Artifact Fourteen: "Secret Notes Your Piano is Keeping from You"
Artifact Thirteen: Scott Rickard's TED Talk (3/4/16)
Similarly to Vsauce, Sam Sutherland's "This Exists" YouTube channel specializes in communicating little-known information to the general public. However, rather than just focusing on science, This Exists will cover any topic that is perhaps considered esoteric. This video covers the subject of microtonal music, and the instruments being invented to play it. It even includes a brief mention of Tolgahan Çoğulu, whose video is cited below.
Scott Rickard is a mathematics professor at University College Dublin. In this presentation, he claims that "repetition makes a piece of music beautiful," and supports his claim with a piece written specifically to avoid any form of melodic or rhythmic repetition.
Artifact Twelve: "Yes! We Have No Bananas!" (2/26/16)
This is one of the Everything2 forum posts cited in the Vsauce video featured below. I've given it its own separate entry because the full content of the post (beyond what is mentioned in the video) delves into the subject of just how much new music can be made without exhausting every possible combination of notes.
It can be read here: http://everything2.com/title/Yes%21+We+have+no+bananas%21
Artifact Eleven: "What Makes Music Enjoyable?" (2/25/16)
"What Makes Music Enjoyable?" is an article written by Remy Melina. His focus is not on the way music affects us based on how it's written, but rather how it's heard; talking about digital music files and how their compression impacts the listening experience.
Artifact Ten: Spectrograms as an Art Form (2/20/16)
Artifact Nine: Gloomy Sunday, a.k.a. "The Hungarian Suicide Song" (2/19/16)
"Gloomy Sunday" is a piece composed by Rezső Seress in 1933. It is infamous for purportedly influencing listeners to commit suicide, including the suicide of Seress himself. Although most of these stories have since been proven to be urban legends, the idea that a song's emotional influence could be so strong is undoubtedly significant.
Artifact Eight: Cadence (2/18/16)
Cadence is the term used to describe a configuration of notes aligned in a way that creates resolution, or a "technical conclusion" of sorts. A song with perfect cadence is considered to have the most stable resolution, making the conclusion of a piece very obvious and satisfying, while interrupted cadence will create an unstable resolution, leaving the listener feeling as if they are still "hanging off the edge," if you will. Think of it as the cherry on top of an ornate ice cream sundae; by including it, you complete your recipe and create a visually and aesthetically pleasing dessert, but without it, no matter how much you compensate with other ingredients, something will feel like it's missing.
Artifact Seven: "Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?" (2/17/16)
Vsauce is a YouTube channel run by presenter Michael Stevens. His videos focus on scientific or philosophical concepts, and add a fun twist to communicating them to the general public. This video is about the science and math that builds up music as we know it; not just about notes and frequencies, but also about file format.
Artifact Six: John Cage's "4'33" (2/16/16)
John Cage is perhaps the most well known avant-garde composer of the 20th century. His most famous piece, entitled 4'33", requires its performer to simply be present with their instrument... and remain silent.
Artifact Five: Bringing Microtones to the Foreground with Tolgahan Çoğulu
Tolgahan Çoğulu is a Turkish musician and luthier. He is most widely known for his adjustable microtonal guitars, meaning they are designed to play notes found between the frets of a regular guitar. He does this in order to play Turkish Maqam music, while preserving the tone and basic design of a classical guitar.
Artifact Four: Relative Key (2/13/16)
Relative Keys are pairs of major and minor scales that share the same key signature. What this means is that two scales which are relative to each other share the same notes, and those notes occur in the same order, but the starting tone (called the "tonic") is shifted. A major key's relative minor can be determined simply by playing the exact series of notes in that scale, but starting and ending from the major 6 (for example, A is the major 6 of C, and playing a C major scale starting and ending on an A will create A minor).
Don't worry if you're confused, I'm working on coming up with an analogy to make all this technical mumbo jumbo more understandable to non-musicians and will update this section accordingly.
(For my Pecha Kucha on Relative Key, go to the "Links" page and find the entry labeled "My Pecha Kucha")
Artifact Three: Music Analyses from Anthony Fantano (1/30/16)
Anthony Fantano is an independent music critic. Through his site (called "The Needle Drop"), he posts album reviews several times a week, but also occasionally posts his take on a certain musical aspect or trend that his fans ask him about. I've included four such videos here.
Artifact Two: Mark Applebaum's TED Talk (1/29/16)
Mark Applebaum is one of the head music composition professors at Stanford University. His personal compositions fall under the "experimental" category pretty much exclusively, with his main goal being to spread the question "What is music, really?"
Artifact One: The Tritone (1/28/16)
The tritone (a.k.a. the augmented fourth or diminished fifth), is a musical interval, which for a time was considered the most horrendous interval of them all. The term "Diabolus in Musica" (Devil in Music) was used to reference the tritone during the 18th century, and there are even claims that composers who included tritones in their work were excommunicated from the church (however, these claims are not significantly backed up). Technically, it derives from the lydian mode, which is the same as a major scale with the fourth raised one half step (for example, the regular fourth in a C major scale is F, but as shown above, the augmented fourth is F#).
Here's one famous use of a tritone (0:05-0:31):
Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4952646.stm
