West African Drummer Thione Diop

I chose to write about West African music because I enjoyed listening to it in class. This song by Thione Diop, known for his drumming skills is a great example of what we have been learning about. He uses syncopation, call and response, polyrhythm and improvisation. You can hear from time to time the woman shouting in the background. As you can see in the video, woman are dancing randomly but going along with the beat that is played. I love how they just go along with whatever they feel at that moment it makes it much more exciting to see than something that you are used to. Hope you enjoyed this video.   :)

"Stereo Love"

 

 

This song is one of my favorites! Even though there isn't much singing, the instruments make you feel like you would know what they would be singing if they were. The instruments that are involved are the voice(which has a narrow range), piano accordian and sounds like there could be some percussion(maybe not). I think this song is amazing because it is soft but can get intense and the instruments illustrate that. "Stereo Love" is of course a homophony even though there is a guy who is singing because he sings in melody with the girl. After listening a few times I believe the song is played in quadruple meter or possibly duple(they bothe sound the same). The song is obviously talking about love and how they are thinking about each other. Hope you enjoy this song as much as I do because I love this song! 

 



Alicia Keys

(Below are actual notes that alicia keys plays in "Fallin")

Thought this would be interesting since we just finished talking about major and minor scales in class. I love Alicia Keys because she is unique and extremely talented. The video above is her actually playing the piano live for an Aol session. I also added the notes below to video to show you what we learned today in reading music. Alicia Keys bases her music off of Beethovan however in a article I read she took his notes from the beginning of "Moonlight Sonata" and took the three note pattern and made it fall down. As you can hear in her video and see in the notes she uses minor scales which the music really sad and dark.Hope you enjoyed learning about an old song and maybe you learned something just like me!

Types of Singing

     



This video is interesting because it really shows you the intensity by playing the notes on a piano. Before I started Music 102 I didn't think there were different ways to sing just figured that people could make their voices higher or lower. Who knew they actually had names for what they were doing! When I saw this video I was amazed just like you will be. The soprano is high pitched and sounds like a note Mariah Carey would be singing. The bass on the other hand is more like a jazz singer; its deep and sounds soulful. The tenor voice sounds like bass at first but then is like a choir, their voices have such a softness to them but at the same time they are manly and it's pretty cool to hear how they can  reach those kinds of notes. I had to add the other video because unfortunately they didn't include the alto voice. The alto voice is like a mix between soprano and tenor it has a masculine tone but at the same time has the happiness and high pitch that soprano singers have. Hope you enjoyed the videos!