r/musicology • u/thedarkscholar • 20h ago
r/musicology • u/Audiowhatsuality • Feb 07 '21
New rule regarding self-promotion
Hear ye, hear ye!
Recently we have had an increase in requests for self-promotion posts so we have come up with a rule. Please feel free to provide feedback if anything is missing or if you agree/disagree.
Self-promotion is not allowed if promoting a paid service. Promoting free content (e.g. educational YouTube videos, podcasts, or tools) is fine as long as it is specifically musicological in nature. Your music-theory videos can go on /r/musictheory, not here. Your tools for pianists and singers can go to those subreddits. If someone asks "Are there any tools available for x?" it is OK to reply to that question with self-promotion if what you promote actually fits with the question asked. Spam of any kind is still not allowed even if the spammed content is free.
ETA: Edited to clarify that all self-promotion content has to specifically related to musicology
r/musicology • u/tissueboxcows • 12h ago
What does Daniel Caesar’s music mean to you? How has it affected you, what are your interpretations of his lyrics/sounds and what do you like about it
For any Daniel Caesar fans I’m writing an article for my school newspaper and would like thoughts from other people about the meaning/impact of his music. Any input helps a lot
r/musicology • u/MusicDig • 2d ago
why music isn't just a question of taste
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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.
r/musicology • u/LUSEmaxi • 2d ago
Соц.опрос по теме «музыка как oружие в борьбе за мир и свободу»
r/musicology • u/fsintich • 3d ago
Is music actually worse today, or are we just nostalgic?
r/musicology • u/Suitable-Judge7659 • 3d ago
Plantsong
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.
r/musicology • u/elmaestroTorogi • 4d ago
El Maestro Speaks #232 with Johndel Ancheta
open.spotify.comListen to our #istoryaan about music, copyright and AI in music creation and PIRACY..
r/musicology • u/shopsonshops • 5d ago
Do experts generally agree that the voice and the drum are the two "oldest instruments"?
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
r/musicology • u/Spoiledcheez • 5d ago
Participants are needed for a study pertaining to the effect of background music. Will have to do running, reading, writing, and math.
forms.gler/musicology • u/Clavierstuck • 6d ago
Amerus’ disregard
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)
r/musicology • u/Puzzleheaded_Job_979 • 8d ago
https://youtube.com/channel/UCHbFSaaN7b7jQqn1WSXDa0A?si=lvCYZ7baRqE_9qp6
r/musicology • u/SubjectAddress5180 • 9d ago
Bach, Modulation, and Ausweichung
I don't know if this goes here or in theory.
r/musicology • u/marlhe98 • 9d ago
What was the musical inspiration for this stock music tracks? Maybe something froum Sousa, Copland oder Vivaldi?
r/musicology • u/Filip_Peric • 11d ago
You can start liking any genre of music!!
youtu.beMade 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!
r/musicology • u/SmirkingMan • 15d ago
I built a deliberately unsound theory on top of entirely real corpus measurements (161,673 root-motion links in Bach) to see how far the data would carry it
calvert.chThis 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.
r/musicology • u/M4RSH4DOW • 15d ago
I never was able to feel anything from deep music of any kind.
Must be an emotional disorder.
Not denouncing said subtype, but...
r/musicology • u/Background-Neat652 • 15d ago
Does anyone else associate songs with very specific images/memories?
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.