Dubstep Music, and why I love it

Post date: Aug 27, 2012 4:48:21 AM

Originally posted February 24, 2012

I was on my phone a couple of days ago checking out YouTube and found this video when searching for “Electronic Music”:

I’m a rookie when it comes to Techno but I at least knew there were quite a few different styles, but I’d never really seen someone show examples of the different types like this. Hopefully the video shows accurate examples that is, no comments were shown on the site. Also I had never ever heard of the last example, Dubstep, and was amazed by how it sounds.

The next thing I did was Google it and found a Wikipedia page on it: Dubstep

The thing that got me about the Wiki page was a term I’ve never heard of, Syncopation. Since This explained exactly how the last example was in the YouTube video above, I had to hear more. I love randomness & unpredictability in music, part of the reason I probably like Indian Tabla music (Goa electronic or old world style). I took a World music class in college and the Tabla and other Indian/Persian/Middle Eastern music and instruments that were shown during some of the videos I watched amazed me. What really got me was how they mentioned the Rāga, a type of rhythm or melody which doesn’t necessarily (or often) repeat the same way each time. They described it with regards to Indian Tabla style music by having you imagine a circle as the “rhythm timeline” (forgive me, these are my own words and interpretations of what I recall from class

). Each “beat” starts at the top of this “rhythm timeline” circle, has sub-beats, singing, sitars, etc. as it goes around, at spacing intervals which can vary in speed up or down, causing the rhythm to “Syncopate” (wow I learned a new word and used it already). It then comes back around to the main “beat” (which could be a drum, bass line, gong, sound sample, etc.) and loops around in the rhythm circle until the song is done. This methodology keeps everyone in the group on the same main beat but allows them to experiment and change things as they wish while it’s going around the circle. I’m probably way over simplifying Rāga and missing other big points of it, but hopefully you get the gist of what I mean.

So I searched for some streaming audio sites on it, and happily found some great places to hear Dubstep music that I wanted to share. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to tell me what you think!

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