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What makes a musical note different from any other sound? How can you tell if you have perfect pitch? Why do 10 violins sound only twice as loud as one? Do your Bob Dylan albums sound better on CD or vinyl? John Powell, a scientist and musician, answers these questions and many more in HOW MUSIC WORKS, an intriguing and original guide to acoustics. In a clear, accessible, and engaging voice, Powell fascinates the reader with his delightful descriptions of the science and psychology lurking beneath the surface of music. With lively discussions of the secrets behind harmony, timbre, keys, chords, loudness, musical composition, and more, HOW MUSIC WORKS will be treasured by music lovers everywhere. The book also includes a CD of examples and exercises from the book.
How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance. A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.
Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? How do we make sense of musical sound? These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious. Now The Music Instinct explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways. Without requiring any specialist knowledge, The Music Instinct will both deepen your appreciation of the music you love, and open doors to music that once seemed alien, dull or daunting, offering a passionate plea for the importance of music in education and in everyday life. 'You'll never listen to music the same way again' - Independent
Take a visual journey through the world of music and learn the science behind it, too. Budding music fans will love discovering musical geniuses of every era, from Mozart and classical music to Bowie and pop, as well as finding out how music is created and what links it all together. The book looks at music throughout history, beginning with the first known melody from the Fertile Crescent and covering modern music phenomena, from K Pop to hip-hop. Instruments and genres from across the world are featured, with "playlists" of key pieces encouraging kids to look up pieces to hear for themselves. STEAM spreads delve into the psychology and math behind music, from how it affects our mood to how it can improve our minds. Covering India's Ragas, Indonesia's Gamelan, Japan's city pop, and more, this book will help children discover a love of music.
How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethno...
Based on the critically acclaimed podcast that has broken down hundreds of Top 40 songs, Switched On Pop dives in into eighteen hit songs drawn from pop of the last twenty years--ranging from Britney to Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson to Kendrick Lamar--uncovering the musical explanations for why and how certain tracks climb to the top of the charts. In the process, authors Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan reveal the timeless techniques that animate music across time and space.
This collection includes the popular title work, "Allegro appassionato," "Album" (consisting of 6 pieces), "Rhapsodie d'Auvergne," "Theme and Variations," plus six etudes, three waltzes, and six etudes for left hand alone. Authoritative sources. Introduction.
Analysis of 18th- and 19th-Century Musical Works in the Classical Tradition is a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in music analysis. It outlines a process of analyzing works in the Classical tradition by uncovering the construction of a piece of music—the formal, harmonic, rhythmic, and voice-leading organizations—as well as its unique features. It develops an in-depth approach that is applied to works by composers including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. The book begins with foundational chapters in music theory, starting with basic diatonic harmony and progressing rapidly to more advanced topics, such as phrase design, phrase expansion, and chromatic harmony. The second part contains analyses of complete musical works and movements. The text features over 150 musical examples, including numerous complete annotated scores. Suggested assignments at the end of each chapter guide students in their own musical analysis.
How does music reflect the key moments in our lives? How do we choose the works that inspire, delight, comfort or console? Fiona Maddocks selects 100 classical works from across nine centuries, arguing passionately, persuasively and at times obstinately for their inclusion, putting each work in its cultural and musical context, discussing omissions, suggesting alternatives and always putting the music first.
A love story and a journey through music. The exquisite and perfectly pitched new novel from the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. It's 1988. The CD has arrived. Sales of the shiny new disks are soaring on high streets in cities across the England. Meanwhile, down a dead-end street, Frank's music shop stands small and brightly lit, jam-packed with records of every kind. It attracts the lonely, the sleepless, the adrift. There is room for everyone. Frank has a gift for finding his customers the music they need. Into this shop arrives Ilse Brauchmann--practical, brave, well-heeled. Frank falls for this curious woman...