I just cut and pasted that off into an application form for the Royal College of Music, Kent.
Thanks ;-) -----Original Message----- From: kent williams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:25 PM To: list 313 Subject: (313) free idea for academic paper in Musicology.... When I defended my Master's Project I promised myself never to go back to school. After nearly 30 years of schooling I realized that I'm a terrible student. Ironically my work now is in an Academic department of the College of Medicine. I work with and for professors and grad students. But I just write software -- I leave it to them to do the academics. Suckers! But every so often I have an idea that has academic potential, and when I think of following through on it I break out in a cold sweat. But no reason not to share it: Detroit Techno's signature sound is based in part on dramatic string or string-like chord patterns over a bed of beats not that far from classic Chicago House. Contrary to the norm in western music, the chords are likely to be 'parallel' -- i.e. a pattern of 4 chords will be one chord, transposed from the root 3 times. The traditional harmonic rules of Western music, by contrast are more parsimonious in tonal motion -- i.e. any two chords in sequence will most likely retain any common notes. The transition between two dissimilar chords will move from one chord to the inversion of the second chord with the least interval distance from the notes of the first. If you are not a musician, your eyes are probably rolling up in your head by now, so more concretely: The Detroit way if played on a piano would involve moving your whole hand, but using (roughly) the same spacing of your fingers. The traditional way would keep your hand mostly in the same place, but change the spacing between your fingers. My suspicion is that the 'Detroit' chords came at least in part from a feature of the Roland Alpha Juno synthesizer, which had a feature called 'chord memory' -- you could play a chord, push a button, and thereafter, you could play that same chord with one finger on the lowest note of the original chord. Or, you could play a transposed chord by playing a different single note. A perfect example of the meshing of these two approaches in one song is UR's 'Jupiter Jazz' -- there is the signature stacatto chords of the synthesizer -- with parallel chord transposition, and a denser female chorus sound that exhiibits the more traditional conservation of harmonic motion. That contrast and overlay of two different harmonic strategies is part of what makes that song so compelling. Well, that, and the bubbling acid line. And Mad Mike's soaring synth soloing...
