Music 150 Notes PDF

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History of American music...

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Graphic Transcription For my graphic transcription project, I chose the song Mind Your Own Business by Delta 5 because of the tune of it. Being someone who listens to pop music, electronic dance music, house music, and country music, I really had to tune into this song. As I was listening to the whole song, I was intrigued by the first minute. The melody, texture, and rhythm was very catchy. I pulled apart the song by visually taking out one part of the song at a time, trying to block out the other sounds. I found this to be very challenging as after thirty seconds, more items to the song started to come in, such as the vocals. So I had to break the song down into five seconds at a time so that I could really focus, and this was just one decision I had to make. Other decisions included choosing shapes and colors to graphically annotate the song. When it actually came to making the score, I did one beat/sound at a time. I decided that for the background beats, I wanted to demonstrate these by simple dots in blue. This was the first thing I did since it was the first thing I heard in the song. Then I did the mountain like figures in green to also show another beat in the song. The green mountains in my score have higher and lower peaks, to demonstrate the speed and distance between each beat. The smaller green peaks are closer together since this specific beat is faster than the taller, more spaced out green peaks. Next, I chose to do the tambourine like sound that comes in at about seven seconds, which is shown as pink straight lines. The different heights of the lines show the pitch of the sound. At about eight seconds, there is a drum like sound that strikes once, and I have indicated that with an orange star. There were four times when the song said “no” so I simply indicated that with the spelling of “no”. Lastly, I decided to do the vocals. These are shown in red wave like lines. There is sort of a rhythm of three for the vocals and the higher waves indicate a higher pitch in the

vocals. From about forty five seconds until sixty seconds, there are two red wave lines since there are vocals being sung over each other. I had a very hard time trying to find the rhythm to this since there was a lot to be heard at once. The most challenging part about making the score was trying to pull out each instrument from the song and to draw the rhythm of it. The first thirty seconds were more straightforward since there were no vocals yet, but trying to decipher the different beats, when they come in, and the pitch of each one etc, was complicated. Once I got to thirty seconds, the vocals came in and were very pitchy. I tried to map the rhythm of the vocals and I was able to do so up until forty five seconds. Then, during the last fifteen seconds of the first minute, there were vocals being sung over each other. This was extremely difficult for me. It was very hard to focus on one thing at a time since the background beats were still going, and the vocals were trailing behind each other. I had to take a few breaks while doing this project since I kept getting frustrated a few times. Overall, I feel like I will now listen more into the songs I listen to. This project made me realize that some songs out there have so many different parts to them such as the vocals, background beats, the different pitches, tones, and rhythm. If one of these parts to the song was missing, the song would not be complete. Depending on the genre of the song, there are reasons behind each instrument being used. When all the parts to a song come together, we are able to appreciate each and every sound we hear....