Music & Pop Culture
What's music?
Music is really hard to define. It's an art developed through time. We can say that music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts of tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.
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The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art and there is also a strong connection between music and mathematics.
Les Luthiers - Loas al cuarto de baño
Stockhausen - Helicopter String Quartet
Wintergatan - Marble machine
Ocean Sound
Taiko Drums - Fertility of the sea
Which are the elements of music?
There are seven basic elements of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone, form, tempo and dynamics.
Melody is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit. It is a single line of tones that moves up, down, or stays the same using steps, skips and repeated tones.
Harmony is the relationship between two or more simultaneous pitches or pitch simultaneities, chord progression affects the key.
Rhythm is the variation of the accentuation of sounds over time.
Tone color is timbre.
Form is the structure of a particular piece, how its parts are put together to make the whole.
Tempo is the speed of communicating an emotion in a particular piece, how fast or slow it's played.
Dynamics is the volume of all parts as a whole and every layer in the structure.
These aspects combine to create secondary aspects including form or structure, texture, and style. Other commonly included aspects include the spatial location or the movement in space of sounds, gesture, and dance. Silence is also often considered an aspect of music, if it is considered to exist.
Anatomy of a song: Take on me
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How does the music industry work?
Autotune: Friend or Foe?
Auto-Tune is an audio processor introduced in 1997 by the American company Antares Audio Technologies. Auto-Tune was originally intended to disguise or correct off-key inaccuracies, allowing vocal tracks to be perfectly tuned. The 1998 Cher song "Believe" popularized the technique of using Auto-Tune to distort vocals.