===== Lessons and modules =====

  * [[basics1|Module Basics Sheet Music]]
  * [[advanced1|Advanced Sheet Music Module]]

  * [[basics2|Module Basics Audio]]
  * [[advanced2|Advanced Audio Module]]

These modules with several tutorials introduce various possibilities of computer-assisted analysis of sheet music and audio files on the basis of music-analytical questions. The tutorials can be carried out in self-study or within courses. The duration of the lessons is approximately 4-6 hours or three sessions of a 90-minute with additional preparation, homework, and optional immersion. You can find a list of tutorials [[tutorials|here]]. But first to the question:


=== Why do we analyze music? ===
There are certainly many different objectives for analyzing music. However, the following two motives are fundamental:
 
  * I want to discover and experience, comprehend and understand something that closes itself to me when I hear it for the first time: How does a certain effect of the music come about?  What is it about what makes listening to a certain piece of music moving or exciting or just beautiful?  
  * Or I want to illustrate or clarify something especially in order to convey and share my experience of the music with others. 

Analysis as a discovery and descriptive approach to music always means making musical events explicit, and is thus a means for understanding music and a prerequisite for communicating music.

There are a number of applications and objectives of musical analysis. Here are perhaps the most important:
  * Analysis of a single piece of music: the special features of a particular piece are analytically worked out. On this basis, an interpretation of the piece can then be made, e.g. with regard to specific effects and meanings.
  * Stylistic analysis: The presentation of the peculiarities of a certain style in a temporally or regionally delimited area or of a personal style. Examples of individual compositions or performances that are typical of a particular style may be examined - or an attempt may be made to derive the style from an analysis of //all// (or as many as possible) pieces. 
  * Music history: what stylistic directions can be determined? How are they related to each other on a level of tonal design and how do they differ from each other?

Today, the various procedures and approaches to musical analysis can be extended by computer-aided methods of visualization, statistical evaluation and targeted pattern search. This is what the tutorials are about.

The methodical extension cannot and does not want to replace the //listening// of music and the examination of the sheet music in any case - but rather wants to extend and empirically substantiate it. 

The tutorial on audio analysis focuses on recordings - and thus on listening to music. Recordings can also be visualized with the help of the computer, especially by displaying the spectral energy distribution in relation to time ([[basics2|Basics Audio]]). For recordings of popular music, of ethnic music, but also of electroacoustic music, new analytical approaches have been developed in which musical notation sometimes plays no role ([[advanced2|Advanced Audio]]).

The project is currently in the testing phase. Feedback is welcome: [[analyse@hfm-weimar.de]]