What is ethnic music? What
element distinguishes an ethnic music style from other ethnic music styles?
For example, what is the difference between Okinawa music and Scotland
music? I think elements of music are (1) melody
(scale), (2 ) chord, (3) rhythm, and (4) instruments.
First, let's think about melody.
Rock and Blues are easy examples, even though they are not ethnic music.
Rock uses normal music scale while Blues includes blue-notes in its music
scale. Next, think about chords. Rock uses simple chords (triad) while
Jazz includes 7th in its chords. Chord progression of Jazz is more complicated
than that of Rock as well. For rhythm, Rock uses 8 beat, Fusion uses 16
beat, Jazz uses 4 beat. Finally, think about musical instruments. It is
easy to see differences between Classical music and Rock music. Especially,
musical instruments are important elements of ethnic music, since each
country has different music instruments.
I am trying to capture features
of each ethnic music style based on this idea, and to reproduce them with
automated composing system. This page includes considerations that I faced
when I embedded functions of ethnic music composition. |
