Self explanatory.
History of all music genres.
I attempted to do a history thesis on this subject but had to drop it because it was way beyond the scope of a freshman class. The short short short version from an afternoon of research about a decade ago is that the earliest use of music was for religious ceremonies, particularly in Egypt (though it may only be the case they were the first people to write about it). I don’t know if we have records of what the instruments would have been like and I’m sure there’s no surviving notation from that time period. We’re talking references to music going back to about 1500 BC, while the earliest surviving notated music is from about 800AD, so there’s 2000 years of music at least with no surviving notation.
But yeah, basically you would play music for religious ceremonies and it was something the priests took an interest in. That kind of tracks because where more written history of music does come into play, it is dominated by the church up until the Baroque period in the 1700s basically. There was definitely folk music and other things happening outside of Europe from 800 to 1700 AD, but if you go take a music history class in college you are going to get a lot of gregorian chants for like 500 years. That’s mostly because the church was the only one paying to have this stuff written down for all that time.
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It began in Africa ca ca ca ca ca
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I can’t hold it all in my brain, there’s just too much 
Ah yes, that old Gregorian Chant Step
I have no authority in music history other than high school level education in it, but the native Australians are said to be the oldest race on the planet dating back 75,000 years. They are quite musical by nature, using singing, didgeridoo and clap sticks. The didge is fabled to be 40,000 years old but the earliest remaining cave paintings of it are only 1500 years.
I’d believe it. In the same way they keep discovering new cave paintings that are like 40000 years old now, I’d buy it if you said there was music happening for tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote it down. That’s the thing about history, you can only study it if you record it, which just isn’t an innovation we had as a society until about 4000BC (I think off the top of my head). And then beyond that it’s a question of what of these things that do get written down survives. So you’re depending on someone going against the tradition of passing these things down via in person training and memorization to be the first person to write it down, AND THEN that written reference needs to survive 6000 years, get discovered, and be able to be translated from a probably long dead language.
I don’t love a lot of that pre-baroque music, and it probably doesn’t really represent what was happening at the time musically - at least not for the average person that would see the occasional poet playing a lute come through their town (which is still a euro-centric view that ignores whatever was happening anywhere else). However because the church wrote it down and protected it, that is now the default starting point of music history. There are people out there who recreate instruments and performances from earlier using context clues (drawings, written descriptions, the understanding of math at the time - in the case of something like Ptolemaic tuning). I haven’t looked into that, but at that point I’d argue you’re into archaeology rather than history - music archaeology sounds like an interesting field to get into!
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Yeah, there are artifacts supposed to be musical instruments such as bone flutes dating back to like 50,000 BC, but without writing giving clues about usage, it’s hard to say. And writing and documentation in general is supposed to be developed in highly structured contexts such as organizing the economy around centralized temples and so on, at least in Mesopotamia where you got lots of clay tablets with cuneiform writings (although I think there are other theories about the developments in other cultures). We basically have no idea how many people developed their personal musical notations by making some dots and lines or waves or whatever.
For some reason I really like the idea of finding musical notations in drawings. Would be interesting to translate patterns into notes, DAWs, arps, step sequencers and so on… When I have lots of free time I might work on an AI model for it, like analzying patterns from scans and giving out some form of structured notation haha…
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I gotta stop necroposting on threads man…
I can’t tell you about the entire history of music, because that’s just too much info for me to collect and write about… (Maybe one day…)
But, I can tell you about the history of Hard Dance genres.
Read if you wish
In the early 90s, when warehouse raves and similar were becoming a popular thing DJs were pushing for fatter and bassier sound, where the focus was on the rhythm and especially the kick and bass. This was at a time where techno was considered unlistenable by a lot of people, because everybody was either getting sucked into hip hop or screaming their heads off at concerts. Also, at the time, underground sound systems weren’t that powerful, and quite often the sound being pushed out of them would be distorted due to the sheer volume. Some DJs took this clip distortion and made it a part of the track, and crowds loved it because of how bassy it was. (The sound engineers however, were not so pleased and thought that their speakers were being ripped apart, lol.) This was how Gabber was born, with faster tempos and rubber band kick drums.
In Belgium, these faster tempos were slowed down a bit and blended with more melody elements to create Jumpstyle, where the aim was to dance “Jump.”
Back to gabber again, it was the early 2000s and the kicks apparently weren’t distorted enough, so they were pushed through multiple layers of distortion and equalization to create the Hardstyle kick with a powerful “tok” and offbeat or “reversed” bass.
Of course, when the actual kick became subdivided into punch and bass, proper reverse-bass hardstyle became a thing, with more of a club or rave feel to it. Hardstyle was becoming more and more melodic up to about 2010, where it split into 2 different genres, Euphoric Hardstyle, and Rawstyle.
Euphoric speaks for itself, but Rawstyle was the harder and darker brother, with drops consisting of powerful kicks and piercing background screeches at about 160 bpm. It was also influenced by Mainstream Hardcore, which was even faster at 180 bpm, and used massive kicks that basically became the song rather than a part of it.
Around the time of jumpstyle, Hardtekk was becoming a different style of Hard Dance, too. It was characterised by punchy non-distorted kicks with a buzzy and monotone tail. This evolved as a separate yet similar genre by the name of Frenchcore, which was extremely fast relative to other tracks (180-200 bpm.)
In the later 2010s Hard dance tracks were becoming simpler and faster, and as a competitor to Frenchcore, Uptempo Hardcore gained speed (quite literally.) 200 bpm, and VERY distorted kicks, the tracks were nowhere near as melodic as the other tracks, but they were much more bassy, and were developing a new style of kick called the Zaag kick.
With the rise of Tik-Tok and overall Gen-Z stupidity, Hard Dance became more and more popular past 2010, and now it’s commercially recognised as an EDM genre group and draws a lot of attention from my generation.
Seperate from most of this, there’s also Speedcore. It evolved from Gabber, where the focus (rather than being on the harness of the kick) was the velocity and tempo. It of all genres evolved VERY quickly (ironic, eh?) but sort of stayed the same over time. New speedcore tracks often have drawn out kick tails but they aren’t used very much. Terror is slower speedcore, and begins at about 230 bpm, it holds more of a spot in the “Hard Dance” genre group than Speedcore, because Speedcore’s considered too avant-garde, apparently.
Oh, there’s also basically anything involving an Amen break… But my hands are tired.
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This sounds intriguing. Would you be into the idea of collaborating on something like this? I’d love to make something that attempts to analyze random patterns and make something meaningful out of them, too
No! We need more of this, keep them coming 
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Hey man, that would be awesome, but tbh finding free time for anything beside work and family is a real problem at the moment for me. Starting a new project while struggling to find time for multiple other things that are on hold is just not realistic for me at the moment. However, if you just want to make something quick for fun, you can just give one of the current LLMs that can analyze pictures like GPT or Claude an image and a prompt to generate some MIDI notes (or probably even a .mid file) based on patterns detected in the picture. If it is just for fun, I think there is a lot of stuff you could do even without any specific coding for it. But if you do want to dive in deeper and do something more specific, I would def give some feedback on any ideas you have - maybe start a thread and some others will join in?
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