TCTC Library: Music: Home

General

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Broad subject general reference database searching hundreds of encyclopedias and other reference works. Provides subject/topic maps.

Allmusic
A comprehensive music reference site, with coverage of all genres and styles, from opera to garage rock to traditional country.
Music: Topic Page
Art of combining sounds into a structured form, usually according to conventional patterns and for an aesthetic (artistic) purpose. Music is generally divided into different genres or styles such as classical music, jazz, pop music, country, and so on.
Song: Topic Page
Relatively brief, simple vocal composition, usually a setting of a poetic text, often strophic, for accompanied solo voice. The song literature of Western music embodies two broad classifications—folk song and art song.

Music History: Arts and Humanities Through the Eras

Sound Terms

Frequency: Topic Page
In physics, number of periodic oscillations, vibrations, or waves occurring per unit of time. The SI unit of frequency is the hertz (Hz), one hertz being equivalent to one cycle per second.
Harmonic Motion: Topic Page
Regular vibration in which the acceleration of the vibrating object is directly proportional to the displacement of the object from its equilibrium position but oppositely directed.
Sound: Topic Page
Any disturbance that travels through an elastic medium such as air, ground, or water to be heard by the human ear.
Sound Wave: Topic Page
Longitudinal wave motion with which sound energy travels through a medium. It carries energy away from the source of the sound without carrying the material itself with it.
Vibration: Topic Page
In physics, commonly an oscillatory motion—a movement first in one direction and then back again in the opposite direction.

Musical Terms

Band: Topic Page
An ensemble of any one type of instrument, as brass band, wind band, marimba band. As town bands once provided music for social dancing, so do modern jazz and rock bands of numerous descriptions.
Cadence: Topic Page
In music, two chords that are specially chosen and arranged to give a logical end to a musical phrase or section.
Melody: Topic Page
In music, a recognizable series of notes of different pitches played or sung one after the other.
Meter: Topic Page
In music, refers to the number and value of the beats in a bar of music. It is also known as time.
Musical notation: Topic page
Symbols used to make a written record of musical sounds.
Rhyme: Topic Page
Or rime, the most prominent of the literary artifices used in versification.MORE
Tempo: Topic Page
In music, the speed at which a piece should be played.
Timbre: Topic Page
In music, the tone colour, or quality of tone, of a particular sound.
Tonic sol-fa: Topic Page
System of musical notation without staves and notes, invented by John Curwen (1816-1880) in the middle of the 19th century on a basis of the principles of solmization and solfège, and once widely used by choral singers, for whom it simplifies the sight-reading of music.

Instrument Families

Brass Instrument: Topic Page
A family of tubular wind instruments or aerophones most often made of brass and sounded by the buzzing of the player's lips.
Percussion Instrument: Topic Page
Musical instrument played by being struck with the hand or a beater, crashed, shaken, or scraped.
String Instrument: Topic Page

A musical instrument in which the sound is produced by the vibrations of one or more taut strings made from gut, metal, or (more recently) nylon.

Instruments

Accordion: Topic Page
A bellows-operated, hand-held wind instrument sounded by free reeds. It consists in effect of two reed organs, each with its own keyboard, joined by a rectangular bellows. The organ in the player's right hand is the higher pitched of the two.
Bagpipe: Topic Page
Musical instrument whose ancient origin was probably in Mesopotamia from which it was carried east and west by Celtic migrations. It was used in ancient Greece and Rome and has been long known in India. Some form of bagpipe was later used in nearly every European country; it was particularly fashionable in 18th-century France, where it was called the musette.
Clarinet: Topic Page
Any of a family of single-reed woodwind instruments of cylindrical bore. It is one of the four main orchestral woodwinds, but did not join the orchestra until after the middle of the 18th century.
Cymbals
From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
Plate-like percussion instruments of copper-tin alloy, used in pairs or alone (in one hand or suspended).
Drum: Topic Page
Any of a class of percussion instruments consisting of a frame or hollow vessel of wood, metal, or earthenware with a membrane of hide or plastic stretched across one or both ends. Drums are usually sounded by striking the membrane with the hands, a stick, or pair of sticks.
Flute: Topic Page
Side-blown woodwind instrument with a long history, capable of intricate melodies and a wide range of expression. The player holds the flute horizontally, and to the right, and blows across an end hole. The air current is split by the opposite edge of the hole, causing the air column inside the instrument to vibrate and produce a sound.
Guitar: Topic Page
Plucked, fretted string instrument. It may be called the classical guitar, the Spanish guitar (because of its origins), or the acoustic guitar (to differentiate it from the electric guitar). The fingerboard has frets (strips of metal showing where to place the finger to obtain different notes), and the 6 or 12 strings are plucked or strummed with the fingers or a plectrum.
Harp: Topic Page
Stringed musical instrument of ancient origin, the strings of which are plucked with the fingers. Harps were found in paintings from the 13th cent. B.C. at Thebes. In different forms it was played by peoples of nearly all lands throughout the ages. The harp was particularly popular with the Irish from the 9th century. They adopted the small instrument still in use, called the Irish harp, as a national symbol.
Harpsichord
From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
Keyboard instrument in which the strings are plucked, not hammered as in the piano, which developed from the harpsichord at the end of the 17th century.
Oboe: Topic Page
Woodwind instrument of conical bore, its mouthpiece having a double reed. The instruments possessing these general characteristics may be referred to as the oboe family, which includes the English horn, the bassoon, and the contrabassoon or double bassoon. The oboe was developed in the mid-17th century in France from various older double-reed instruments.
Organ: Topic Page
A musical wind instrument in which sound is produced by one or more sets of pipes controlled by a keyboard, each pipe producing only one pitch by means of a mechanically produced or electrically controlled wind supply.
Piano: Topic Page
Or pianoforte, musical instrument whose sound is produced by vibrating strings struck by felt hammers that are controlled from a keyboard. The piano's earliest predecessor was the dulcimer. The first piano was made c.1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731), a Florentine maker of harpsichords, who called his instrument gravicembalo col piano e forte.
Player Piano: Topic Page

Mechanical piano designed to reproduce key actions recorded on a perforated paper roll.
Recorder: Topic Page
Musical wind instrument of the flute family, made of wood, varying in length, and having an inverted conical bore (largest end near the mouthpiece).
Synthesizer
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide
Electronic musical device for the simulation of vocal or instrumental timbre (tone quality).
Trombone: Topic Page
Brass wind musical instrument of cylindrical bore, twice bent on itself, having a sliding section that lengthens or shortens it and thus regulates the pitch.
Trumpet: Topic Page
Brass wind musical instrument of part cylindrical, part conical bore, in the shape of a flattened loop and having three piston valves to regulate the pitch.
Violin: Topic Page
Family of stringed musical instruments having wooden bodies whose backs and fronts are slightly convex, the fronts pierced by two ƒ-shaped resonance holes.

Recording and Playback

Amplifier: Topic Page
Device that accepts a varying input signal and produces an output signal that varies in the same way as the input but has a larger amplitude.
Copyright: Topic Page
Right granted by statute to the author or originator of certain literary, artistic, and musical productions whereby for a limited period of time he or she controls the use of the product.
Metronome
From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
A device used to indicate the tempo of a composition by sounding regular beats at adjustable speed.
Microphone: Topic Page
Device for converting sound into electrical energy, used in radio broadcasting, recording, and sound amplifying systems.
Record Player: Topic Page
Or phonograph, device for reproducing sound that has been recorded as a spiral, undulating groove on a disk. This disk is known as a phonograph record, or simply a record.
Sound Recording: Topic Page
Process of converting the acoustic energy of sound into some form in which it can be permanently stored and reproduced at any time.
Speaker: Topic Page
Device used to convert electrical energy into sound. It consists essentially of a thin flexible sheet called a diaphragm that is made to vibrate by an electric signal from an amplifier. The vibrations create sound waves in the air around the speaker.

Humanities Research Resources

Humanities Research Databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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Academic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, it includes peer-reviewed full text for STEM research, as well as for the social sciences and humanities. Scholarly content covers a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more.

Topical Video Content
Academic Search Complete offers access to video content from the Associated Press, the world’s leading news agency. Videos relevant to the search terms will appear in a carousel in the result list. With footage from 1930 to the present and updated monthly, this collection of more than 75,000 videos covers a wide variety of topics.
Art Full Text This link opens in a new window
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Foundational art research database providing full-text art journals and books. It covers fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as photography, film and architecture.
This database also contains resources such as books by and about artists, artist materials and methods, artist profiles and a database-specific thesaurus.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Broad subject general reference database searching hundreds of encyclopedias and other reference works. Provides subject/topic maps.
Literature: Gale This link opens in a new window
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Offers broad and representative range of authors and their works, including full-text critical and literary analysis for literary studies. Researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world.
Ebooks from Gale This link opens in a new window
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A broad ranging general reference collection of ebooks. Search thousands of authoritative reference sources across all fields and disciplines.
Humanities Full Text This link opens in a new window
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Provides scholarly articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, and original works of fiction, drama, poetry and reviews of books, ballets, dance, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more.
Oxford Reference Online (Literature) This link opens in a new window
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Access to encyclopedias, companions, and dictionaries devoted to various aspects of literature.
Information on writers, works, movements, historical context, literary theories, and allusions—from African American literature and Irish literature to Canadian and Italian, from Classical to Romantic, from poetry to plays.

Humanities Reference eBooks

Arts and Humanities Through the Eras by Edward Bleiberg
Profiling milestones and movements in the arts, literature, music and religion from a specific period, covering the various disciplines of the humanities in relation to each other, as well as to history and culture.
Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature by Steven R. Serafin
Composed of signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature.
Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion
This encyclopedia presents the religious affiliations and beliefs of prominent philosophers, in A-Z entries.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Donald M. Borchert
This ten-volume set, considered the most authoritative reference work on the subject includes articles ranging from individual thinkers to concepts and branches of philosophy.
Encyclopedia of Religion by Lindsay Jones
Presents a cross-cultural approach that emphasizes religion's role within everyday life and as a unique experience from culture to culture.
The Harvard Dictionary of Music by Don Michael Randel
Wide ranging and reliable, this treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today's beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by Tom Pendergast; Sara Pendergast
Covering topics ranging from from fast food and fitness fads to political events and literary genres, including: art, books, fashion, magazines, movies, music, politics, sports, television and many others.
The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of 20th Century Architecture
Contains wide ranging and authoritative coverage of the whole spectrum of architecture and urban planning in the 20th century, and of leading architects and engineers the world over.
The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms by Edward Lucie-Smith
An essential reference work embracing the vast vocabulary of art in all its forms. Contains over 2000 authoritative entries. Covers painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, the decorative, applied and graphic arts from all periods throughout the world up to the present day: there is even a table of the dynasties of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, India and Japan.