Downloads

fascicle 1: Preface and Introduction:

Advanced Music for Beginners, ch.0--1 [A4].pdf

Advanced Music for Beginners, ch.0--1 [US].pdf

About Advanced Music for Beginners

The project is to make music more interesting and beautiful, to explore all music-making techniques that are effective, and to exploit all that the ear savors. The book, Advanced Music for Beginners, is the clearest exposition of this that I can manage. It contains a detailed explanation of a music theory based on the human cognition of music (derived from Cognitive Science where possible, and by broad cross-cultural analysis where not). It has a companion software project, Írim, to automate its ideas.

If you are interested, you are welcome to come into the forum and talk to us about it.

This page is where I'll post it in fascicles, as I write them.

The first contains two chapters:

• The Preface—a bunch of curmudgeonly little essays complaining about unfruitful approaches to music-making—because I don't want you to waste your time pursuing weak strategies.
• The Introduction—a bird's eye overview of the subject. Its backbone is a seven-layered model describing how acoustic phenomena become aesthetic experiences that move listeners to passion and contemplation—and all of the practical strategies that this implies to musicians.

The highlight of the introduction is an overview of the musical layer—the sensations that arise from mere audition by way of anomalous neural processing: rhythm, melody, harmony, and from these, texture and form. The rest of the book will be about how to harness them for the sake of art.

The next fascicle will probably include chapters about scale, tuning, and harmony—but don't ask me when it will be done.