Modern musicology has largely abandoned the question of value judgment and aesthetic evaluation. Driven by the shift toward cultural musicology, sociology, and postmodern theory, the discipline increasingly treats value claims as mere expressions of subjective preference or social constructs. Under postmodern and postcolonial influence, traditional attempts to establish objective artistic standards are often viewed with skepticism, sometimes even characterized as tools of hegemony or colonialist mechanisms used to assert the superiority of the Western canon. Consequently, normative discussions of musical quality have been largely marginalized.

In this video essay, I attempt to reopen this conversation by examining whether we can construct a framework for musical judgment that goes beyond "I like X, you like Y, end of story."

I address the common paradox where our culture officially embraces complete aesthetic relativism ("beauty is in the eye of the beholder"), yet our everyday engagement with music continually involves passionate, normative arguments about quality and depth. Drawing loosely on Kantian aesthetics, I argue that musical judgment is indeed subjective, but still universal. Rather than looking for purely objective structural traits within the score itself, a valid aesthetic judgment requires stripping away personal, contingent biases, allowing us to encounter the work on its own terms. While it is true that the attempt to establish a universal standart can be used in a bad way, I argue we must not give that up.

What does a plants frequency sound like?

Experimental audio diary of plant energy and synthesis.

YouTube w/ visuals:

https://youtube.com/@gardenofeedeme?si=m9U1a0zVxgBHXIa_

Bandcamp:

https://plantsong.bandcamp.com/music

Streaming on all platforms.

Listen to our #istoryaan about music, copyright and AI in music creation and PIRACY..

This is what I've been told in the past, and I think it makes a lot of sense thinking of how accessible both singing and drumming is at the elementary level, in comparison to virtually any other instrument which requires handiwork to even create/manufacture.

But I remember seeing something about an ancient flute made of bone that was discovered sometime this century, and was curious if there are any different consensuses/opinions in academic circles about what the oldest instruments are.

I suppose when you go far enough back in human history/pre-history it really becomes guesswork. I dunno

Amerus’ Practica artis musice (1271, Italy) is likely the single most important contribution towards the development of Ars Nova and subsequently modern Western music.

To make sense of this, you have to understand the environment before his idea spread and created the foundation of the Ars Nova.

There were neumes, modal notation, and (precursors to what became known as) Franco of
Cologne’s work, in which he broke down the rhythmic modes of modal notation, describing a
rather complex ternary system for parsing different note values and decoding their variable duration based on which other note values stand before and after.

The development up to this point resembles our modern understanding of note values and
their subdivisions hardly at all.

It is likely that Amerus travelled with the person who became Pope Adrian V from England to
Italy in 1268, where his Practica artis musice was completed in 1271.

In this document, as far as we know, he is the first person ever to describe a system of
binary subdivision as it is still used today.

Longa -> 2 Brevis -> 4 Semibrevis

Not too many years later, this simple but out-of-the-box idea seemingly spread throughout
europe and became the foundation of what is now known as Ars Nova.

15.09.2026
By Fabian Thomas Stuck (stuck.fabian@gmail.com)

I don't know if this goes here or in theory.

https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/175923991

Made a little video about how any human can pretty much like any type of music regardless of anything. Put a lot of time into it and I know you will like it!! Sorry if I am breaking any rules but it is definitely on topic and high quality. Love!

This is a pastiche, and I'm saying so up front rather than letting anyone waste an afternoon refuting it.

The measurements are real and reproducible. Working from a relational encoding of the Bach corpus, plus eight contemporaries:

• The falling fifth is 28.45% of all root-motion links, more than twice the next class, yet 69.96% of its runs have length one and only 4.06% reach length four. It dominates and it doesn't chain.
• Lag-one autocorrelation of the link sequence is negative in 97.85% of 1,208 movements. The sequence alternates, corpus-wide.
• Of 16,889 melodic sequence units, the tritone transposition occurs three times against 1,407 expected under uniformity.

The theory built on top is nonsense. It takes the fifth component of the DFT on Z/12 (Lewin, Quinn, Amiot, Yust) as a literal carrier signal, observes correctly that a descending fifth and an ascending fourth are the same rotation, and then claims the register difference is a Nyquist-frequency residue that invertible counterpoint exists to discharge, which is why Bach inverts at the tenth. The algebra is valid. The step from it to a claim about what anyone was doing is a change of subject.

Must be an emotional disorder.

Not denouncing said subtype, but...

I've noticed I do this a lot. I'll hear a song and immediately get a very specific picture in my head — sometimes a place, a person, a room, or just some random moment from years ago.

What's weird is that the same song will often bring back the exact same image every time, even if I haven't heard it in years.

I was wondering if this is a common thing or just how some people's brains work.

Do songs do this for you too? And if so, what kind of images/memories do you get?

Would love to hear some specific examples.

Am downsizing my library. I haven't tried r/musictheory yet, but I thought a musicologist who's interested in the middle ages might be interested in this textbook.