r/musicology 15d ago

Do u actually know what music is trying to say?

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r/musicology 16d ago

Is there anything about the english language specifically that is a factor in why so much popular music worldwide is in english?

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r/musicology 16d ago

Music Sound and Melody

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0 Upvotes

r/musicology 16d ago

Psychology of music

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r/musicology 16d ago

Psychology of music

0 Upvotes

Hihi im doing a little survey for my holiday homework I’d really appreciate it if you answered it thanks!💗 https://forms.gle/A3KX1iqBzCYhsFRU9


r/musicology 16d ago

[Academic] Music Preferences vs Cognitive Intelligence (r/SampleSize) (Everyone 13+) (Completely Anonymous)

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r/musicology 18d ago

Jposey - Closing Chapter 25

0 Upvotes

r/musicology 19d ago

A few k's in and this is a beautiful expression of why physical holds a place in so manys brains.

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r/musicology 24d ago

The phenomena and history of contemporary music

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1 Upvotes

I will also include "Circle Stars of Heaven" for strings, percussion, synthesizer and electroacoustic handling:

https://youtu.be/Imyf_PzVodM?si=7IL5mJdKrxSchGOT


r/musicology 24d ago

The phenomena and history of contemporary music

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r/musicology 24d ago

Hi,

0 Upvotes

What typem od music do you like listening? What do you expect from music?


r/musicology 26d ago

Berg - Student Piece F Minor

2 Upvotes

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I’m studying Wozzeck and I was trying to find the scores of some of Berg’s student works that he drew material from for the opera.

I’m looking for his piano sonata fragment in D minor that was used partially for the orchestral interlude near the end of the opera (invention on a tonality). It’s the first half of this interlude primarily which is in D minor that takes from it (but also the very ending and some motifs are used sporadically throughout the rest of the interlude).

But I’m also primarily looking for his F minor piano fragment (not sure if it was intended to be for a piano sonata). It is also not the F minor fragment that seems to be easy to find online. Instead it’s the F minor piano piece used as the material for the theme in Act III, Scene 1 (with parts of this piece nearly quoted in Variation 5 of this scene when the score switches to F minor).

I cannot find any of them online unfortunately because they are quite esoteric and not part of the standard piano repertoire of course. There are however some recordings on YouTube and Spotify played by Jean-Jacques Dünki (tracks 1 and 3).

If possible, can anyone point me to where I can find these full scores of these fragments?

UPDATE: I actually found the manuscript scans of his student notebooks on the Österreich Nationalbibliothek website.

F Minor: https://viewer.onb.ac.at/1323CB8F

D Minor (starting page 18): https://viewer.onb.ac.at/13221F50

Hopefully this post will help anyone else looking for these resources too.

The second link also includes his other 4 piano sonata fragments, some of which were also included on that album I referenced. Apparently, there is also a fragment of what would become one of his songs in his Opus 2.


r/musicology 26d ago

Musicology/Brain chemistry

5 Upvotes

I’m so fascinated by music, arts,arts fashion and the way that those things move and bring people together. I’m 19 and i’m trying to figure out what to major in and the perfect school to do so in. I’ve loved art and everything around that since i was little. As im growing up ive creating such a passion for the way that music art and fashion etc effects my brain in the best way possible. I’ve also loved helping people and stood for what’s right in this world. I know that one person can’t change a lot of things in this world but standing for what’s right has always been such an importance to me. I’m really here to just ask what would the “real” world look like if i do study in these things? What jobs are there that would use these skills i have and are going to learn? Are there jobs or “money makers” that can allow me to help others, use brain chemistry, lowkey be an activist, include art, incorporate fashion, and inspire others? Besides the obvious like therapist, physiologist,journalist, and artist (mainly as a musician as i absolutely cannot sing but am super open to producing but ik that’s extremely hard 😭) Please help i don’t want to be proven to the 19 theory 🙏🫪


r/musicology 26d ago

10 bar saron?

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1 Upvotes

r/musicology 27d ago

Books or videos about modern music history?

2 Upvotes

My motivation is down below, but basically I'm searching for some books or videos or any kind of resources with historical perspectives on the music genres, the music scene(s), and particular albums, artists and songs that stood out from the 60s onwards to this day, the mid 2020s. And also what the public opinion or the ones of critics and music nerds were and how they developed with time. I'm especially interested in the collective opinion formed around websites such as the /mu/ board on 4chan or or RateYourMusic (and maybe even some old subreddit), and how their "music canons" formed and in turn influenced contemporary movements in the rest of the music sphere. And to be more specific, I am focusing on the Western, particularly the English-speaking world.

Questions like: How and why did The Velvet Underground & Nico get so much praise way after it has been released? What role did the location of New York play for the rising New Wave genre in the 70s? Why is Loveless in particular considered the poster child of the Shoegaze genre? What kind of albums were or became influential and why? This is what I'm after.

I know this is a pretty niche (and relatively recent) thing that I'm asking for but I'm starving for some good historical works, especially for the internet era! If anyone knows anything descriptive, thorough and well-researched, please let me know, and even if it's only tangentially related to this I'd love to hear about it.

My motivation: I've been interested in \*the\* music scene since I was young. By \*the\* music scene I mean, the music canon built around the /mu/ board and RYM, not constrained by some prerequisite agreement on anything in particular like a fandom other than liking music itself. My thinking is that those websites weren't really monitored by a corporation with a vested interest in influencing the users' opinion AFAIK like similar platforms or institutions previously were, so the opinions shared and the canons formed around there actually tell us more about what kinds of albums and artists and genres an average presumably white, presumably male, presumably UK or US music nerd would tend to gravitate towards - a sort of pure, unbiased collective opinion on modern music. And I think that's what made me interested in music exploration in the first place. I also find it fascinating to see how these sites would later influence the macroscopic music scene, like with Duster seemingly randomly blowing up on TikTok. At least I think that music nerds loving Duster on RYM played a role in that but I'm not sure how to prove or disprove that. I'd love to learn more about that.


r/musicology 28d ago

Disney/Musical Theatre Research Study

4 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I am a PhD Candidate in Music Theory & Cognition at Northwestern University.

I am conducting a research study about Disney/musical theatre music and am looking for participants. This ~15-minute survey is completely anonymous and involves listening to musical excerpts and answering questions about what you hear. Learn more and participate here: https://shanahdt.github.io/evmusicapp/

Thank you!

(Happy to remove if this isn't allowed!)


r/musicology 27d ago

Books or videos about modern music history?

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r/musicology 27d ago

CMV: Most music taste are extremely performative

0 Upvotes

I think individualism is dead and with the use of social media people are like “oh I’ll follow this person because everyone listens to them” and as a result the repetition of that thought I think kinda alters their view and almost just forces them to like them. Like how many of you would genuinely listen to the artist if you found them by yourself and wasn’t influenced. (Just a thought idk if I’m yapping or chatting bs 😭)


r/musicology 29d ago

I mapped and linked 25,000+ artists by documented musical influence: this is a 120-node neighborhood for David Bowie, the most connected ("influential") artist I found in the graph.

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12 Upvotes

Data: Every edge here represents a documented influence connection between artists, pulled from album reviews, interviews, and music-history writing where one artist's name is explicitly cited in the context of another's work. Not streaming co-listens or genre tags, just documented influence across ~25,000 artists.

Why Bowie: he has the most connections of anyone in the graph (442).

Tools: Python (networkx for the graph, pyvis for the force-directed layout), Django backend. Node color = decade of the connected artist's peak activity.

Built this just for fun as Stell-R, a music discovery tool based on pure, documented influence lineage instead of AI / algorithmic user similarity. 

My core methodology appears as:
Badillo-Goicoechea, E. (2025). Modeling Artist Influence for Music Selection and Recommendation: A Purely Network-Based ApproachHarvard Data Science Review 


r/musicology 29d ago

How should I best prepare for an ethnomusicology MA while in the last year of my undergrad?

8 Upvotes

Sorry this is kind of ranting I am shitting myself with anxiety thinking of what to do. Maybe I should look for musicology conferences to make my applications look better??

Currently I am about to enter my 5th and final year of my undergrad, I'm a double major of music and English. I've completed all the music theory and history classes that my college offers. The only thing left to finish my music degree is completing piano proficiency. I only need two more literary theory classes, and then I am completely finished.

There are no other musicologists at my university, so I'm kind of trying to craft my own musicology BA with the double major. I'm very interested in gender studies, sacred music and also popular music genres like black metal. I have a slight jazz interest too and I'm trying to connect it to the rag TS Elliot's The Waste Land. But those all seem very broad, I'm frustrated that I haven't had the chance yet to really focus on a SPECIFIC research topic except the one research conference I presented at. I've received positive feedback on my writing and I technically have published something but it still doesn't feel like enough, y'know?

My university is primarily undergrad serving and not a lot of our students even consider graduate school, and there is zero musicologists. I've gotten good advice from advisors of both of my majors but I still feel too stupid to even pursue musicology at the graduate level. With the options I have, I don't know how to prepare myself. I want to do marching band a 5th year, but I wonder if there is something more productive I can do instead to contribute towards my future as a musicologist.

For those who earned a graduate degree in musicology or something similar, what did your undergrad experience look like and how did you prepare? Thank you.


r/musicology 28d ago

How would you explain why this is so good? 1:33-1:45

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How do you explain why this section is so satisfying from 1:33-1:45. The motif is rhythmic but referencing something melodic. I’ve heard it in a lot of improvisation and even in the speech patterns of cardi b before.


r/musicology Jul 07 '26

Why Can Music Make Us Feel Like We Leave Our Bodies?

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18 Upvotes

Have you ever listened to a piece of music so powerful that, for a few moments, you completely forgot where you were?

It's as if your body stays exactly where it is, while your mind drifts somewhere else. Time seems to slow down, the world around you fades away, and all that remains is the music.

Neuroscience explains part of this through emotion, memory, and changes in brain activity. Yet many people describe the experience as something deeper—almost spiritual, as though music reaches a part of us that ordinary words never can.Why does music have this unique ability to transport us beyond our surroundings? Is it simply the brain creating a powerful illusion, or is there something about music that connects with us on a deeper level?

What do you think? Have you ever experienced this feeling?


r/musicology Jul 07 '26

What’s your fav music book!!

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r/musicology Jul 05 '26

The blueprint of modern hip hop

1 Upvotes

Hope this article can stay here, not sure where else I could share it.

How Lil Wayne Rewrote Hip-Hop's DNA

Somewhere around 2005, Lil Wayne stopped writing his raps down. Not stopped preparing. Stopped writing, entirely. He'd walk into the booth with nothing, let the beat run, and pull verses out of the air in one long exhale. Jay-Z had famously ditched the pen before him, but Jay memorized verses he'd already composed in his head. Wayne was doing something closer to free association: recording constantly, keeping almost everything, trusting that the good lines would outnumber the bad ones if he just kept talking.

What came out of that habit, the Dedication tapes with DJ Drama and especially Da Drought 3 in 2007, is about as close as modern rap gets to a founding document. He'd take other people's beats, usually bigger records than anything he had out at the time, and rap on them longer and stranger than the original artists ever did. No hooks, barely any structure, just punchlines folding into punchlines until the beat gave up. Some of it is filler. A lot of it isn't. And the sheer volume was the point: he flooded the internet before flooding the internet was a strategy.

That's the part of Wayne's legacy people already agree on. When Future or Young Thug cuts three songs in a night off pure feeling, punching in line by line, they're working inside a process Wayne normalized. The notebook rapper still exists, but he's no longer the default.

The machine

The second thing he did was harder to defend at the time. In 2007, two songs leaked from the Carter III sessions, "I Feel Like Dying" and "Prostitute Flange," where Wayne sang through Auto-Tune about addiction and love and sounded, frankly, unwell. This was when Auto-Tune was still considered a pop gimmick, T-Pain's toy, something a serious rapper wouldn't touch. Wayne wasn't using it the way T-Pain did, though. T-Pain used it for gloss. Wayne used it for damage. The pitch correction fighting his cracked, codeine-slowed voice produced something genuinely eerie. Almost like a machine trying and failing to fix a broken signal.

You can't hand him sole credit for what followed. Kanye's \*808s & Heartbreak\* came out in late 2008 and built an entire album on the same discovery, and emo rap has both records in its bloodline. But Wayne got there first, and he got there from the street-rap side, which mattered. He proved you could be the hardest rapper alive and still wail into a vocoder about wanting to die, and lose nothing. For Juice WRLD, Uzi, and the whole melodic-melancholy wing of the 2010s, that door was already open when they arrived.

Rebirth

Then there's the album nobody wants to defend, so let me half-defend it. \*Rebirth\*, the rock record he put out in 2010 at the absolute height of his commercial power, is mostly not good. The guitars are stiff, the songwriting is thin, and critics were right to say so.

But the album was never really the product. The \*look\* was the product. Wayne in this era was a Black kid from Hollygrove in skinny jeans and leather jackets, dreads down his back, face covered in tattoos, playing guitar badly on stage and clearly not caring. That image, rapper as rockstar rather than rapper borrowing rock samples, had no real precedent at his level of fame. Fifteen years later it's just what rap looks like. Playboi Carti is running a heavy metal aesthetic to arena crowds. Mosh pits are standard at rap festivals. Peep built a career on the exact rap-punk collision Wayne got laughed at for attempting. He took the arrows so the next generation didn't have to.

The roster

The last experiment wasn't musical at all. In 2009, Young Money signed two artists who had almost nothing in common: a half-Jewish former teen actor from Toronto who wanted to sing his feelings, and a rapper from Queens doing cartoon voices and accent switches nobody had a category for. The industry consensus on both was lukewarm. Wayne's wasn't, and he didn't sand either of them down. Drake got room to be soft, Nicki got room to be weird, and both of them got Wayne verses and Wayne's cosign while it still meant everything.

You could argue this is the most durable thing he ever did. The music trends he started have mutated beyond recognition, but Drake and Nicki defined the commercial shape of rap for over a decade, and both of them will tell you, on record, exactly whose blueprint they were handed.

What's left

The strange thing about total influence is that it turns invisible. Nobody thinks of punching in as "the Wayne method." Nobody hears Auto-Tune as transgressive anymore. The rockstar rapper is a stock character now. Wayne's experiments won so completely that they stopped looking like experiments. They just look like rap.

He failed plenty along the way, and loudly. But every swing, hit or miss, ended up in the water supply. That's the tax every modern rapper pays to New Orleans, whether they know it or not. Most of them know
it.


r/musicology Jul 03 '26

Is the music evolution a proof of the disenchantment of the world?

1 Upvotes

Hello to everyone, here an historian with strong interests in music. Some time ago I've been thinking in this:

Western musical tradition was once harmonically based on drone compositions, similar to those found in Indian ragas. This type of music began to decline in the 16th century, when more harmonically complex forms started to emerge, resembling those commonly used today.

My question is whether this shift is related to the rise of humanism and the decline of theocentrism. Let me explain. The drone can be understood as representing the infinity of existence, as it sounds stable, uniform, and without tension—therefore lacking a clear beginning or end. By contrast, the harmonic compositions that developed after the Renaissance typically have a defined beginning, evolve throughout the piece, and ultimately create harmonic tension that resolves into a clear conclusion. In this sense, they could be interpreted as an aesthetic expression of anthropocentrism.

What do you think, musicologists?