657 articles
Song
Song: a short piece of music with sung words, per Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries. Covers verse-chorus form, folk vs art song, textsetting, forensics, and AI lyric-to-melody generation.
Song structure
Song structure (song form): the arrangement of verses, choruses, prechoruses, and bridges in popular music. AABA/32-bar form dominated 1920s–1960s Tin Pan Alley; verse-chorus form overtook it in the late 1960s; streaming-era pop compresses sections.
Songline
A songline, also called a Dreaming Track, is a path across Australia traced by Ancestral beings in Aboriginal tradition, sung as an oral map and body of law.
Songs of the Land of Israel
Songs of the Land of Israel (שירי ארץ ישראל, shirei eretz yisrael) is the earliest genre of Israeli popular music, created in the Yishuv before 1948.
Soprano saxophone
The soprano saxophone, also called soprano sax, is the smallest and highest-pitched common saxophone, a B♭ instrument often straight in shape, known for jazz roles from Sidney Bechet to John Coltrane.
Sousaphone
Sousaphone: a shoulder-carried B-flat marching tuba with a forward-facing bell, created in the 1890s from John Philip Sousa's design ideas; first built by J.W. Pepper (1893 or 1895), later by C.G. Conn.
Splash cymbal
Splash cymbal: a small, thin drum-kit effect cymbal, 6 to 12 inches typical, giving fast attack and short decay for quick accents; developed with Gene Krupa and Avedis Zildjian in the 1930s swing era.
Staff (music)
Staff (music), also called stave: the set of five horizontal lines and spaces on which Western musical notes are written to show pitch, used with clefs; developed from 9th-century lines and Guido of Arezzo's four-line staff around 1030 AD.
Stavan
Stavan, from the Sanskrit root stu meaning "to praise", is a Jain devotional song addressed to the tirthankaras, sung chiefly in Gujarati and Hindi by the Jain laity.
Steel guitar
The steel guitar is a guitar played horizontally with a metal bar rather than fretted by hand, originating in Hawaii and central to Hawaiian and country music.
Steelpan
Steelpan (steel drum, pan): pitched percussion instrument invented in Trinidad and Tobago around 1939 from 55-gallon oil drums; national instrument, born from tamboo bamboo after colonial drum bans, with Panorama competition since 1963.
Steinway & Sons
Steinway & Sons, founded 1853 by Henry E. Steinway in New York, is an American piano maker building handmade grands and uprights in New York and Hamburg, holding 150+ patents, owned since 2013 by Paulson & Co., with Boston and Essex as lower-priced lines.
Stradivarius
A Stradivarius is a violin, viola, or cello made by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy, before his death in 1737; the finest examples have sold for over $15 million.
String instrument
String instrument (chordophone): an instrument whose sound comes mainly from vibrating strings stretched between fixed points, classified in Hornbostel-Sachs as simple (zithers) or composite (lutes, harps); includes violin, guitar, piano, sitar.
Sun Dance songs
Sun Dance songs are the ritual songs of the Sun Dance, the major annual ceremony of the Indigenous peoples of the North American Great Plains.
Suspended chord
Suspended chord (sus chord): a triad whose third is replaced by the second (sus2) or fourth (sus4), making it neither major nor minor; formulas 1-2-5 and 1-4-5, plain sus means sus4, from classical suspension voice leading.
Sutartinės
Sutartinės are a form of Lithuanian multipart folk song traditionally performed by women in north-eastern Lithuania; their deliberately dissonant style was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010.
Suzuki method
Suzuki method (スズキ・メソード), also called Talent Education, is a music education method created by Shinichi Suzuki (鈴木鎮一) based on the mother-tongue approach: children learn music by ear with parent involvement, about 400,000 learners in 74 countries, distinct from the Suzuki automobile company.
Svara (स्वर)
Svara (स्वर) is the Indian classical music term for a musical note: one of seven named degrees, sa ri ga ma pa dha ni, defined relative to a movable tonic and shaped by raga-specific ornamentation, distinct from the 22 microtonal shrutis.
Swahili work songs
Swahili work songs are songs sung to accompany labor in the Swahili-speaking regions of the East African coast, above all maritime work such as sailing, fishing, and paddling.
Syncopation
Syncopation: shifting musical accents to weak beats or off-beats, contradicting the prevailing meter. Key concepts: second- vs fourth-position syncopation, ragtime origins, 1590s musical sense, growth through 20th-century popular music, and groove.
Tabla
Tabla (तबला): North Indian pair of tuned hand drums, dayan (right, wooden treble) and bayan (left, metal bass), the main percussion of Hindustani classical music since the mid-1700s, marked by syahi tuning paste, spoken bols, and theka-based taal accompaniment.
Tablature
Tablature (tab) is music notation showing finger positions, strings, frets, or keys rather than pitch, used in the West since the early 14th century for lute, keyboard, and today chiefly guitar and bass.
Taiko (太鼓)
Taiko (太鼓), also wadaiko, are traditional Japanese drums of tacked-head (nagadō-daiko) and rope-tensioned (shime-daiko) types, ancient in ritual and festival use; the ensemble style kumi-daiko was created by Daihachi Oguchi in 1951 and spread worldwide.
Take
Take: each recorded playthrough of a piece of music in a studio session, numbered in sequence. Covers matrix/take numbering, tape-era editing, DAW comping (Ableton Take Lanes), and Norwegian/German usage.
Tala (ताल) (music)
Tala (ताल, tāl, tālam) is the cyclic rhythmic system of Indian classical music, used by both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. Built from matras, vibhags, tali-khali marks, and a theka, cycles such as 16-beat tintal and 8-beat adi tala return to sam; unlike Western bars, it is a repeating cycle.
Tambourine
Tambourine (tambour de Basque, timbrel): a single-headed frame drum with pairs of metal jingles in the shell, of Middle Eastern origin, used in orchestra, folk, and popular music; jingle alloy such as German silver or brass sets its brightness.
Tamil cinema lyric tradition
The Tamil cinema lyric tradition, continuous since the 1930s, treats Tamil film songs as literary works, with poets like Kannadasan, Vaali, and Vairamuthu serving as popular songwriters.
Tanpura (तानपूरा)
Tanpura (तानपूरा), also tambura: fretless four-string Indian drone lute of Hindustani and Carnatic music, tuned Pa-sa-sa-Sa, with jawari bridge overtones, Miraj and Tanjore styles, and electronic versions since 1979.
Tappa
Tappa (টপ্পা) is a semi-classical genre of Hindustani vocal music that grew from camel drivers' folk songs and was refined into a classical form in the 18th century by Shori Mian.