composition

Donald Knuth explains at Stanford's CCRMA the constraint-based methods he is using to compose a major work for pipe organ.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science demonstrates an X-ray fluorescence gun that measures chemical composition, tears it down, analyzes its failure, and discusses a new XRF technology appearing on eBay.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

A short clip of a track from Emily Howell, a computer program by David Cope that composes classical-style music, performed by human players. It is a sample of algorithmic composition.

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

Composer Tantacrul explores how corporatism produces soulless background music, and how some companies use such music in propaganda-style campaigns. He composes several corporate styles to show their tropes, with some music theory along the way.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

John Chowning's 1977 computer music piece Stria, composed with FM synthesis, which he discovered in 1967. It unifies timbre and scale structure around the Golden Mean.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

The first lecture in Bartosz Milewski's category theory series for programmers. It covers the motivation and philosophy behind category theory and why composition matters for handling complexity.

Brian Lonsdorf explains why Underscore.js falls short as a functional programming library, then introduces currying, composition and point-free style in JavaScript. He argues for data-last argument ordering.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.

Douglas Crockford's Nordic.js 2014 talk on 'the better parts' of JavaScript and programming in general. He argues against `this`, `new` and ES6 classes, and for classless, composition-based object patterns, with some broader remarks on building better structures for the future.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.

Ahoy's documentary traces tracker music from early Amiga software like SoundMonitor and Soundtracker through the demoscene, Protracker, and PC trackers such as Screamtracker and FastTracker. It covers the sound, culture and history of 16-bit module music.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay asking why Marvel films lack memorable musical themes. It blames temp tracks and directors scoring to filler music.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.

Vox Earworm explains why John Coltrane's Giant Steps is so hard to improvise over: it is fast and moves through three keys. Musicians Braxton Cook and Adam Neely walk the host through the underlying music theory.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds the Prodigy track Smack My Bitch Up in Ableton, identifying the samples used and recreating the track by hand.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

Adam Neely tests the claims for tuning to A=432 Hz by trying the unusual tuning systems that its proponents' numerology requires. He compares how they sound against standard tuning and temperaments.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

A short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds The Prodigy's 'Voodoo People' in Ableton from its listed samples. The video shows how the track is assembled and how close a handmade reconstruction can sound.