Music
How music is built, heard, made and carried by every culture on earth, from the overtone series to the mixing desk.
For: anyone who plays a little and wants to know what is going on, anyone thinking of studying music, songwriters and producers who learned by ear, and every listener who has wondered why a chord feels sad.
Shaped by the NASM standards for the Bachelor of Music (the US accrediting body for music schools), the UK QAA Subject Benchmark Statement for Music and the Berklee core curriculum; told worldwide, with Hindustani and Carnatic teaching, the maqam traditions, Indonesian gamelan and West African drumming as systems in their own right rather than footnotes to European theory.
Year 1 · Hearing and writing it down
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01ReadInteractiveQuiz14 min
Music Fundamentals: Pitch, Rhythm & Notation
Pitch, rhythm, scales and notation: the alphabet everything else uses.
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02ReadInteractiveQuiz13 min
Ear Training & Musicianship: Hearing What Is There
Training the ear to name what it hears.
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03ReadInteractiveQuiz14 min
Rhythm, Metre & Groove: One Pulse, Many Ways to Cut It
Pulse, metre, polyrhythm and groove, in Africa, the Americas, India and the Arab world.
Year 2 · How music is built
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04ReadInteractiveQuiz11 min
Harmony & Voice Leading: Why Chords Pull
Chords, keys and how voices move between them.
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05ReadInteractiveQuiz12 min
Counterpoint & Form: Lines Against Lines
Lines against lines, and the shapes of whole pieces.
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06Deep diveInteractiveQuiz16 min
Acoustics, Tuning & Timbre: Why a Violin Isn't a Flute
The physics of sound: overtones, tuning systems and why a violin isn't a flute.
Year 3 · Music in history and the world
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07ReadInteractiveQuiz13 min
Music Traditions of the World: Each System in Its Own Terms
Raga, maqam, gamelan and more, each in its own terms.
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08ReadInteractiveQuiz13 min
Western Music History: A Thousand Years of Choices
A thousand years of the European tradition, from chant to film scores.
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09ReadInteractiveQuiz13 min
Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age: How the Last Hundred Years Sound
The blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop and the recordings that changed how music is made.
Year 4 · Making it
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10ReadInteractiveQuiz10 min
Composition, Arranging & Orchestration: Writing for Real Instruments
Writing, arranging and orchestrating music of your own.
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11Deep diveInteractiveQuiz18 min
Music Technology & Production: The Studio as an Instrument
Recording, synthesis, mixing and the studio as an instrument.
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12ReadInteractiveQuiz11 min
Sensation & Perception: The Brain's Best Guess
How ears and brains turn vibration into pitch and loudness.
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13Deep diveInteractiveQuiz16 min
Music Cognition & Performance: Why Music Moves Us
Why music moves us, and what practice and performance do to a musician.
MIT OpenCourseWare's music courses, free; IMSLP, the free library of public-domain scores; musictheory.net for drills; the textbooks named at the end of each subject. See also the library's 09 Music (why music moves you, how to listen, the genre family tree, the orchestra, how recording changed music).
Sociology
How societies hold together, sort people, change and come apart, measured and argued over from every continent.