In support of my music lessons I thought it could have been useful to make readers listen to passages, scales, chords, whatever. Like for images of scores, but audio instead of visual. At last I haven't found anything but publishing on Youtube.
Here's an example:
Don't expect the audio quality will be better, I won't hunt the perfect soundfont and won't do MIDI editing (the MIDI files will be produced by Lilypond, which is a software to typeset music, not to create nice MIDI from a score, and then those files will be converted into audio by timidity, using its free bundled soundfont).
Very very likely all the audio excerpts will be played by an instrument like an electric piano (this example, being a test, is an exception).
About what you hear in the “video”. It's this:
Followed by this:
It's easy to say that these pieces are truncated, even if you don't know the whole piece. You can “feel” that they must continue in some way, it's like a sentence truncated in the middle, no full stop, maybe a comma, but you know that something must come next…
Just in case you have missed the last lesson, here it is.
In case you want to listen to the fantastic first movement of the third symphony by Beethoven, there are many option on youtube. The first thing you will notice is that I've stripped the two initial orchestral chords stating the tonality. The second thing you should notice is that violas and second violins don't play tremolo — that's because it sounded too ugly (I think Lilypond don't generate any event to smooth the attack or whatever). Then you will also discover how it continues and how a real orchestra sounds.
If you aren't accustomed to classical music, I suggest you nonetheless to listen to great pieces like this one. Try to ask to yourself how Beethoven built the “discourse”, how he built tension and how he released it. There should be many question you ask yourself, even if your purpose is to compose popular music.
I can hear a dirty sound at the beginning of each piece; is it only me, or is it the same for you? Thanks to let me know; I'll investigate if there's something going wrong in my audio system.
