Play with your music theory

Last week I put together a new set of music theory videos.

These videos are aimed at participants in Play With Your Music, who may want to start producing their own music or remixes and have no idea where to start. I’m presuming that the viewer has no formal background, no piano skills and no reading ability. This would seem to be an unpromising place to start making music from, but there’s a surprising lot you can do just by fumbling around on a MIDI keyboard. Playing the white keys only gives you the seven modes of the C major scale, with seven very different emotional qualities. Playing the black keys only gives you the G♭ major and E♭ minor pentatonic scales. From there, you can effortlessly transpose your MIDI data into any key you want.

The videos use several different visual metaphors for pitches and scales: simple grids for starters, and also my beloved circle diagrams.

There’s also some discussion of the spiral topology of pitch space.

Future videos will get into rhythm, how it works generally and some useful boilerplate patterns like son clave. In the process, I have a broader research goal in the service of the NYU MusEDLab: to extract a taxonomy of design metaphors for educational music videos. In other words, I’m trying to find out what you can do in video that you can’t in other media. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.

By the way, you can download the MIDI files and all the scale diagrams if you’d like.