§ Field Guide · MMXXVI Edition I — Open
Ten instruments,
one essay,
twelve weeks.
A self-study site for music research. Ten small operative models of music-theory ideas, a six-thousand-word briefing on the discipline as it stands in 2026, and a twelve-week syllabus that runs from acoustics to the current debates. Free, open, and small enough to read in a week.
I The Workshop ten instruments, no dependencies
Music theory turns into something you can operate: a clock face for pitch-class sets, a triadic lattice for transformations, a tuning lab for the harmonic series, a 132-marker timeline of the discipline, a fretboard, a polyrhythm engine, a flashcard deck, a bookshelf, a Schenkerian reduction stage, and a twelve-tone matrix. Self-contained — each one a single file you can open, read, and break.
Pitch-Class Set Calculator
Forte 1973
A 12-pc clock face. Click pitches and watch normal form, prime form, interval vector, and Forte number compute live. All 223 set classes; complement, transposition, inversion.
Open → II.Tonnetz Explorer
Cohn 1996
An interactive triadic lattice. Apply P, L, R, N, S transformations and watch the highlighted triangle pivot. Hexatonic, octatonic, the 24-triad cycle.
Open → III.Tuning Lab
Helmholtz 1863 · Perlman 2004
The harmonic series in real time; A/B-compare melodies in 12-TET, just intonation, Pythagorean, ¼-comma meantone, 24-TET, and slendro/pelog.
Open → IV.The Discipline, 1850–2026
Historiography
132 markers across institutions, publications, paradigms, controversies. Filter by subfield, search, zoom — including the 2019–25 Ewell–JSS overlay.
Open → V.Guitar Fretboard
Karplus–Strong 1983
A 6-string fretboard with logarithmic fret spacing. Eight tunings, fifteen scales, nineteen chord shapes with strum direction and inter-string spread.
Open → VI.Metronome & Polyrhythm
Chernoff 1979 · Agawu 2003
Sub-millisecond Web Audio scheduling; nine time signatures; tap tempo. Polyrhythm mode runs 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:7, 7:11 cross-rhythms aligned at the LCM cycle.
Open →A second wing — the CLI Workshop — collects six pipe-friendly instruments for the corpus and the shell-script: pitch-class profiling (Forte 1973), microtonal retuning (Blackwood 1986), meter discovery (Huron 2006), Euclidean rhythms (Toussaint 2005), Xenakis sieves (Xenakis 1990), and cantus-firmus search (Mongeau & Sankoff 1990). Single-file Node, no dependencies; output of one feeds the next. Open the CLI workshop →
II The Briefing ~6,000 words · eleven sections
In 2026 the field is methodologically pluralist and politically contested. The Western art-music canon is no longer the assumed default; cognitive and computational methods sit beside hermeneutic and ethnographic ones; popular music, sound studies, and performance studies have become first-class subfields. Two ongoing controversies — around Heinrich Schenker and around generative AI — are reshaping both the curriculum and the labour conditions of academic musicology.
§ I — Overview · The State of the Field, 2026
Read the full briefing →Table of contents
- I.Overview
- II.The discipline at a glance
- III.The map of subfields
- IV.Methods
- V.Periodization & repertoires
- VI.Global traditions
- VII.Aesthetics & philosophy
- VIII.Music technology & recorded sound
- IX.Current debates, 2019–26
- X.The prototypes
- XI.Where to start
III The Arc a twelve-week self-study syllabus
From the physics of a vibrating string to the racial-justice and AI debates of 2025–26 — a curriculum scaffolded with weekly readings, listening lists, reflection questions, and exit criteria. Roughly eight to twelve hours per week.
IV The Library an indexed reference, when you need it
1.08M+ scholarly works in musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, music history, and performance — searched and read through OpenAlex's free metadata corpus.
Recent dispatches · most cited, this decade
V The Bench six commands · for the pipe and the file
Where the Workshop is for the screen and the mouse, the Bench is for the corpus and the shell-script. Six small Node scripts, no dependencies, batch-friendly: pitch-class profiling, microtonal retuning, meter discovery, Euclidean and Xenakis-sieve generation, and melodic search.
Interval-Class Histogram
Forte 1973
The Forte interval-class vector [ic1 … ic6] with cardinality and an optional ASCII histogram, computed for any pitch-class inventory.
$ node 01-interval-histogram.js < pitches.txt
II.
Microtonality Scaler
Blackwood 1985 · Xenakis 1971
Retunes a MIDI sequence to edo, just intonation, cents, or meantone systems — exact rationals via BigInt, output in Hz.
$ node 02-scaler.js --tuning=edo:31 < pitches.txt
III.
Onset / Meter Profiler
Huron 2006
Reads inter-onset intervals and finds the most likely time signature among 2/4…12/8 with a salience-weighted confidence score.
$ echo "500 500 500 250 250 500" | node 03-meter.js
IV.
Euclidean Rhythm Generator
Toussaint 2005
Distributes k pulses across n steps via Bjorklund's algorithm — the rumba, the tresillo, the asymmetric African timeline. Binary, MIDI, or LilyPond.
$ node 04-euclid.js 3 8
V.
Sieve Generator
Xenakis 1990
Evaluates a Xenakis sieve expression over residue classes mod n, with union, intersection, and complement. Outputs integers, MIDI, or rhythm.
$ node 05-sieve.js "(12,0) | (12,4) | (12,8)"
VI.
Cantus-Firmus Search
Mongeau & Sankoff 1990
Finds where a source melody appears in a corpus — exact, transposed, inverted, retrograde, or near-match — with offsets and similarity scores.
$ node 06-cantus.js --source=chant.txt < mass.txt