music theory

Imaginary Landscapes is a profile of visionary composer, artist and producer Brian Eno. It brings into focus Eno’s seemingly disparate work in sound, vision and light, and explores his music in visual terms, based on landscapes and images that have shaped his life as an artist.

The Commodore 64 was the best-selling home computer system of all time, and still draws a large crowd of retro-gamers.

Despite its popularity, though, the music of C64 games has rarely been analysed in academic articles.
Karen Collins’ Loops And Bloops: Music of the Commodore 64 Games discusses the technical constraints of C64’s SID soundchip and how this shaped the musical aesthetic of music on the Commodore 64: Read more…

iPhone Music Software: This is a demo video of Octavian (App Store link), a $2.99 iPhone Keyboard Calculator.

With Octavian, you can:

• Quickly find scales and chords and transpose them to any root note
• View any mode of any scale
• View chords in root position and first, second, and third inversions
• Build chords on any scale degree
• Use Scale Explore to view all scales that contain the notes of the current chord
• Use Chord Explore to identify chords built on the degrees of a scale
• Traverse the Circle of Fifths by holding down the note selector for 1.5 seconds
• View scales/chords as notes (C E G), intervals from the root (0 4 7), or intervals from the previous note (0 4 3).

NOTE Octavian is NOT a synth. It makes no sound. Bitnotic hopes to make Octavian THE music theory app for the iPhone.

Brian Eno had some interesting comments on genius vs “scenius” at the Sydney Luminous Festival:

I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.

he period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Certainly there was a “scenius”for electronic music in the 1970’s, when Eno did some of his most important work. We may have a scenius now, too, spurred on by the surge in creativity that Internet media is driving.

What do you think is more important – the contributions of individuals like Eno, or the time and the scene that they work in?

via MoreDarkThanShark

In this documentary, David Toop discusses his thoughts on sound and their role in music. Toop speaks about his  fascination with sound and how digital technology affects its creation and reception. He also explains the genesis of the ‘laptop orchestra’ as we see it in action during a recent workshop for new members.

Give it some time – Toop has some compelling thoughts on sound and music theory. Read more…