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I have always been tempted by these, they look so cool! but never dared to go w/o brakes. i wonder how much lighter (i.e. faster) they are. I have a really lightweight racer, and virtally never get overtaken, not even by couriers!

I'm endlessly fascinated by arabic music. Interestingly, with modern keyboards being in equal temprament by default, a lot of musical traditions that have been using other tuning systems, move to equal temprament as they upgrade their instruments. Quite a bit of pure choral music tends to be...

What i meant is that each scale has seven chords that you can play using only notes from the scale. So if one were to define the scale of a song (fragment) as the scale that contains all the chord notes, you would probably not find that many modern pop-songs that are using a major scale. I'm not...

I have mild Synesthesia and find that adding the 7th to a major chord makes it a bit more greenish/lilac. ;)

there are various ways you can think of a blues scale: one is as a minor pentatonic scale with an added flat5. I don't personally hear the blues scale/note as either happy or sad, more as ... jazzy ... Which is also why i would never use it in dance tracks. One important advantage of the Blues...

there are various automatic composition systems, they can sometimes do some quite convincing stuff in well-established genres. Here is an example. I'm sure it can be tweaked to do minimal techno.

There are various minor scales. Harmonic minor sound fairly arabic to my ears. I really don't like the major scale. Sounds way cheesy and classical. I never use it. i think it is rarely used in pop music. Instead modes like (mixo)lydian and so on dominate. And of course the blues scale, hugely...

No, only the octave is in tune in equal temprament, everything else is out of tune, including 4th and 5th. mathematically this is easy to see because E.T. proceeds by 12th-root-of-2 steps, which is an irrational number. and you cannot get rational fractions such as 4th and 5th from irrationals...

Logic Audio (and presumably other programs like it) offers loads of tunings. You can also define your own. All my tunes sound horrible in most other tunings.

One of the reasons that (european as opposed to african) religious music is more on the slow and solemn side is probably to do with the architecture of places of worship: european churches were big buildings with loads and loads of reverb. Music was essentially only made by singing. add the two...

I'm not sure they were against the (state) law, just against (catholic) church laws. and that church used to be the dominant employer of musicians.

Well, with our western equal temprament, the actual ratios are much much more complicated! The above ratios are only approximated. But we (westerners) seem able to ignore equal temprament's being out of tune. Another problem is that if simplicity was the only factor, pure octaves or power...

an immediate problem with this is that it doesn't account for inverted chords: Eg an inverted major cord with the third on the bottom still sounds major and a minor chord with the third on top still minor.

Dont worry, i didn't think you were. Hmmm, in some sense you are right. But i also think that i'm right at the same time ;). The music industry has a strong bias towards promoting youngsters, because the target audience wants stars they can identify with. Also, the industry drops artists...

My take of this is that (one of) the social function(s) of religion is precisely to cover up the fact that it doesn't have answers to the questions about why there is a universe/god at all, rather than nothing, and use (meaningless) rituals instead so people forget that these questions are...

The biological basis of emotions has been a hot topic in academic psychology for a while. Regarding music, especially the emotions expressed in the human voice, this guy is the daddy. Check out his books. Overall i think that the issues are not really understood. My personal suggestion is that...

Sure, I understand that S. and others where trying to synthesize religious tradition with modern science. In the same way that political writers at the time tried to fuse monarchy and democracy. but this option is pretty threadbare these days. It's not really clear to me why the pantheistic...

I hear this a lot. but exactly why does one need a new word for nature? and such a loaded one at that? What intellectual benefit does one derive from saying god or vishnu or zeus when meaning nature? I'm baffled.

Most of the best music is made by experienced and professional musicians who stay within a genre, from bach to james brown to timbaland. Whether that genre excites them as much as it did when they were 15 is another question, but experience generally trumps enthusiasm. Most new...

But why would they want to do this? DnB is incredibly popular at the moment, a lot of my students are really into it. they are too young to see that there's not much sonic innovation. and: why should they? They are having fun. It seems that genres always stay the same (Hip Hop, DnB, Metal, RnR...