Theory, production, classical, jazz, opera, electronic, rock, folk, and global traditions. Browse curated, sandboxed HTML presentation decks in Music, each with crawlable summaries, slide outlines, and topic metadata.
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From Lagos to the World
The blues is a 12-bar form, a flat-third-and-flat-seventh harmonic palette, and a vocal idiom — and also a cultural inheritance carried by African Americans from the post-Reconstruction South into 20th-century American music.
A continuous tradition of written-down sacred and secular European music — from neumes scratched onto medieval parchment to sound files exported from Sibelius last week.
A commercial American popular-music tradition that emerged in the late 1920s from Anglo-Celtic ballad, African-American blues, gospel, and Western cowboy song — first marketed as "hillbilly," now a multi-billion-dollar industry.
1948. French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer broadcasts Étude aux chemins de fer — a four-minute piece composed entirely of recorded train sounds. He calls the method musique concrète : composing with concrete sound objects rather than abstract notes.
A definition by Cecil Sharp, the English collector who first systematized the term: folk music is music handed down by oral tradition, varying as it passes from person to person, with no fixed authoritative version.
Gospel is Black sacred music — the descendant of the spirituals, the parent of soul, the working tradition of the Black American church for nearly a century.
August 11, 1973. Cindy Campbell throws a back-to-school party in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the Bronx. Her brother Clive — DJ Kool Herc — runs two turntables side by side, finds the percussion break in James Brown's Give It Up or Turnit a Loose , and switches between two copies to extend it. The "merry-go-round" technique. The break loop. Hip-hop's clock starts here.
Latin music is not a single genre but a vast family of musical traditions born from the encounter of African, Indigenous, and European cultures across the Americas — unified by rhythmic complexity, dance, and a deep relationship between the sacred and the secular.
For the first 50 years of recording — Edison's tinfoil cylinder (1877) to the introduction of magnetic tape in the 1940s — recording was a single take, captured directly to a physical medium. There was no editing.
A pitched sound is a periodic vibration. Its perceived pitch corresponds to its fundamental frequency in cycles per second (hertz, Hz).
A Journey Through Sound, Craft, and Culture
From the raw energy of 1970s garages to a global countercultural movement that forever changed music, fashion, and politics.
Rhythm and blues (R&B) is the umbrella term for African-American popular music since the late 1940s. Soul, its mid-1960s flowering, is gospel transposed into secular subject matter, with the deeper vocal commitment and harmonic complexity gospel allowed.
The singer-songwriter is the figure who writes the song and then performs it, alone or accompanied, with the writing audible in the singing. The song is understood as their own utterance, not a vehicle for craft.
"World music" is a category invented by record-store managers in London in 1987 to file everything that wasn't classical, jazz, rock, or pop. The term is awkward; the music is real.