Musical Spaces

Musical Spaces
Author: James Williams
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000400999

There is growing recognition and understanding of music’s fundamentally spatial natures, with significances of space found both in the immediacy of musical practices and in connection to broader identities and ideas around music. Whereas previous publications have looked at connections between music and space through singular lenses (such as how they are linked to ethnic identities or how musical images of a city are constructed), this book sets out to explore intersections between multiple scales and kinds of musical spaces. It complements the investigation of broader power structures and place-based identities by a detailed focus on the moments of music-making and musical environments, revealing the mutual shaping of these levels. The book overcomes a Eurocentric focus on a typically narrow range of musics (especially European and North American classical and popular forms) with case studies on a diverse set of genres and global contexts, inspiring a range of ethnographic, text-based, historical, and practice-based approaches.

Exploring Musical Spaces

Exploring Musical Spaces
Author: Julian Hook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre:
ISBN: 0190246014

Exploring Musical Spaces is a comprehensive synthesis of mathematical techniques in music theory, written with the aim of making these techniques accessible to music scholars without extensive prior training in mathematics. The book adopts a visual orientation, introducing from the outset a number of simple geometric models--the first examples of the musical spaces of the book's title--depicting relationships among musical entities of various kinds such as notes, chords, scales, or rhythmic values. These spaces take many forms and become a unifying thread in initiating readers into several areas of active recent scholarship, including transformation theory, neo-Riemannian theory, geometric music theory, diatonic theory, and scale theory. Concepts and techniques from mathematical set theory, graph theory, group theory, geometry, and topology are introduced as needed to address musical questions. Musical examples ranging from Bach to the late twentieth century keep the underlying musical motivations close at hand. The book includes hundreds of figures to aid in visualizing the structure of the spaces, as well as exercises offering readers hands-on practice with a diverse assortment of concepts and techniques.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?
Author: Barry Blesser
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262250705

How we experience space by listening: the concepts of aural architecture, with examples ranging from Gothic cathedrals to surround sound home theater. We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling. Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines—including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others—Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects.

The Sound of Broadway Music

The Sound of Broadway Music
Author: Steven Suskin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2009-04-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199718822

Broadway's top orchestrators - Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Philip J. Lang, Jonathan Tunick - are names well known to musical theatre fans, but few people understand precisely what the orchestrator does. The Sound of Broadway Music is the first book ever written about these unsung stars of the Broadway musical whose work is so vital to each show's success. The book examines the careers of Broadway's major orchestrators and follows the song as it travels from the composer's piano to the orchestra pit. Steven Suskin has meticulously tracked down thousands of original orchestral scores, piecing together enigmatic notes and notations with long-forgotten documents and current interviews with dozens of composers, producers, conductors and arrangers. The information is separated into three main parts: a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; a lively discussion of the art of orchestration, written for musical theatre enthusiasts (including those who do not read music); a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; and an impressive show-by-show listing of more than seven hundred musicals, in many cases including a song-by-song listing of precisely who orchestrated what along with relevant comments from people involved with the productions. Stocked with intriguing facts and juicy anecdotes, many of which have never before appeared in print, The Sound of Broadway Music brings fascinating and often surprising new insight into the world of musical theatre.

Visualizing Music

Visualizing Music
Author: Eric Isaacson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2023-05-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253064759

To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually? Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation. Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.

Repetition in Music

Repetition in Music
Author: Adam Ockelford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351551442

This monograph examines the place of repetition in perceived musical structure and in theories of music. Following a preface and introduction, there are four main chapters: 'Theory', 'Analysis', 'Metatheory and Meta-analysis', and 'Cognition and Metacognition'. Chapter 2 (Theory) sets out the principles underlying the creation and cognition of musical structure developed by the author in earlier studies, in the dual context of David Lewin's mathematically based theory of musical intervals and transformations and Gilles Fauconnier's concept of mental spaces (which was formulated in the context of cognitive science). Chapter 3 (Analysis) shows the theory in operation in relation to the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata K.333. It indicates how structural issues may be related to considerations of aesthetic response and musical 'worth' through comparison with J.C. Bach's Sonata op. 5 no. 3. Chapter 4 (Metatheory and Meta-analysis) uses the new theory to interrogate the propositions underpinning set theory and transformations, offering a psychomusicological critique and potential development of, for example, the work of Forte, Morris, Isaacson and Straus. This enables issues raised earlier in relation to the work of Lewin to be addressed. In conclusion, in Chapter 5 (Cognition and Metacognition), the matter of cognitive preferences and constraints is considered in relation to repetition in music, which permits a final investigation of different approaches to musical analysis to be undertaken. In summary, by synthesising the findings of diverse earlier work in the context of the new theory, it proves possible to move thinking forward on a number of fronts, and to indicate potential directions for future empirical and analytical developments.

A Geometry of Music

A Geometry of Music
Author: Dmitri Tymoczko
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2011-03-21
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0195336674

In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.

Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century

Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century
Author: George Corbett
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1783747293

Our contemporary culture is communicating ever-increasingly through the visual, through film, and through music. This makes it ever more urgent for theologians to explore the resources of art for enriching our understanding and experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Annunciations: Sacred Music for the twenty-First Century, edited by George Corbett, answers this need, evaluating the relationship between the sacred and the composition, performance, and appreciation of music. Through the theme of ‘annunciations’, this volume interrogates how, when, why, through and to whom God communicates in the Old and New Testaments. In doing so, it tackles the intimate relationship between Scriptural reflection and musical practice in the past, its present condition, and what the future might hold. Annunciations comprises three parts. Part I sets out flexible theological and compositional frameworks for a constructive relationship between the sacred and music. Part II presents the reflections of theologians and composers involved in collaborating on new pieces of sacred choral music, alongside the six new scores and links to the recordings. Part III considers the reality of programming and performing sacred works today. This volume provides an indispensable resource for scholars and artists working at the interface between theology and the arts, and for those involved in sacred music. However, it will also be of interest to anyone concerned with the ways in which the Divine communicates through word and artistry to humanity.

Music, Sound and Space

Music, Sound and Space
Author: Georgina Born
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1107310555

Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.

Decentralized Music

Decentralized Music
Author: Paulo de Assis
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2024-08-14
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1040091733

This book offers a thorough exploration of the potential of blockchain and AI technologies to transform musical practices. Including contributions from leading researchers in music, arts, and technology, it addresses central notions of agency, authorship, ontology, provenance, and ownership in music. Together, the chapters of this book, often navigating the intersections of post-digital and posthumanist thought, challenge conventional centralized mechanisms of music creation and dissemination, advocating for new forms of musical expression. Stressing the need for the artistic community to engage with blockchain and AI, this volume is essential reading for artists, musicians, researchers, and policymakers curious to know more about the implications of these technologies for the future of music.