The Cycle of Pop Music

Music Of Mesopotamia ... Sumerian music The discovery of numerous musical instruments in royal burial sites and illustrations of musicians in Sumerian art show how music seemed to play an important part of religious and civic life in Sumer... Music and dancing were a part of daily celebration and temple rites-music was played for marriages and births in the royal families... Singers probably expressed intense and withdrawn emotion, as if listening to themselves, as shown by the practice of cupping a hand to the ear (as is still current in modern Assyrian music and many Arab and folk musics) (van der Merwe 1989, p...

Data Compression ... Compression is useful because it helps reduce the consumption of resources such as data space or transmission capacity. Because compressed data must be decompressed to be used, this extra processing imposes computational or other costs through decompression...

Ethnomusicology ... Coined by the musician Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos (nation) and μουσική mousike (music), it is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music... Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music." Although it is often thought of as a study of non-Western musics, ethnomusicology also includes the study of Western music from an anthropological or sociological perspective... Bruno Nettl (1983) believes it is a product of Western thinking, proclaiming "ethnomusicology as western culture knows it is actually a western phenomenon." Nettl believes that there are limits to the extraction of meaning from a culture's music because of a Western observer's perceptual distance from the culture; however, the growing prevalence of scholars who study their own musical traditions, and an increasing range of different theoretical frameworks and research methodologies has done much to address criticisms such as Nettl's...

Rock And Roll ... The American Heritage Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music... Encyclopædia Britannica, on the other hand, regards it as the music that originated in the mid-1950s and later developed "into the more encompassing international style known as rock music"...

Musical Ensemble ... Other common groupings in classical music are the woodwind quintet, usually consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn and the brass quintet, consisting of two trumpets, one french horn, a trombone and a tuba... A pops orchestra is an orchestra that mainly performs light classical music (often in abbreviated, simplified arrangements) and orchestral arrangements and medleys of popular jazz, music theater, or pop music songs...

Jazz ... From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music... As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music...

Bebop ... In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians created a new style that came out of the 1930s' swing music... They partially strived to counter the popularization of swing with non-danceable music that demanded listening... These forerunners of the new music (which would later be termed "bebop," or "bop"-- although Parker himself never used that term, feeling it demeaned the music) began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords and chord substitutions...

Ragtime ... Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered... The album won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Billboard's Top Classical Album of 1974... Historical context Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century, descending from the jigs and march music played by black bands...

List Of Renaissance Composers ... Since the 14th century is not usually considered by music historians to be part of the musical Renaissance, but part of the Middle Ages, composers active during that time can be found in the List of Medieval composers... Composers on this list had some period of significant activity after 1400, before 1600, or in a few cases they wrote music in a Renaissance idiom in the several decades after 1600...

Record Producer ... Today, the recording industry has two kinds of producers: executive producer and music producer; they have different roles... While an executive producer oversees a project's finances, a music producer oversees the creation of the music... A music producer can, in some cases, be compared to a film director, with noted practitioner Phil Ek himself describing his role as "the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, like a director would a movie...

Wedding Music ... Some couples may consider the traditional wedding marches clichéd and choose a more modern piece of music or an alternate such as Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel...

Musician ... It's also a person who makes music a profession, anyone (professional or not) who's skilled in making music or performing music creatively, or one who composes, conducts, or performs music (especially instrumental music)...

History Of Music In The Biblical Period ... The music of religious ritual was first used by King David, and, according to the Larousse Encyclopedia of Music, he is credited with confirming the men of the Tribe of Levi as the "custodians of the music of the divine service." Historian Irene Hesk notes that of the twenty-four books of the Old Testament, the 150 Psalms in the Book of Psalms ascribed to King David, have served as "the bedrock of Judeo-Christian hymnology," concluding that "no other poetry has been set to music more often in Western civilization." The study of ancient musical instruments has been practiced for centuries with some researchers studying instruments from Israel/Palestine dating to the "biblical period." Archaeological and written data have demonstrated clearly that music was an integral part of daily life in ancient Israel/Palestine... Data also describes outdoor scenes of music and dancing in sometimes prophetic frenzies, often with carefully orchestrated and choreographed musicians and singers within sp...

Musical Composition ... Similarly, music of the Middle East employs compositions that are rigidly based on a specific mode (maqam) often within improvisational contexts, as does Indian classical music in both the Hindustani and the Carnatic systems, gamelans of Java and Bali, and much music in Africa... Useful skills in composition include writing musical notation, music theory, instrumentation, and handling musical ensembles (orchestration)...

History Of Classical Music Traditions ... A culture's music is influenced by all other aspects of that culture, including social and economic organization and experience, climate, and access to technology... The emotions and ideas that music expresses, the situations in which music is played and listened to, and the attitudes toward music players and composers all vary between regions and periods... "Music history" is the distinct subfield of musicology and history which studies music (particularly Western art music) from a chronological perspective...

Music And Mathematics ... The attempt to structure and communicate new ways of composing and hearing music has led to musical applications of set theory, abstract algebra and number theory... Time, rhythm and meter Without the boundaries of rhythmic structure – a fundamental equal and regular arrangement of pulse repetitivity, accent, phrase and duration – music would be impossible... The common types of form known as binary and ternary ("twofold" and "threefold") once again demonstrate the importance of small integral values to the intelligibility and appeal of music...

Music Theory ... At and below about 1,000 Hz, the perceived loudness of a tone gets lower as sound frequency decreases, but above approximately 2,000 Hz, the perceived loudness increases as the sound's frequency gets higher. This is due to the ear's natural sensitivity to higher pitched sound, as well as the ear's particular sensitivity to sound around the 2000-4000Hz area, the frequency range most of the human voice occupies...

Music Therapy ... Music therapy is also used in some medical hospitals, cancer centers, schools, alcohol and drug recovery programs, psychiatric hospitals, and correctional facilities... The Turco-Persian psychologist and music theorist al-Farabi (872–950), known as "Alpharabius" in Europe, dealt with music therapy in his treatise Meanings of the Intellect, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul... Robert Burton wrote in the 17th century in his classic work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia...

Rapping ... Rapping is a primary ingredient in hip hop music and reggae, but the phenomenon predates hip hop culture by centuries... Today, the terms "rap" and "rapping" are so closely associated with hip hop music that many use the terms interchangeably... History See also: African American music, Music of the United States, History of poetry, Jamaican music, Roots of hip hop, Old school hip hop, and Talking blues Etymology Rap etymologically means "fast read" or "spoke fast"...

Baroque Music ... Baroque music forms a major portion of the classical music canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to... Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre...

Soulja Boy ... In September 2007, his single "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The single was initially self-published on the internet, and it later became a number-one hit in the United States for seven non-consecutive weeks starting in September 2007...