music notation

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.

Musician Benn Jordan uses AI to detect AI-generated music and digs into music industry data, including streaming payouts and sample library copyright problems. He covers ways to tell whether a track is human-made.

Adam Neely analyzes vaporwave through music theory, timbre and nostalgia, and includes a parody track made for the video. He also touches on the phenomenology of music.

Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies. It counts the possible note combinations and discusses how common chord progressions and remixing affect originality.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

WIRED's 5 Levels format with Jacob Collier explaining harmony to a child, a teen, a college student, a professional and Herbie Hancock.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

Rick Beato analyzes a pop song he argues is among the most harmonically complex ever, breaking down its chords and key changes. It is a music theory deep dive aimed at general music fans.

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 analyzes the music and production of Max Martin through Ariana Grande's Into You, breaking down its layering and songwriting craft.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

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.

3Blue1Brown presents the Triangle of Power, an alternate notation that unifies powers, logarithms and roots in a single triangular symbol. The video shows how the inverse operations relate and how the notation could help.

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.

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.

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.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.

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.

A minutephysics video explaining why a piano cannot be perfectly tuned, comparing equal temperament with just intonation and the math of harmonics.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

GoldenSound publishes music on Tidal to test MQA, a deep dive into the format's claims and problems including its leaky filter. Testing begins around the 5:45 mark.

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.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Numberphile's Tony Padilla and Matt Parker discuss Graham's number, once the largest number used in a mathematical proof, and how enormous it is.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

Kurzgesagt examines how AI-generated content is flooding the internet, from video and music to news and books. It looks at how this makes verifying what is real harder.

Numberphile's James Grime discusses highly composite numbers, nicknamed anti-primes, which have more factors than any smaller number, using 5040 as the central example. It touches on Plato and Ramanujan.

Vsauce looks at 'juvenoia', the exaggerated fear that new media and youth culture are corrupting the young. It gives historical examples of older generations complaining about the next one.