I grew up with folk music, attending schools run by hippies and a summer camp run by Pete Seeger’s family. But I didn’t realize that folk music could be cool until I got to college. It was there that my friend Jeremy Withers turned me on to a band called Cordelia’s Dad, fronted by a singer …
Continue reading “Tim Eriksen is the best folk musician in the world”
Linear music notation is good for reading, but it doesn’t tell you everything you want to know about underlying musical structure. Notes that are close to each vertically are not necessarily the most closely related. The concept of harmonic relatedness is a complex one, but there’s an excellent tool for beginning to get a handle on it: …
A musical pitch is a blend of many different frequencies beside the fundamental. Here’s a visualization of the different vibrational modes of an ideal string. The string’s movements are the sum of all these different modes simultaneously.
There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones …
Music is really just orderly vibrations: in the air, in instrument bodies, in speaker cones, in tiny hairs in your inner ear, in electromagnetic fields in wires, in patterns of neurons firing in your brain. If you understand the math behind these vibrations, it can help you understand how music works. Surprisingly, it can also …
