Book picks similar to
Sonata Forms by Charles Rosen


music
non-fiction
music-books
classical-music

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music


Greg Milner - 2009
    Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented.Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their "compact disc" is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating "loudness war" to get its fix.From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry


Clinton Heylin - 1995
    Along with many illustrations of the creative packages, this is the whole story of the $250 million industry that sustains itself on the great figures of rock music and their biggest admirers.

Succeeding with Your Master's Dissertation: A Step-By-Step Handbook


John Biggam - 2008
     Using case examples of both good and bad student practice, the handbook takes students through each step of the dissertation process, from their initial research proposal to the final submission. The author uses clear illustrations of what students need to do - or not do - to reach their potential, helping them to avoid the most common pitfalls. This essential handbook covers: Producing focused and relevant research objectives Writing your literature review Citing your sources correctly Clearly explaining your use of research methods Writing up your findings Summarizing your work by linking your conclusions to your initial proposal Understanding marking schemes Aimed primarily at Master's students or students on short postgraduate courses in business, humanities and the social sciences, this book is also key reading for supervisors and undergraduates considering postgraduate study.

Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds


David Toop - 1995
    It travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas; from David Lynch's dream house high in the Hollywood Hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. An ethereal culture developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications.Author of Rap Attack 3 and Exotica, David Toop has in Ocean of Sound written an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound.

Guitar Fretboard Workbook: A Complete System for Understanding the Fretboard for Acoustic or Electric Guitar


Barrett Tagliarino - 2003
    Navigate the guitar neck better than ever before with this easy-to-use book! Designed from Musicians Institute core curriculum programs, it covers essential concepts for players of every level, acoustic or electric. A hands-on guide to theory, it will help you learn to build any scale or chord on your own and unleash creativity. No music reading is required. This second edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new music examples.

Music is My Mistress


Duke Ellington - 1973
    Told in his own way, in his own words, a symphony written by the King of Jazz. His story spans and defines a half-century of modern music.This man who created over 1500 compositions was as much at home in Harlem's Cotton Club in the ‘20s as he was at a White House birthday celebration in his honor in the ‘60s. For Duke knew everyone and savored them all. Passionate about his music and the people who made music, he counted as his friends hundreds of the musicians who changed the face of music throughout the world: Bechet, Basie, Armstrong, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, to name a few of them. Here are 100 photographs to give us an intimate view of Duke's world—his family, his friends, his associates.What emerges most strongly in his commitment to music, the mistress for whom he saves the fullest intensity of his passion. ”Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays,” he says. He composed not only songs that all the world has sung, but also suites, sacred works, music for stage and screen and symphonies. This rich book, the embodiment of the life and works of the Duke, is replete with appendices listing singers, arrangers, lyricists and the symphony orchestras with whom the Duke played. There is a book to own and cherish by all who love Jazz and the contributions made to it by the Duke.

Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal


Ian Christe - 2003
    Contrary to popular belief, headbangers and the music they love are more alive than ever. Yet there has never been a comprehensive book on the history of heavy metal - until now. Featuring interviews with members of the biggest bands in the genre, Sound of the Beast gives an overview of the past 30-plus years of heavy metal, delving into the personalities of those who created it. Everything is here, from the bootlegging beginnings of fans like Lars Ulrich (future founder of Metallica) to the sold-out stadiums and personal excesses of the biggest groups. From heavy metal's roots in the work of breakthrough groups such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin to MTV hair metal, courtroom controversies, black metal murderers and Ozzfest, Sound of the Beast offers the final word on this elusive, extreme, and far-reaching form of music.

R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data


Hadley Wickham - 2016
    This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You’ll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned along the way. You’ll learn how to: Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning


Christopher M. Bishop - 2006
    However, these activities can be viewed as two facets of the same field, and together they have undergone substantial development over the past ten years. In particular, Bayesian methods have grown from a specialist niche to become mainstream, while graphical models have emerged as a general framework for describing and applying probabilistic models. Also, the practical applicability of Bayesian methods has been greatly enhanced through the development of a range of approximate inference algorithms such as variational Bayes and expectation propagation. Similarly, new models based on kernels have had a significant impact on both algorithms and applications. This new textbook reflects these recent developments while providing a comprehensive introduction to the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates or first-year PhD students, as well as researchers and practitioners, and assumes no previous knowledge of pattern recognition or machine learning concepts. Knowledge of multivariate calculus and basic linear algebra is required, and some familiarity with probabilities would be helpful though not essential as the book includes a self-contained introduction to basic probability theory.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy


Stephen Richard Witt - 2015
    It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online — when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself.

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña


David Hajdu - 2001
    When twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was already recognized as a genius, a youth idol with an acid wit and a barbwire throat; and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark, was unquestionably the center of youth culture.In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu recounts the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but also his part-time lover Joan Baez -- the first voice of the new generation; her sister Mimi -- beautiful, haunted, and an artist in her own right; and Mimi's husband, Richard Fariña, a comic novelist (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me) who invented the worldly-wise bohemian persona that Dylan adopted -- some say stole -- and made his own.A national bestseller in hardcover, acclaimed as "one of the best books about music in America" (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post), Positively 4th Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s -- about how the decade and all that it is now associated with were created in a fit of collective inspiration, with an energy and creativity that David Hajdu has captured on the page as if for the first time.

The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music


Ted Libbey - 2006
    No music lover can pick up this one-volume compendium without becoming a more knowledgeable, discerning listener. • The sonata form revealed, and why it's been deeply satisfying for three centuries. • What to listen for in Brahms, a self-described Classicist who was one of music's great innovators. • Pizzicato, fioritura, parlando, glissando. • The transformative power of Toscanini–who earned more conducting the New York Philharmonic than his contemporary Babe Ruth made with the Yankees. • And throughout, more than 2,000 recommended recordings.Log on and listen. Created with Naxos, the world's largest classical music label, the book includes a unique Web site featuring more than 500 examples cited in the text. Look up barcarolle. First read about its swaying 6/8 meter and Venetian origins; then log on to the music Web site and hear it performed in Act IV of Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann. If that whets your curiosity about Offenbach, click to hear the cancan in his La vie parisienne. All online samples are marked by an icon in the text.

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey


Bill Brewster - 2000
    Starting as little more than a talking jukebox, the DJ is now a premier entertainer, producer, businessman, and musician in his own right. Superstar DJs, from Junior Vasquez to Sasha and Digweed, command worship and adoration from millions, flying around the globe to earn tens of thousands of dollars for one night's work. Increasingly, they are replacing live musicians as the central figures of the music industry. In Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, music journalists Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton have written the first comprehensive history of the mysterious and charismatic figure behind the turntables -- part obsessive record collector, part mad scientist, part intuitive psychologist of the party groove. From England's rabid Northern Soul scene to the birth of disco in New York, from the sound systems of Jamaica to the scratch wars of early hip-hop in the Bronx, from Chicago house to Detroit techno to London rave, DJs are responsible for most of the significant changes in music over the past forty years. Drawing on in-depth interviews with DJs, critics, musicians, record executives, and the revelers at some of the century's most legendary parties, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is nothing less than the life story of dance music.

Inorganic Chemistry


Catherine E. Housecroft - 2001
    It offers superior coverage of all key areas, including descriptive chemistry, MO theory, bonding, and physical inorganic chemistry. Chapter topics are presented in logical order and include: basic concepts; nuclear properties; an introduction to molecular symmetry; bonding in polyatomic molecules; structures and energetics of metallic and ionic solids; acids, bases, and ions in aqueous solution; reduction and oxidation; non-aqueous media; and hydrogen. Four special topic chapters, chosen for their currency and interest, conclude the book. For researchers seeking the latest information in the field of inorganic chemistry.

Björk: Wow and Flutter


Mark Pytlik - 2000
    Contains a detailed songbook and over 30 exclusive interviews with Björk's associates, family members, and industry professionals.