OPEN MUSIC THEORY

Open Music Theory Version 2 (OMT2) is an open educational resource intended to serve as the primary text and workbook for undergraduate music theory curricula. As an open and natively-online resource, OMT2 is substantially different from other commercially-published music theory textbooks, though it still provides the same content that teachers expect from a music theory text. OMT2 has been designed inclusively. For us, this means broadening our topics beyond the standard harmony and atonal theory topics to include fundamentals, musical form, jazz, pop, and orchestration. And within those traditional sections of harmony and atonal theory, the authors have deliberately chosen composers who represent diverse genders and races. The book is accessible. And perhaps most importantly, the book is completely free and always will be. The text of the book is augmented with several different media: video lessons, audio, interactive notated scores with playback, and small quizzes are embedded directly into each chapter for easy access. OMT2 introduces a full workbook to accompany the text. Almost every chapter offers at least one worksheet on that topic. Some chapters, especially in the Fundamentals section, also collect additional assignments that can be found on other websites. Version 2 of this textbook is collaboratively authored and edited by Mark Gotham, Kyle Gullings, Chelsey Hamm, Bryn Hughes, Brian Jarvis, Megan Lavengood, and John Peterson.

What Hacker News says

mmcclimonAug 2022

I'm not sure what your dissent is, so I'm not sure how to respond to it. I think you're saying that you had a good experience in your music theory classes, which used Bach chorales, and you wouldn't want to discard that experience in favor of a shallower, broader curriculum.

If so: that's not really what I'm saying at all! Even in courses that focus primarily on, say, Western common-practice harmony (as many basic undergrad theory courses do), you're likely to find a much broader variety of music being taught than just the Bach chorales. That's partly because the field as a whole has been moving away from strict adherence to the traditional canon, but also more basically it's just good pedagogy. That is: most music that students play isn't going to be four-part homophony, and so learning to do harmonic analysis of string quintets or saxophone quartets or lead sheets provides a much stronger grounding about how harmony works in real music -- even if you circumscribe harmony quite strictly as "harmony as deployed in Western common-practice music betwen 1700 and 1850."

Disclaimer: I left the field and have been employed full-time as a software developer for more than 5 years, and pedagogy isn't an area of the field I follow closely. A good recent example is the open-access textbook Open Music Theory (https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/); perusing the examples there I think will be a good demonstration of the breadth of both styles and composers that's pretty representative of current pedagogy, even without radically altering the aims of the undergraduate music theory curriculum (which is also happening).

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theOnliestJan 2015

I wanted to put in a plug for Open Music Theory [1], for anybody who's interested. It's an open-source [2], Creative-Commons licensed music theory text designed for use in college music theory classrooms. It's written primarily by some friends of mine, all with teaching positions and Theory PhDs, so the material is good. I'm using the 20th-century materials in my class this semester instead of assigning a $100+ textbook. It's not quite as comprehensive as a dead-tree book (yet?), but is a great resource for beginners, or people looking to supplement their knowledge.

[1] http://openmusictheory.com [2] https://github.com/openmusictheory/openmusictheory.github.io

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casey_langSep 2026

I've also been recommended to Open Music Theory, as a beginner to theory. Has anyone compared the two? https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/front-matter/int...

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westurnerJun 2024

"Show HN: Polymath: Convert any music-library into a sample-library with ML" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756949#34782253

Looks like there's a Hooktheory Classroom product, in addition to Hookpad and their music theory book which features the music of Avicii.

/r/musictheory/wiki suggests that "Open Music Theory" is the best text: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/index/

The search keyword "Melodic"

Do Windows VST plugins work with Glicol on Linux with Yabridge, LinVst, Carla, or WineASIO?

Glicol is written in Rust and has its own non-Rust syntax?

Is there a syntax/grammar API doc?

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