Miscellaneous Music Links

This is a collection of links having to do with music, but not particularly with traditional music.

• I've made a few comments in the past about temperament and intonation, and people have asked me to recommend references. I haven't had anything at hand, but now I suggest checking out The Just Intonation Network.
• Mills College can also provide a tuning and temperament bibliography.
• Mills College also can supply a comprehensive list of mode names.
• And to get a diagram of how to play any mode or scale (well, quite a few of them, anyway) on a guitar in any tuning, check out The Java Guitar Scale Applet.
• When I attended the University of Illinois, the School of Music owned a Scalatron. This was like a two-manual electric organ except that you could tune each keyboard to any scale you wanted, with an accuracy of around 1% of a semitone. So you could tune one keyboard to just intonation and the other to equal-tempered, or tune both to some Balinese gamelan scale if you wanted to.

When keyboard synthesizers hit the mass market, I was hoping that one would turn up with similar capabilities. After all, there's a computer inside controlling everything--you could program it to do whatever you want. No such product hit the market, however.

Then I thought maybe I could develop my own product which would use the MIDI interface to accomplish this. However, I quickly found out that this was practically impossible, not for any technical reason, but only because of the extremely stupid way in which the MIDI specification was done. Well, there goes another get-rich scheme!

At any rate, someone has finally released such a product. They used system-exclusive commands on a small selection of high-end keyboard synths, so it's not a general solution. Also, they say that these synths don't have enough precision to do the job really well, so you're better off buying their own model. The company is called Justonic.

• The Theremin Home Page. The theremin was one of the first electronic musical instruments, and one of the few not based on any previously existing instrument.
• MAZ CD Grabbers Page has software (some free) to load sound from CDs, which is useful when learning tunes by ear. Once you have the sound in your computer, you can use free Expander software to slow it down without changing the pitch. Another site to check out for audio utilities is the Shareware Music Machine. Has tools for most purposes, and links to many other relevant sites. (These links courtesy of Han Speek)
• The Tinfoil site is dedicated to the early days of recorded sound. Now you can receive sound from a wax cylinder via streaming audio!
• Classical MIDI archives.
• The Recorder Home Page. No, not the tape recorder, we're done with electronics now!
• FiddleNet! Here you will find information on Old Time Fiddling, upcoming contests, and links to fiddle sites all over the world.
• Guide to violin care by Andrew Kirk, violin-maker
• The lute page features many downloadable files of music in lute tablature, and plenty of pictures.
• Lots of flute links—seems to have gone missing.
• More than you ever wanted to know about oiling a wooden flute
• Information and lots of links for people interested in making various wind instruments, courtesy of Daniel Bingamon from Kings Mills, Ohio.
• Northumbrian smallpipes home page. Should probably go on the Celtic links page, but the instruments seem to be grouping here.
• Fiddle care guide.
• String selection guide.
• The Baroque Cello Home Page.
• The Internet Cello Society.
• The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. It contains over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960.
• The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.
• Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. (Music Division, Library of Congress)
• Renaissance music notation.
• Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum.
• I'm not sure if he exactly fits in the music category, but I didn't want to omit Lord Buckley!

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