MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: periodicity

  • Mapping the Music Universe – preview

    Mapping the Music Universe is written for the literate musician, including college music students through music scholars, and anyone who is intellectually curious about how music works, especially in the 20th-21st-century modern and “post-modern” eras.

    Purpose

    The mapping project is a comprehensive catalog of patterns and processes, meant to provide simple tools for understanding modern music. This is not a theoretical treatise but a practical guide for all educated or educating musicians and the intellectually curious, requiring only basic music literacy. For me as a composer, it is also an exploration of how some of the less travelled conceptual paths lead to interesting creative possibilities. Sample composed etudes will give examples to connect the abstractions back to our musical imaginations.

    In 1989 I co-authored a composition textbook with Larry Austin, Learning to Compose: Modes, Materials, and Models of Musical Invention. We felt it was conceptually ground-breaking. My next book, ARRAYS, was an aural skills workbook covering basic modal, tonal, and “post-tonal” music of the Renaissance through the Twentieth Century. They were intended as college-level textbooks, ARRAYS basic and Learning to Compose quite advanced — maybe too advanced to succeed as a textbook, turning out to be more of a technical monograph than a basic guide. Mapping the Music Universe draws in part on the ideas and approaches of both these now out-of-print publications.

    The three parts progress logically from fundamental — time and periodicity — to pitch space, then to larger structures — texture and form. They can be read in this sequence or separately in any order. Likewise, within each part, the various topics are presented in a progressive order, but jumping in at any point is not to be discouraged. As terms are defined, they are set off to the right. Figures include musical examples, sample etude compositions, tables, and graphic illustrations of patterns and their relationships.

    Read full Introduction . . .

    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS

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  • STARS: Time points, periodicity, perception

    We start with time. Everything in music involves time, is of time, sound events occurring in our perceived flow of time. Sound itself is periodic, a repetition of compression waves in air (or water).

    Repetition of an event or series of events, establishing a frequency of repetition and the period or cycle length of the elapsed time duration from each event’s starting time point (moment) to the starting point (moment) of its repetition.

    We perceive the frequency of the waves as pitch if they are faster than 20 per second and slower than about 4,000. Frequency is typically measured in cycles per second, called Hertz.

    Non-periodic waves faster than about 20 Hz are perceived as noise. Events or time cycles slower than 20 Hz are perceived as pulses, tempo, rhythm, phrase structure, etc. At these slower sub-sonic event speeds, it is more convenient to identify the duration of the cycle, its period, than the frequency.

    Periodicity, this repetitive aspect of sound events in time, gives us a dimension to map all the possibilities, from extremely fast to almost frozen slowness, and from simple, highly regular repetitions to a very complex succession of variants.

    Topics

    • Defining time
    • Time perception
    • Periodicity
    • Meter
    • Definitions
    • Stress and accent
    • Rhythmic molecules
    • Harmonic rhythm
    • Beyond meter
    • Prime numbers

    To read more, request a password from tc24@txstate.edu

    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS