How do I into musical analysis? I want to better understand what I am listening to

How do I into musical analysis? I want to better understand what I am listening to.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=1DG7aTuRjSM
musictheory.net/lessons
youtube.com/watch?v=xCHnwloKsWM
youtube.com/watch?v=149UGrLzR5w
youtube.com/watch?v=9zdNdjF-htY
youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg
youtube.com/watch?v=Gv58WzevTNU
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I'm interested too

The first thing you need to do is realize that measures, key signatures and time signatures don't matter and shouldn't exist. The second thing you need to do is learn how to play the piano. Done.

>understand difference between tonic harmonic area, pre dominant area and dominant area within a single key first.
>study the circle of 4ths/5ths (i prefer 4ths tho 5ths is more common)
>learn about secondary dominants, this will lead you into more chromaticism

eventually if you keep going down that road you'll cease to see music in scales at all and everything will just become voice leading

but in order to see music outside of scales, you have to see music inside of scales if that makes sense

Yeah, sorry, but all of that is dead. Try again when any of that is relevent.

i disagree
good harmony ages well no matter what
sounds and samples don't necessarily
music and harmony transcends 'relevance'
its like the color wheel

>Adorno and Boulez said it so it must be true

Read wiki pages on the pieces you listen to and different types of form. If it's a well known piece you can just search up "[piece] analysis" into Google and something will probably come up.

There are videos like this
youtube.com/watch?v=1DG7aTuRjSM

Do you guys have any recommended material to either watch, read or listen to?

Who?

Just listen to Pet Sounds on repeat until you can predict every sound, and you'll be good to go.

The tonal system is still relevant user. Literally every song that isn't noise or atonal/serialism uses it.

>spouting a bunch of bullshit and then not knowing its advocates
Way to show that you have literally no idea what you're talking about.
filtered

yeah honestly
is not bad advice, SMiLE too.
also: i would start learning piano and learning basic chords like triads then start learning old tin pan alley like songs with those kinds of chord changes then like jazz tunes and maybe some more complex changes like stuff that happened in the 60s

I have no idea who those people are, but I still believe what I said. There is no purpose in time signatures, key signatures or measures. To know how absurd music theorists are, all you have to do is look at the design of the clefs, such as Treble and Bass. Terrible design. Just use letters, like 'T' or 'B'.

More proof that you have no idea what you're talking about. Treble and bass clef ARE letters. G and F respectively.

If you really cared about the shit you're saying then you better read a Wiki page on Boulez fast.

They may be letters, but they are designed terribly. Too complex. Try harder next time, music theorists.

I'm sorry they're too complex for your little mind lmao bye

i didnt understand anything but im very interested.
can you put that in dummy words, please?

musictheory.net/lessons
Just read this

thanks

I read that years ago and I'm still in a bit of a loss, especially wrt to rhythm. What would be the next step after that? I've been reading some material I found on /comp/ but I wanted something more like a complete treatise, a book, rather than infographics and videos.

What about rhythm confuses you?

I can't even hear or process it or when I think I can I can't frame it into the formalism I just read about.
Like, I know more or less what a beat and a measure are, but the moment people start talking about building rhythm by accenting some beats in a measure I'm at a total loss. How does an accented beat even sound like? Do I play an accented beat louder than the others? I know it sounds stupid, but I really don't know how that works and without that nothing else makes sense.

Have you tried bobbing your head to music? You can probably intuitively feel where accented beats are without really thinking about it

I try stomping my foot on the ground and sometimes I can lock on to the beat like a metronome but I still can't get the accented beats, sometimes I do think I can listen a pattern of sorts but I'm never sure if it's what I should be looking for.

Accented beats (in common time) are typically 1 and 3 in classical music and 2 and 4 in rock and jazz.

For an example,
youtube.com/watch?v=xCHnwloKsWM
You can feel the bass drum on 2 and 4 which accents those beats.

Compared to
youtube.com/watch?v=149UGrLzR5w
You can hear how the melody is structured so that quarter notes are placed on 1 and 3 which accents those beats.

Fuck not bass drum, snare drum.

First song won't open here, YT says video is unavailable, probably some stupid region lock or something.
Second one is a bit hard. There's that basic idea that forms the melody and just gets repeated and toyed around with. I can see what you said happening in two bars, the first and third notes are quarters. I can't grasp from the melody alone what makes them accented, but when there's chords being played in parallel it does seem like those beats stand out a bit more, is that it?
If that is it, the first problem is that when there's no chords being played alongside or he's arpegiating in eighth notes or whatever else it doesn't work.

And then there's those other two measures where he's doing anything but what you said. I thought the rhythm was supposed to be more or less stable?
And this might be just a quirk of standard notation, but the whole melody seems shifted somehow. Like it should begin with the dotted eigth followed by sixteenth and end on the dotted half note.

Anyway, thanks for helping and sorry for taking one hour to answer, I'm just that slow.

youtube.com/watch?v=9zdNdjF-htY
Here try this one. Pattern of bass drum on beats 1 and 3 and snare drum on beats 2 and 4 still follows. If still nothing, just listen to any standard hard rock song. I'm not too knowledgeable on the "theory" on why accents are placed on different beats in rock music but I assume its because snare is more prominent than bass drum. Like I'm imagining hearing snare on 1 and 3 and bass drum on 2 and 4 and it certainly feels like the strong beats are 1 and 3.

Anyway
>I can't grasp from the melody alone what makes them accented, but when there's chords being played in parallel it does seem like those beats stand out a bit more, is that it?
To answer your question from LONG ago that I totally forgot about until just now, performers sometimes purposefully play accented beats a hair louder. It really just depends on the style. Absolutely you want every other beat played a hint louder in a march but not so much in a flowery melody.
You can hear 1 and 3 louder in when chordal accompaniment comes in and 2 and 4 have the dotted eighth rhythm.
>If that is it, the first problem is that when there's no chords being played alongside or he's arpegiating in eighth notes or whatever else it doesn't work.
While it's not telegraphed you can "feel" implied accents because the piece is in 4/4 common time. If you clapped 1 and 3 to the music, it would not feel awkward during these sections.
>I thought the rhythm was supposed to be more or less stable?
Some of the art of classical music is knowing when to write something to throw off the listener.
>the whole melody seems shifted somehow. Like it should begin with the dotted eigth followed by sixteenth and end on the dotted half note.
I'm really not feeling this one honestly. Starting with a dotted eighth on the downbeat is really unusual and when it happens it just undermines expectations (see above)

Edit: shit ok that arcade fire is a bad example.
youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg
Sorry for the meme song, it gets the job done

I'll try that and report asap, thanks again user.

>performers sometimes purposefully play accented beats a hair louder. It really just depends on the style.
Oh, ok. That helps.

>If you clapped 1 and 3 to the music, it would not feel awkward during these sections.
Ok, so if I clapped 1 and 3 it would somehow sound ok, but, say, 2 and 4 would sound off? I'll try that.

>Some of the art of classical music is knowing when to write something to throw off the listener.
It also throws off puny students like me. It's like you study road signs and regulation to get your driver's license but when you're doing the test and come across a stop sign your instructor tells you to hit the gas.

>I'm really not feeling this one honestly.
I just think that if you played the bottom part like in the pic and nothing more, it would feel complete, like something with a beginning and an end. But the way it's notated in the piece it doesn't feel like a complete unit. It still "loops" fine, but somehow it feels off to me.
Of course, that also shifts the 1-3 structure into 2-4, so I expect that somehow that just doesn't work even though it seems better for me.

Ultimately music is pretty subjective in terms of what some people feel and others feel. It's what gets people into essay wars over where certain chords or phrases fit in the overall scheme of a given work. To me the bottom line feels super awkward but for you it feels fine.
What might be throwing you off in the top line is that that first unaccompanied phrase, you're correct, is supposed to feel incomplete. Because it ends on an (implied) half cadence. What that means is that the final note (dotted half on D) is part of a (implied) dominant harmony (that is, G dominant seventh chord) that wants to lead back to C minor.
For a better example of that see
youtube.com/watch?v=Gv58WzevTNU
The E major chord (dominant of A, the tonic) in the third beat of the second full bar, 9 second in. You can hear how that first phrase feels incomplete. Like a question that needs to be answered. And Bach answers it in the next phrase by starting the next measure with A (the tonic). The VIIdim65 chord in between V and I is just an extension of the dominant harmony and heightens the expectation back to A. Don't worry about it.

Ok, yes, with the drums it comes a bit more naturally, it's more isolated from the melody and it's fairly stable because Nirvana. Gets a bit confusing in the chorus but I think I can still hear it.

And why is the Arcade Fire song a bad example? I thought I could hear it well there too. The fourth beat sounded slightly delayed but I think it's just my bad counting being thrown off by the double tap on the bass drum.

Schubert is still hard, but I think I can see how the quarters make 1 and 3 a better fit.

Ok, I confess I didn't really look at the harmony while doing this and it's even more confusing now.
Top actually ends by resolving to a Cm chord in the full score. So, at least going by the harmony, this is what should feel complete.
Bottom ends in D and I'm not sure how D relates to G7, but it should have some tension anyway, which I didn't feel at all. Maybe I'm actually hearing the piece as if it's in D and C becomes the leading tone then, if that even makes sense.

But yeah, Bach sounds just as expected.

I'm walking home rn so I'll respond better in a bit but spark notes version is that the dotted eighth-16th at the end of the top is a pick-up

Ok so the the thing about this piece is that you actually do not get a true declaration of the home key of C minor until the third measure. That is because the melody implies G7 (notes: G,B,D,F) with the unison G at the very beginning and the B natural leading up to the D repeated 4 times. The melody is ambiguously in C minor or G major at the beginning due to this as well as the fact that there is no accompaniment to hone in the key until it comes in at bar 5. But at the cadence at bar 9 you should definitely feel C minor.

In the pic I outlined and simplified the implied harmonies latent in the melody as a series of G7-C-G7-C-G7-C and f you have a piano or MIDI somewhere I encourage you to re-enter this or play it and feel for yourself.

I also boxed in each phrase in the melody. The red box is the question phrase (antecedent), that ends on a dominant harmony and the blue box is the answer phrase (consequent) that confirms the tonality of C minor. Again, in someways the piece is a textbook piece because it has such a simple melody and backing harmonies, but in other ways it's not because of the fact that it starts off in the dominant rather than the tonic like you would expect. So, if you hear the antecedent by it's lonesome, you could probably hear it without the pick-up like in the bottom line in but with the full two phrase set (called a period) you most definitely should hear it as written.

I have to imagine that he's trolling.

a few of the things that helped me the most were:

a) writing out a scale on a piece of paper and deriving the diatonic chords, relative/parallel/harmonic/melodic minor scales, modes/modal pentatonics etc.
b) really familiarizing myself with intervals and musical tropes. lots of pop music in particular is really predictable and cliche'd (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that) which makes it a good subject to study.
c) practicing theory in your head whenever you have a chance. standing in line at the grocery store? try and imagine what the diatonic chords of D# major are while you're waiting.
d) exposing myself to other frameworks besides Western theory. lots of different cultures have gravitated towards the pentatonic scale/Ionian mode, probably not by happenstance.

Ah, I see the dominant now, I somehow managed to convince myself G7 has an E instead of D. The ambiguity explanation is also helpful, I just thought he was opening with V and going towards I from there(it seems to be a rather common opening) and if something sounded off it was my fault for not being able to feel where the tonic is.

And I think the confusion with the phrases came about because I always treated measures like some kind of logical division that must stand on its own and phrases have to begin at the beginning of a measure and end at the end of another(or the same). No textbook ever told me that's how things work, but since they never told me it's not how it works either I just assumed it was natural. Now that you broke the phrases I can see that is not the case.

I'll try to reproduce your picture and see if I can feel it.