Free courses from Aphelion
Battuto
Music, explained to people who would rather read a derivation than a rule. Everything here starts from something physical and arrives at the thing you actually use, and no step is skipped by calling it tradition.
Written for DAW users rather than conservatoire students: MIDI numbers and piano rolls, not staves and clefs. Every lesson is interactive, every claim is either derived on screen or marked as convention, and none of it costs anything.
- 01FoundationsFrom pressure waves to the piano roll.Why there are twelve notes, why some pairs of them sound smooth, and why every one of them is very slightly out of tune on purpose. Nothing is asserted: each rule arrives as a consequence of the one before it.6 lessons
- 02Sound Design & SynthesisHow a synthesizer actually works, from the oscillator up.Foundations ends with a note as a set of partials. This course is about controlling that set: one subtractive instrument built from the oscillator up, then additive, FM, wavetable, physical modelling and granular, treated as five answers to a single question about cost.10 lessons
- 03Harmony & MelodyWhat you build once the grid exists.Chords, keys and the lines between them, for people who would rather see the circle of fifths derived than memorised. Mostly combinatorics and group theory, with the genuinely conventional parts marked as conventional.6 lessons
- 04RhythmTime, grouping, and how much of it you are supplying.The other axis of the piano roll, and the one where the listener does most of the work. Beat, metre, syncopation and groove, in a course that is honest early about how much of this is inference rather than arithmetic.6 lessons
- 05Style & ConventionWhere the derivations stop and the agreements start.The last course, and the one where nothing can be derived. Three courses found real structure in music; this one is about everything that was decided instead, taken seriously enough to be written down exactly, counted, and then broken on purpose.6 lessons
How these are built
Each course is a chain, not a reference manual. A lesson establishes exactly one thing the next one cannot proceed without, which is why they are numbered and why the numbering is worth respecting. Read one in order and the last lesson should feel inevitable rather than new.
The courses are separate derivations and do not have to be taken in order, though Synthesis assumes you accept that a note is a stack of partials, which is the second thing Foundations proves.