An Exploration of Global Music Structures
Formative Forces in Sound
A short book for composers who want to move beyond familiar forms and discover new ways of organizing sound.
What if musical form didn’t begin with the familiar structures we already know?
As composers, intuition guides the way we shape sound—but intuition can also keep us circling familiar patterns. Formative Forces in Sound steps outside those patterns by looking at how musical traditions around the world organize tuning, rhythm, form, storytelling, and time.
The goal is not to imitate another culture’s music. It is to expand the set of possibilities you instinctively reach for when composing. The book eventually turns toward the natural world to ask what structure can look like when sound does not need to follow the paths we already know.
Global Structures
Musical traditions around the world reveal profoundly different assumptions about how tuning, rhythm, form, and time can be organized.
Composer’s Intuition
The aim isn’t to copy another culture’s music. It is to expand the set of possibilities you instinctively reach for when composing.
Nature as Form
Natural forces suggest structures that transform, accumulate, dissipate, and move forward without necessarily returning home.
Inside
the Book
Ten ways of thinking about musical structure.
- Home–Away–Home
- Thai Tuning
- Native American Powwow Music
- Indian Classical Music
- Aboriginal Music
- Mongolian Throat Singing
- Chinese Music
- Japanese Gagaku and Minimalism
- Mande Music
- Non-living Sonic Structures
To expand the music we make, we may need to expand the structures we can hear.
Step outside the familiar.
Formative Forces in Sound is an invitation to hear structure differently.
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