Music as universal?
How strong or intense a sound feels, depending on both physical and contextual factors
What is loudness?
Dilla's explanation for his rhythmic concept.
What is "simple-complex"?
The belief that one’s own culture is inherently superior to others.
What is ethnocentrism?
Several different rhythms performed simultaneously.
What is a polyrhythm?
The different forms of this Chinese instrument evokes imagery associated with nature and the cosmos.
What is the qin? (or guqin)
This perspective represents how members of a musical community understand their own musical practices
What is emic?
This music production process aligns note onsets with positions on a rhythmic grid.
What is quantization?
Research practice that involves participating in and observing the music being studied in person, frequently gaining facility in another music tradition as a performer or theorist.
What is (ethnographic) fieldwork?
The tonal quality of a sound, shaped by its harmonics, that makes different instruments sound distinct even when playing the same note.
What is timbre?
The alternation or overlap between a lead performer and a responding group, often involving improvisation.
What is call and response?
The development of competence in two musical systems, expanding one’s musical practice and knowledge.
What is bimusicality?
Cultural tradition discussed in class that exemplifies how countries in the Americas outside the U.S. allowed percussion-based traditions amongst enslaved people.
What is candomble? or voudou? or santeria?
Term describing how cultural encounters produce new forms and identities, challenging the idea of racial or cultural purity.
What is hybridity?
These slides, turns, and oscillations are not optional embellishment; rather, they help to define the unique character, mood, and identity of a raga.
What are gamakas?
A term used to explain social cohesion in pow wow music.
What is harmony?
The term used to describe a view in which metaphysical speculation is rejected in favor of ‘positive’ knowledge based on systematic observation and experiment.
What is positivism?
Percussion instrument that alters its pitch to mimic the tones and rhythms of West African tonal languages.
What is a talking drum?
Umbrella term for non-normative identities, aesthetics, and social practices (extra-credit).
What is queer?
Sub-genre of emo that emerged in the early 1990s featuring clean arpeggiated guitars, off-key vocals and complex drum patterns.
What is Midwest Emo?
A West African oral historian, storyteller, musician, poet, and praise singer
What is a griot?
This musical system analyzed in one of the readings in order to challenge the universality of the term improvisation.
What is raga?
A series of loud, accented drum strikes in a powwow song that serves a deep spiritual and structural purpose, including marking the choruses of songs.
What is an honor beat?
Theory that explains how “consumers actively rework and transform symbolic meanings encoded in advertisements, brands, retail settings, or material goods to manifest their particular personal and social circumstances and further their identity and lifestyle goal.”
What is Consumer Culture Theory?
This notation system is closer to a performance-oriented tablature that describes the physical actions and gestures of the performer's hands -- it does not primarily notate music through precise pitch and duration.
What is jianzipu (減字譜), or reduced-character-notation?
In pow wow music, this term explains how the lead singer is partially interrupted by the group, who complete his phrase. Later, the lead singer returns to the beginning of the melody, but omitting the first phrase.
What is incomplete repetition?