Music Theory

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16 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Music Theory.

• Bar-line shift — A jazz improvisation technique that displaces the perceived harmonic change across the notated measure boundary.
• Breedsma — The microtonal interval with frequency ratio 2401:2400, about 0.72 cents, arising as the difference between particular septimal intervals and tempered out in several equal temperaments.
• Canter rhythm — A recurring long-short or displaced two-accent rhythmic figure, named after the canter gait and used in waltz and other music or dance to overlay the prevailing meter.
• Cell (music) — A short musical idea that functions as a generative unit for repetition, variation, combination, or larger motivic construction.
• Chord progression — An ordered succession of chords whose harmonic relations establish, prolong, redirect or destabilize tonal and modal expectations.
• Complement (music) — A pitch-class or interval relation in which one musical object combines with another to complete a declared total such as an octave or chromatic aggregate.
• Interpolation (classical music) — The insertion of additional, functionally nonessential material between two otherwise successive formal functions, extending a phrase, period or liturgical item.
• Microtonality — The composition, tuning or performance of music using pitch intervals smaller than a conventional semitone or otherwise outside the prevailing twelve-tone equal-tempered pitch grid.
• Otonality and utonality — Harry Partch's paired just-intonation chord concepts: otonalities share a denominator and follow an overtone series, while utonalities share a numerator and mirror a subharmonic series.
• Pitch class — The equivalence class of musical pitches related by whole-octave displacement.
• Quarter tone — A musical interval approximately half a semitone, or one step of a 24-part equal division of the octave when used in 24-tone equal temperament.
• Root (chord) — The pitch class that names and structurally organizes a chord as the origin of its interval stack, regardless of which chord tone sounds lowest.
• Rule of the octave — A thoroughbass convention assigning characteristic harmonies to each ascending and descending scale degree in a bass octave.
• Septuple meter — A musical meter organizing each measure into seven equal beats or subdivisions, commonly grouped as combinations of two, three and four.
• So What chord — A five-note jazz voicing built as three stacked perfect fourths topped by a major third, named for its prominent use in Miles Davis's So What.
• Subminor and supermajor — Microtonal interval categories lying respectively between diminished and minor and between major and augmented intervals under a stated tuning system.