midi

Title: Descending Chromatic scale on keyboard

Description: A descending Chromatic scale (playing a semitone below it is pitch one note at a time on a 88 key keyboard which includes 7 octaves) played on a Yamaha PSR-E453 keyboard by me recorded and edited in a small bedroom with a midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) cable on Logic Pro X (music editing software). This sound was inspired by the discussion in class about discordance in music early African America studies and me relating it back to how a descending chromatic scale reflects back to the discordance that was used by many African Artists during the time but is now used and praised within Eurocentric music stylings.

Syncopation, in music, is the displacement of rhythms so the musical emphasis is on the weak beat. In this excerpt from Count Ferdinand Waldstein’s Sinfonie in D, movement one, the first and second violin parts use a syncopated rhythm to emphasize the off-beat of the music while the bass line keeps a steady eighth note pulse. Eighteenth century galant composers commonly used syncopation in their music, giving their compositions musical interest.