Atoms
5,034 knowledge atoms — one concept each, the smallest teachable units. To find something specific, use search or browse by domain, level or type.
Showing 841–900 of 5,034 · page 15 / 84
Mastering turns a collection of songs into a record by making them belong together in tone, volume, and timing
McLean's lens frames musical pattern as repetition, symmetry, interference, and deviation
MCs are integral to dubstep's live experience, inheriting toasting traditions from Jamaican reggae
MDMA (ecstasy) did not create UK rave culture but acted as a social solvent that accelerated house music's spread
Melodic techno emerged gradually from late-2000s German techno rather than from a single founding release
Melodic techno's practitioners span a spectrum from festival big-room to auteur studio sound design
Meter groups beats into bars of two, three or four, notated by a time signature
Miami bass is built around the Roland TR-808 as its defining drum machine
Miami bass is defined by TR-808 drums with a sustained kick, heavy bass, raised tempos, and explicit lyrics
Miami electro (locally 'freestyle', later 'bass music') was a regional variant amplifying the TR-808's bass impact
Microhouse builds melodies from extremely short 'micro' samples of voice, instruments, and everyday noise
Microhouse replaces house's kick drums, hi-hats and drum-machine samples with clicks, static and glitches
Microhouse spread from its European origins to worldwide scenes, boosted by the mid-2000s minimal boom
Mid-1990s DnB producers deliberately shunned pop appeal to protect the music's underground status
MIDI is a 7-bit serial protocol sending note and control events on up to 16 channels, not audio
MIDI is a serial control protocol carrying numbered performance messages, never audio waveforms
MIDI note numbers map to Hz via a tuning formula centered on A4=440 Hz
MIDI velocity (0-127) represents note intensity and is distinct from master volume
Mille Plateaux was the label that turned clicks-and-cuts into an international phenomenon
Mini-notation polymeter requires the {…}%n form; without %n it uses the first group's length
Mini-notation specifies patterns tersely inside a string, with events spaced evenly across one fixed-length cycle
Minimal techno arose as a deliberate return to stripped-down Detroit roots in response to techno becoming too 'ravey'
Minimal techno is defined as 'only what is essential to make people move' — not artistic minimalism
Minimal techno was forged through subtraction — removing extraneous instrumentation — not addition
Minimal techno's canonical tempo range is 125–130 BPM with 128 BPM cited as the sweet spot
Mix mostly at moderate monitoring level, near where the music will be heard
Mixing a signal with a slightly delayed copy of itself produces comb filtering
Mixing to stems provides retroactive flexibility for remixing, surround, and game audio applications
Model 500's 'No UFOs' (1985) is widely regarded as the first techno production
Modulating the pulse width of a square wave produces chorusing and Doppler-shift timbral effects
Monitor with headphones while field recording because you cannot otherwise hear what the microphone hears
Moog kept the keyboard for accessibility while Buchla rejected it for new interface controls
Most naturally occurring sounds are not copyrightable; only sounds with human creative authorship can hold copyright
Most people cannot reliably identify which of two different-hued colors is lighter — 60% of answers are wrong
Most pitched instrument tones reduce to patterns of harmonics generatable from sine, saw, square, or pulse waves
Moving from broadcast NTSC/PAL to computer displays freed VJs from fixed 4:3 resolutions
Multiply blend mode darkens by multiplying per-channel values, giving white transparency and black full darkening
Multiplying st.x by width/height corrects the UV space for non-square canvases
Music code is a language, so its free/shareable nature is what gives it shared meaning
Music spans nine time scales from infinite to infinitesimal
Music triggers involuntary emotional memories more reliably than recordings of voices or everyday sounds
Musical language has no typographic convention for quotation, making homage indistinguishable from plagiarism
Musical minimalism grew out of tape-loop and repetition experiments
Musical patterns exist both as sonic sequences and as embodied physical actions in motor memory
Musical tones have regular periodic waveforms; noise is aperiodic and chaotic
Musique concrete treats any recorded sound as a composable 'sound object' independent of notation
Musique concrète's tape-loop and splicing techniques are a direct precursor to modern sampling
N.times do ... end repeats a code block exactly N times then continues execution
Nearfield monitors are the preferred primary mixing speakers for small studios
Nearly all dance music places the kick drum on the downbeat of the first measure
Neo-classical crossover fuses classical writing with electronic texture and minimalist repetition
Nesting passes the result of inner expressions as arguments to outer ones; indentation makes levels readable
Neurofunk is defined by obsessive production cleanliness and implosive neurosis rather than techstep's explosive bombast
Neurofunk turned drum 'n' bass into a brittle, non-hypnotic variant of Techno
Neutral gray is achromatic and characterless but takes on a complementary tinge from any adjacent color
New Age and ambient share tonality and pacing but differ in function: New Age demands emotional participation, ambient does not
New beat spawned hard beat (heavier, more EBM) and skizzo (faster, techno-influenced) subgenres
Noise color describes the spectral distribution of random audio — white is flat, pink is 3dB/octave rolloff
Noise in music has at least three non-equivalent definitions: acoustic, communicative, and subjective
Noise music deliberately uses unwanted or non-musical sound as its primary material