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Huzzah! Tchaik is mah boi.

I currently don't have my pxtones with me, so I'm going to attempt to dissect as much of Arctic Winds as I can from memory, which will consist primarily of really simple/obvious stuff that you probably could have easily figured out on your own. Basically, I could just not do it, but I feel compelled to so that you know that I haven't totally abandoned you, and that I'm not a <em class='bbc'>complete</em> slacker. Before I do that, however, I have a quick linguistics question for you. Am I correct in thinking that words like broke, wrote, drew, saw, etc. are called "narrative past-tense", and words like broken, written, drawn, seen, etc. are called "conversational past-tense"? Or is it the other way around? Or is it something else entirely?

Alright, so, Arctic windsofwi-*shot*

The piece starts with, fittingly enough, wind sounds. Notice how the volume, pitch, and pan are gradually changed over time in a largely amorphous manner. Later in the piece, after the first climactic point, the wind sounds come back, but the changes in volume, pitch, and pan are more rapid, giving a feeling of greater turbulence/agitation. Notice that I didn't really have to make the latter ones louder to give the feeling of turbulence/agitation. This reflects the principle that, in music, the change over time of some parameter (i.e. pitch, volume, harmony, rhythm, timbre) is often much more important than the value of that parameter at any given point in time.

One more thing to notice about the wind sounds, which is less of an artistic/musical thing and more of just a handy trick for sequencing music electronically. All of the pxtone "notes" in the two wind tracks at the beginning are identical in terms of their pitch, volume, and pan envelopes. My main reason for using two wind tracks and not just one is that it allows me to have a graceful attack and release to the entire sequence of wind sounds, without having silences in the middle, while still enabling me to simply copypasta a small amount of material and not have to write the whole thing out by hand. Each individual "note" fades in from nothing and fades out to nothing, which gives a graceful attack and release, but if I only used one track, repeating this pattern, there would be awkward silences in the middle where it temporarily fades down to nothing. By having two tracks, and having them out of sync with each other, when one is silenced, the other is at its climax, giving a sense of continuity to the whole thing.

Okay, on 2nd thought, this is not going to be a total waste of time. I'm only going to go 3 more notes into the song, for now (the first three actual pitches in the piece, played by the flute) and use them to illustrate some important music theory concepts.

The flute begins with two short notes: G# and B, which lead into a much longer C#. The landing on C# helps to establish C# as the tonic (it should be fairly obvious why this is the case), as do the two pickup notes (especially the G# - it's probably not so obvious why this is the case). In any of the 84 heptatonic scales we've mentioned before (12 starting pitches * 7 modes = 84 total scales), the 2nd most important pitch (after the tonic) is the 5th pitch in the scale. In all the modes starting on C#, except the diminished mode, G# is that 5th pitch.

The main reason for the importance of this 5th pitch is the harmonic series, that is, the set of all pitches whose frequencies are integer multiples of some fundamental frequency. Recall from our earlier discussions some of the frequency ratios which correspond to certain intervals:
Perfect octave - 2:1 ratio
Perfect 5th - 3:2
P4 - 4:3
M3 - 5:4
m3 - 6:5

So, for example, the first 6 harmonics of C#3 would be:
<span rel='lightbox'><img...

Omg really? The new system is being a dick again. The image was supposed to be: <span rel='lightbox'><img src='http://i.imgur.com/mHsu4.png' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' /></span>

Aaaaand, now I have to rewrite everything I wrote after that >:-(

Mathematically, it should be fairly clear that, if note X is a harmonic of note Y, then note X's harmonic series is a subset of note Y's (since multiples of multiples of some number k are themselves multiples of k). Because of this, moving from a harmonic of the home key to the home key gives a satisfying feeling of "settling in", since we move from hearing a narrow subset of the harmonics we expect to hear to hearing the full set of harmonics.

In the image above, the first harmonic of C# that is not itself a C# is a G#. Because of this, moving from C# to G# gives a feeling of "stepping out", while moving from G# to C# gives a feeling of "settling in". This motion is the driving force behind almost all music in the classical period, and a sizable chunk of music in the baroque and romantic periods. Note that, even though in the above image the C# and G# in question have an extra octave between them, this doesn't have to be the case. Due to the way our ears and brains work, which octaves notes are in is largely irrelevant when dealing with the harmonic series.

So, to summarize, the note a perfect 5th above the tonic (which is the fifth note in the scale in all modes except the diminished mode) is important because motion to and from that note is the basis for almost all tonal music.