Music & Sound

Watch

• Heavenly Sounds - The Organ and its Fascinating Versatility | Music Documentary ↗DW Classical Music
• The Science of Sound in Film — Film Sound Recording for Beginners ↗StudioBinder
• How to analyse sound in film ↗The Media Insider
• SOUND ALCHEMY Documentary - Hermetic Sound Science - Egyptian Roots of Modern Sound Healing ↗soundbringer
• Sound Mixing for Film, Loudness ↗Tom Efinger
• How to SOUND DESIGN your Documentary — Vox Style ↗Lilly's Tech Tips

Read

• The Study of OrchestrationA definitive, encyclopedic guide to the techniques and aesthetics of orchestration, bridging theory and practical application for composers and musicians.Samuel Adler
• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human ObsessionA groundbreaking exploration of how music engages the brain, blending cognitive science, psychology, and cultural analysis to explain its universal appeal.Daniel J. Levitin
• The Sounds of Music: A Brief IntroductionA concise yet profound examination of the physics, perception, and cultural dimensions of sound, offering foundational insights for composers and listeners alike.Robert Erickson
• Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and RadioA meticulously curated anthology of primary sources tracing the technological and cultural transformations that shaped modern music and sound media.Timothy D. Taylor

Voices to follow

• Ludwig van Beethoven ↗Revolutionized classical music by bridging the Classical and Romantic eras, creating iconic symphonies and sonatas despite deafness.Composer and pianist
• Johann Sebastian Bach ↗Master of Baroque music whose compositions, like the Brandenburg Concertos and The Well-Tempered Clavier, laid foundational principles for Western music.Composer and musician
• Miles Davis ↗Pioneer of jazz who shaped multiple genres, from bebop to fusion, with groundbreaking albums like 'Kind of Blue' and 'Bitches Brew'.Jazz trumpeter and composer
• Yo-Yo Ma ↗World-renowned classical musician celebrated for his technical mastery and cross-cultural collaborations, spanning from Bach to bluegrass and beyond.Cellist

Glossary

• PitchPitch is the perceived frequency of a sound, determining how high or low it sounds to the human ear.
• TimbreTimbre is the quality or color of a sound that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or instruments.
• RhythmRhythm is the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats.
• HarmonyHarmony refers to the simultaneous combination of notes to create chords and chord progressions that support the melody.
• MelodyMelody is a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying and forms the main part of a piece of music.
• TempoTempo is the speed or pace of a given piece of music, typically measured in beats per minute.
• DynamicsDynamics refers to the volume of sound, ranging from very soft (piano) to very loud (forte), and how it changes throughout a piece.
• TextureTexture describes the way multiple layers of sound in a piece of music interact, such as monophonic, homophonic, or polyphonic.

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Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Growth & Productivity Economics

  A factory keeps making cars faster and cheaper every year. But a string quartet still needs four people and the same twenty minutes Beethoven did, no speeding it up. So as everything else gets cheaper to produce, human-only things like live music, haircuts, and teaching quietly cost us more and more. Economists call it Baumol's cost disease.

• Emotion & Emotional Regulation Psychology

  When a song plays a tense, unfinished-sounding chord, your brain is quietly betting on which note comes next. The rush you feel when it finally lands on the right one is your reward system celebrating a correct guess. That is the same brain machinery behind craving, which is why music can grab your feelings just by making you wait.

• Nationalism & the Nation-State History

  That solemn national anthem that feels thousands of years old? A lot of them were freshly written in the 1800s, along with 'ancient' folk dances and costumes. Nations were being built, and they needed a shared past to feel real, so people composed one, then dressed it up as tradition.

• Linguistics Literature

  Play a wrong chord in a song and you flinch, the same way you'd wince at 'me go store' instead of 'I went to the store.' Music has grammar too, rules about which note should come next. And brain scans suggest you use a lot of the same mental machinery to catch a broken sentence and a broken chord. Music really is a language your brain reads.

• Signal & Image Processing Mathematics

  An MP3 shrinks a song by deleting sounds your ears literally can't hear, like a soft note hidden right after a loud crash. This 'masking' is a blind spot in human hearing, and the whole compression trick is built directly on top of it. You're not missing anything, because your brain was going to ignore it anyway.

• Mystical Experience Religion

  That shiver you get when a choir swells to its peak? A mystic feels something startlingly similar reaching for God. Brain-wise, awe runs on the same wiring whether it comes from a cathedral or a symphony, and for a second it dissolves the wall between you and everything else.

• Intellectual Property and Copyright Law

  There are only so many short melodies possible, so hit songs now sometimes sound alike purely by accident, and people get sued. So some musicians used a computer to generate nearly every possible tune and released them all for free. The idea: if no one can own them, no one can sue over them.