Music Theory Concepts & Notation

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Abstractions about how music is organized, notated, and perceived, spanning pitch and interval relationships such as ambitus, tetrachord and enharmonic equivalence, structural and performative concepts like musical improvisation and transformational theory, and cross-domain or novelty musical practices such as protein music and eye music.

20 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Ambitus — In medieval music, ambitus () is a Latin term literally meaning enclos[ur]e, and in Medieval Latin means the "range" of a melodic line, most usually referring to the range of scale degrees attributed to a given mode, particularly in Gregorian chant.
• Circle of thirds — In music theory, the circle of thirds, also known as the cycle of thirds, is a way of organizing pitches, and a musical tool that helps musicians remember and memorize the order of thirds in a scale, and hence the notes of the chords in those scales.
• Eclecticism in music — In music theory and music criticism, the term eclecticism refers to the use of diverse music genres.
• Enharmonic equivalence — In music, two written notes have enharmonic equivalence if they produce the same pitch but are notated differently.
• Eye music — Eye music (often referred to in English by its exact German translation Augenmusik) describes graphical features of scores which when performed are unnoticeable by the listener.
• Four on the floor (music) — Four-on-the-floor (or four-to-the-floor) is a rhythm used primarily in dance genres such as disco and electronic dance music.
• Inharmonicity — In music, inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of overtones (also known as partials or partial tones) depart from whole multiples of the fundamental frequency (harmonic series).
• Loudness War — The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment.
• Matrix (music) — In music, especially folk and popular music, a matrix is an element of variations which does not change.
• Musical Improvisation — Musical improvisation (also known as musical extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians.
• Pitch Space — A mathematical or graphical model that represents perceived or theoretical relationships among musical pitches as positions, paths, neighborhoods, or distances, with dimensionality and octave equivalence determined by the analytical purpose.
• Protein Music — Protein music or, more broadly, genetic music (including DNA music) is a musical technique where music is composed by converting protein sequences or DNA sequences to musical notes.
• Regular Tuning — A multi-string tuning with the same directed pitch interval between every pair of adjacent open strings.
• Relative Key — A pair of major and minor scales sharing the same key signature are said to be in a relative relationship.
• Sotto voce (music) — The second part of Chopin's Nocturne in C minor, Op 48 No 1, which is marked sotto voce e sostenuto; this is used to 'hold back the drama and keep us in suspense'.
• Tertian — A musical structure organized by stacked or successive major or minor thirds, including chords, harmony, counterpoint, and root motion when thirds are structurally controlling.
• Tetrachord — In music theory, a tetrachord (; ) is a series of four notes separated by three intervals.
• Transformational Theory — A music-theoretical framework that analyzes musical motion as transformations acting on a space of musical objects rather than primarily describing the objects themselves.
• Tremolo — Tremolos may be either measured, in which the exact rate of repetition or oscillation is specified, or unmeasured, in which it is not (the understanding being in that case that it should be performed as rapidly as possible).
• Tune Family — In folk music a tune-family is, "a seeming multiplicity of melodies," reducible, "to a small number of 'models' or sets." One can think of the models or sets as deep structures.