes · Intervals · Harmony
The craft of making new music — melody, harmony and arrangement treated as decisions a writer makes rather than rules to obey.
Foundations & Overviews · Melodic Writing · Arranging · Orchestration · Songwriting Craft
The physical craft of playing — technique, tone and interpretation across the instrument families and the trained voice.
Foundations & Overviews · Piano · Guitar · Strings · Woodwinds
A thousand years of notated music — medieval polyphony through Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to the Romantic century.
Foundations & Overviews · Medieval Music · Renaissance Polyphony · Baroque Music · Bach
The tradition that reorganised twentieth-century music.
Foundations & Overviews · Blues Origins · Early Jazz & New Orleans · Swing Era · Bebop
The dominant listening of the last seventy years.
Foundations & Overviews · Rock & Roll Origins · Soul & R&B · Funk · Reggae & Caribbean Music
Systems built on different assumptions about pitch and rhythm.
Foundations & Overviews · Indian Classical Music · Arabic Maqam · West African Rhythm · Latin American Music
The studio as an instrument — recording, mixing and mastering, synthesis and sampling, and sound design as composition.
Foundations & Overviews · Recording Techniques · Microphones · Mixing · Mastering
Why sound does what it does to people — psychoacoustics, memory, rhythm perception, and the evolutionary puzzle of musicality.
Foundations & Overviews · Psychoacoustics · Music & Emotion · Music & Memory · Rhythm Perception
How music reaches people and who gets paid — publishing, royalties, live economics, and copyright's uneasy fit with the art.
Foundations & Overviews · Music Industry Structure · Publishing & Royalties · Live Performance Economics · Independent Music
No prior grounding assumed.
The Story of Notation
C. F. Abdy Williams · 1903
Traces staff notation back through neumes and mensural signs, arguing that notation's odd conventions are fossils of performance problems each era…
+11 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Method for the Spanish Guitar
Fernando Sor · 1830
Builds a complete technique for the classical guitar from first principles of hand position and tone production, arguing against the ornamental…
+36 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music
Thomas Morley · 1597
A dialogue that teaches Renaissance sight-singing, counterpoint and composition together, arguing that a gentleman's musical competence rests on…
+37 more at this level
12 of 87 works
C. F. Abdy Williams
Traces staff notation back through neumes and mensural signs, arguing that notation's odd conventions are fossils of performance problems each era was trying to solve.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026John A. Lomax
Argues that cowboy songs were a genuine oral folk tradition worth preserving in print before it disappeared, and collects them directly from working cowboys rather than published sources.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Francis Cooke
Collects first-person interviews with leading pianists of the day and finds them disagreeing sharply on technique, which the author reads as evidence there is no single correct method.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Isaac Goldberg
Argues that the commercial song-publishing district of Tin Pan Alley, not the concert hall, was the real engine that shaped American popular musical taste.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Leonard Bernstein
Uses Chomsky's generative grammar as an analogy to argue that tonal music has a universal grammar of its own, and that twentieth-century atonality broke a genuine linguistic rule rather than just a stylistic convention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Diana Deutsch
Argues that absolute pitch is far more widespread than assumed and is best explained as a general perceptual ability that is lost in most children during a critical period unless reinforced, such as by a tone language.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Murch
Argues that a soundtrack reads as clear not by being sparse but by segregating sounds into distinct perceptual bands, so density and clarity are compatible if the frequencies and rhythms of different sounds do not compete.
Benjamin Zander (TED)
Uses a single Chopin prelude to show that hearing classical music depends on following one long harmonic line rather than tracking individual notes, and demonstrates the difference at the keyboard.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rachel Brashier
Argues from fieldwork with a Balinese gamelan teacher that mastering gamelan is transmitted through combined visual, tactile and kinesthetic channels that cannot be reduced to verbal instruction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Victor Wooten
Argues that music should be taught the way children learn spoken language, through immersion and mistake-filled play with fluent speakers, rather than through rules taught before any playing is allowed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Emma Winston & Laurence Saywood
Argues that lofi hip hop's YouTube livestreams sell relaxation and focus by borrowing hip hop's sonic markers while stripping out the genre's original cultural and political associations.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Milton Mermikides (Gresham College)
Argues that musical emotion comes from expectation being set up, delayed and resolved, so what moves a listener is structural timing rather than the sounds themselves.
link checked 17 Sept 2026