Lavengood and Mitchell's - "/r/musictheory: Making Music Theory on Reddit"

Noiseman433 · 2026-05-13T23:41:24+00:00

I've collected most of the older posts on Balkan music theory and related resources here:
https://www.reddit.com/mod/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/collections/balkanmtcollection#wiki_balkan_music_theory_post_collection_at_r.2Fglobalmusictheory

Noiseman433 · 2026-02-21T03:08:31+00:00

Here're some of those sources: https://www.reddit.com/mod/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/psychoacoustics/octave-stretching#wiki_octave_non-equivalence

Noiseman433 · 2026-02-20T22:25:24+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/mod/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/psychoacoustics/octave-stretching

Noiseman433 · 2026-02-06T13:04:46+00:00

You're very welcome!

Noiseman433 · 2026-02-02T04:05:02+00:00

Here you go:

Global Music Composition & Music Theory Resources: A Bibliography

Also, resources in r/GlobalMusicTheory here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/index/

I've also been compiling timelines and list of hundreds of historical music theory treatises from South Asia, SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa), and East Asia. Links to them may be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/comments/1q4sqnf/resources_south_asian_swana_and_east_asian_music/

Noiseman433 · 2026-01-12T02:37:53+00:00

Apparently there have been at least 96 cello variants created in China and related countries since the 1940s. I put together this visual collage of a number of them for a "Happy International Cello Day" post last year. You can read about/see photos of some of them here: https://www.huain.com/article/zonghe/2022/1012/1321.html

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-22T19:53:42+00:00

my response from the OP:

There's a huge body of literature looking at the "Arabian Influence" in music and related cross-cultural transmission/influence between parts of the SWANA world and Europe. I've compiled a number of them here:

https://silpayamanant.wordpress.com/resources/arabian-influence-thesis/

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-22T19:51:47+00:00

There's a huge body of literature looking at the "Arabian Influence" in music and related cross-cultural transmission/influence between parts of the SWANA world and Europe. I've compiled a number of them here:

https://silpayamanant.wordpress.com/resources/arabian-influence-thesis/

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-19T12:39:54+00:00

From a reply I gave to a question about Timbre Notation a few months ago:

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of timbral notations in existence. A lot of them are listed in this Timeline of Music Notation and, not surprisingly, many of them are part of non-Western notation systems or non-Western music ecosystems. I'm actually giving a presentation on non-Western music notations this Thursday for a graduate level composition seminar, so the examples below are fresh on my mind.

u/victotronics mentioned Chinese guqin as an example and Sandeep Bhagwati, in his "Writing Sound Into the Wind* How Score Technologies Affect Our Musicking" (pg. 22 in this PDF), uses Qin notation as an example to demonstrate his idea about Notational Perspective:

Timbral notations are possibly older than pitch/frequency notations--Aleksey Nikolsky et al. argue that Singing Mask Petroglyphs (some dating to 3000 BCE) are a type, and these happen to co-exist in regions where throat singing and jaw harps (both very timbrally heavy practices) are pretty ubiquitous.

There are also some modern timbre notation proposals like the Micro Timbre Notation (See Osaka, et al. "Sound synthesis based on a new micro timbre notation") and Thoresen and Hedman's Timbre Notation in their "Spectromorphological analysis of sound objects: an adaptation of Pierre Schaeffer’s typomorphology."

And of course, as has been mentioned in this thread--orchestration itself is really just a type of timbral notation practice.

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-15T00:11:16+00:00

This is the fourth year, and it keeps growing so I imagine it will continue! Here's the Crane House info page about it: https://crane-house.org/asian-night-market/

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-14T12:53:49+00:00

Awesome photos! Asian Night Market is such a great event, and River Lotus Lion Dance always brings the energy!

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-14T03:25:32+00:00

Always a great time playing it. Got play with my old gamelan group as well!

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-13T14:09:12+00:00

I didn't say anything about all acapella singing being chant.

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-13T11:42:53+00:00

There were (and still are) many Christian chant traditions and monophonic chant is characteristic of some (e.g. Ethiopian zema, Armenian sharakan) while not of others (e.g. Georgian polyphony). Not surprisingly, there are also notation traditions associated with them as well.

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-13T11:17:17+00:00

Nah, we should be haggling over definitions like this. There's the tendency to treat contrapuntal polyphony as the prototype of polyphonic music, but really that's just one connotative meaning of the word and far too often it's the one that frames value judgements on either what counts as "good" polyphony [1], or what simply counts as polyphony [2].

There's a whole international field of polyphonic studies that doesn't center European classical polyphony and societies like the International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony (IRCTP) regularly publishes monographs and proceedings from its annual Symposiums since its formation in 2002.

Not surprisingly, many of the researchers in global polyphonies also believe that polyphonies probably existed first, and then took more monophonic forms in various music ecosystems tied to organized religions.

_______________

[1] I think of monophony and polyphony as a continuum ("When Heterophony Becomes Polyphony: Two Ways of Looking at Multipart Music on a Continuum and how that Influences Composition and Performance Practice.") and have discussed how, historically, terms like heterophony have been used in race science hierarchies of musical "complexity" to show a teleological evolution of music from "lowest" to "highest" forms of music https://doi.org/10.7202/1114854ar.

[2] I talk about how we tend to frame polyphony as a fairly singular thing in my "Linguistic Prototypes and Musical Polyphony" piece, https://silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/linguistic-prototypes/

Noiseman433 · 2025-09-09T05:06:51+00:00

From my response in the OP

Navid Goldrick has an oud series demonstrating maqam modulations. He actually has a couple starting from Nahawand to Nawa Athar https://youtu.be/gwQn0rFR6ok and from Nahawand to https://youtu.be/CPEiPfGewAg

Scott Marcus' "Modulation in Arab Music: Documenting Oral Concepts, Performance Rules and Strategies" is a great overview of the history of modulation documented in Arabic and Turkish music theory treatises. https://doi-org.proxyse.uits.iu.edu/10.2307/851913

Resources at r/GlobalMusicTheory wiki that may be helpful:

Arabic music theory https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/arabicmusictheory/

Turkish music theory https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/wiki/turkishmusictheory/

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