General Editor Robert Dimery and a big bunch of music critics from around the world compiled this bible-size guide: 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and, as the name reads, these are albums you must listen, not a guideline of “the best of the best ever!”. People tend to take too serious a book of these proportions and they always start telling things like: why Pop and not Metal? …and so on, obviously not everybody is going to agree on every selection, and that is precisely the point in this kind of guides, for instance, I hate (really, I do!) Jeff Buckley’s singing (and I don’t usually hate something when it comes to music, I just ignore what I don’t like) but that doesn’t mean the album Grace doesn’t deserve a position in the book, since a lot of people may like, or even love, the late Buckley.
The book is worth reading and if you are an avid collector, like ourselves here at LaSuite303, it makes an attractive item in your bookshelf.
As many reviewers of the book, I won’t dissapoint you by not complaining about the terrible ommissions such as: Amon Tobin, Bran Van 3000, Dave Brubeck, Cornelius, Esquivel, Mano Negra (since they did consider Manu Chao’s Clandestino over Casa Babylon, one of the greatest works of music I’ve ever heard), Sergio Mendes (who, along with Esquivel, I consider the biggest misses), Morphine and Weezer… among others, and there’s not a conceivable way in which these artists didn’t make it, while Britney’s …Baby One More Time did.
The other bad thing about this compendium is that an irrational percentage of the list is embodied by albums from the USA and the UK, I agree that these two nationalities are always going to sweep the percentage, but not in such a drastic manner.

Bart Hopkin, editor and founder of Experimental Musical Instruments, a journal dedicated to new and unusual musical instruments, published “Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information for Instrument Making” back in 1996, this is a great book that covers everything from patterns, timbre & overtones, resonance, oscillation, impedance, etc. The book basically explores the world of musical instrument design, it explains how common and new instruments can be made using simple tools, but this book is not a step-by-step guide for making every musical instrument from scratch, it is more about the phisics of sound making, about understanding why musical instruments are built the way they are.

This amazing book is about music, but with a scientific point of view, according to the author’s theory all music has it own mathematical algorithm, this one is a good example to show these facts, it is a good theory, but in most cases on the examples, it can be compared with compositions created by human beings since it only fulfills the requeriments for the genre.

I always think about this intersting issue, but I have developed my own theory and it goes in other direction, I mean, we can understand the algorithm created by music but my question would be: How can human beings assimilate and codify music, depending on what basis or influences?

I think if you add more complexity on a melody or a rhythm, people can’t assimilate or codify it as good as a simplier one, and obviously they can’t easily enjoy it.

Am I right? Please post your opinion about this.