Music Theory (Part 1) - Relationship between Sound and Time
Its been 7 days since my introduction post. I've been thinking about what to share with my newfound community. The week has been stressfull. I had a gig last friday where my friends and I presented a bunch of Indo-Chilean folk fusion originals and arrangements of ancient tunes. All in all I had a great time writing and rehearsing.
What made my week hectic was not the gig but my assignment submissions. Especially the one for my Big Band Writing course.(Writing for 20 instruments can force tears out of you - one of my latest lessons in life)
I'm the good looking fellow in the center :)
Enough of this lets talk about music!
First of all I want to say time is everything in music.
Pitch = waves/second and Beat = waves/minute(bpm).(Im using a loose definition of the word waves and beat here - by beat I mean an even pulse ) Even though we perceive these phenomenons very differently they are actually directly related. When it comes to perception, we also hear cycles of beats (we call it timesignatures). A number of these cycles make up a section. And a number of these sections make up a piece of music.
Basically music is a repetition of repetitions.(reminds me of recursive functions)
A less cluttered version of the explanation.
- For a sound to make sense it has to be in the format of a pitch(a stable repeating pattern of waves)
- For a pitch to make sense it has to move in time in the BPM domain. Lets call this a phrase or motif.
- For a motif to make sense it has to have some relation with the underlying pulse. We call this the time signature. Most songs we've heard either fits in a 3 beat cycle or a 4 beat cycle. These cycles are separated on paper with a line called Bar.
- A group of these bars form a section. Section can have names like INTRO, VERSE or the alphabets A B C.
- A Group of these sections make up a piece of music.
I hope this makes some sort of sense. If not don't worry everything will be clear after a few posts. I'm just warming up.
Im not much of a verbal person so I am not good at putting ideas into words. Let me know if I need to elaborate on anything.
Hopefully I will get enough time this week for Part 2 called Mechanics of Pitches and Perception.
Music of the week:
Tigran Hamasyan - Mocroot (full concert). (Might take time to get used to this kinda music if you are not used to it. Its great stuff! Super colorful! )
Tigran Hamasyan Wiki, Tigran Hamasyan Official Page, Tigran Hamasyan Spotify
INSTANT follow and upvote for being the first Steemian I've seen mention Tigran!!! He's one of my absolute favorites and a huge influence on my own music. I hadn't thought of the waves per second/per minute thing even though I've recognized the "all of music is rhythm" concept; thank you for putting words to it that I had failed to find. What a coincidence that I just ran across this, I haven't seen many other people on here talking theory (but maybe I haven't been browsing #musictheory enough haha) and I just made a quite extensive post about microtonality before I saw this. Perhaps you be interested to read it? Here's a link:
https://steemit.com/musictheory/@fungusmonk/the-harmonic-series-special-edition-what-does-it-mean-to-be-in-tune-an-extensive-discussion-on-music-theory-with-andybets
Astounding music
Awesome post and great musical taste (Tigran)! I'm a big fan of his work. Followed