Awesome Music Theory

A directory of books, resources and courses for studying everything about music and sound

This is version 2. Version 1 was a single page with all screenshots, which may have loaded slowly

Where to start

1. Go through Ableton's guide
2. Explore Hooktheory's TheoryTab: search for your favorite songs and anime openings. Honestly both of their books are top-notch and well worth the money
3. Play around with Bartosz Ciechanowski's visualizations on the essence of sound
4. Skim through Toby W. Rush's overview to intensify a fear for classical music theory
5. Listen to Beethoven's sonata #5 movement #1, also see what we as a society know about it
6. Stare at visualizations: classical, jazz harmony and jazz solos
7. Watch a gamelan multitrack and try to make sense of it
8. Press "scan"

Western music languages

Music languages can be divided into a number of families. Historically, the most dominant and influencial one is Western family of languages. Its languages share some common traits:

• 12-tone temperament
• major/minor keys
• homophony
• chords in thirds
• any of the 12 notes can be a tonic

The languages are (roughly speaking):

• Rock - probably worth exploring the first, as it's the simplest and pretty popular. It makes sense to start here and expand into other Western languages later on - as they share a lot of concepts. By the way, pop music (structure-wise) it a super-genre combining bits of rock, jazz and other stuff
• Classical - the biggest chapter here, as it's the main focus of all research and teaching (despite its unpopularity according to streaming stats). Subtopics: pre-classical, advanced
• Jazz. Subtopics: harmony, lego, solo
• Barbershop
• Movies
• Video games
• Bach chorales
• Other genres like R&B, country, dance electronic, gospel
• Western regional traditions (eg. Latin)

Non-Western music languages

Non-Western music languages are different families. As they were developed all over the globe, they don't share many common features.

The families are (roughly speaking):

Broad overview on non-Western languages

Topics

Topics on electronic music

Contacts

A real-time feed of new resources in Telegram

Do you know how to enroll in a music theory program after a computer science BSc (without a completed formal music degree)? Please, let me know: [email protected], t.me/vitalypavlenko (asking for myself)