Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a DJ. It doesn’t take much more software than that to produce your own electronica. Some copyright holders and their lawyers are feeling a lot of anguish about this development. For the rest of us, I think it’s an exciting new opportunity, a chance to restore music to its rightful and natural state as shared property, a dynamic conversation anyone can be part of. Read the rest of this entry »
Mashups as micro-mixtapes
July 1st, 2009
The Doctor Who theme song: analog electronica
June 28th, 2009When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet Show. British third graders are manic xenophobes of Eric Cartman proportions. It was the first time I had ever experienced genuine alien-ness, and I didn’t like it. The best thing about being there was Doctor Who.
Wow chicka wah-wah
June 27th, 2009Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones through. Now glide from one to the other. The resulting “ooohaaaah” is the sound the wah-wah pedal is named for. By selectively filtering an electronic instrument’s overtones, the pedal can make it sound more vocal. It’s only two vowel sounds out of the dozens your mouth is capable of producing, but it’s a start toward making a more human tone. Read the rest of this entry »
When the “When The Levee Breaks” break broke
June 18th, 2009The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is, as far as I’m concerned, the very embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.
John Bonham’s staggeringly heavy drum performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a stairwell, recorded by microphones placed three stories above. This arrangement made for a big and powerful, yet oddly diffuse and distant sound. To make it even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality. Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, and it’s hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the pitch-shifted timbre acoustically. It’s almost as if “Levee” was meant to live in the electronic realm. Read the rest of this entry »
Herbie Hancock gets future shock
June 17th, 2009People have been experimenting with using recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years, but the concept didn’t explode into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie Hancock’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, managed to get some pleasure from his future shock. Read the rest of this entry »
Bad meaning good
June 15th, 2009“Peter Piper” is the leadoff track on Raising Hell, the third album by Run-DMC. It was their big commercial and critical breakthrough. My stepbrother Dan had it on cassette and it pretty much defined the sound of my sixth and seventh grade experience.
God don’t ever give me nothing I can’t handle, so please don’t ever give me records I can’t sample
June 14th, 2009The title is a lyric by Kanye West on Common’s track “They Say.” A hundred percent of my musical energy right now is coming from and going into sample-based music. Just about every music purchase I made in the past year was to get high-quality samples. I use my CD collection as a valuable hard-copy backup of a vast, well-recorded sample library. For just about any song except the major masterpieces, I’d much rather listen to the hook repeated endlessly over a hip-hop beat than the song itself. Reason and Recycle are only too happy to oblige me. Being able to effortlessly homebrew my own dance music has given me some insight into how good it must feel to make your own cheese or wine or shoes or sushi or computer programs.
How to make a hot beat
June 11th, 2009The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention again. If the pattern-breaking happens repetitively, itself forming a new pattern, we find it super gratifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Human technology is part of nature
June 2nd, 2009Humans are animals. Our tools are extensions of our bodies into the environment, like beavers and beaver ponds, coral and coral reefs, plants and oxygen. We’re unusual in the extent of our bodies’ impact on our environment, but plenty of other organism shape their environment to suit their needs. Technology is part of our extended phenotype, as much a part of us as our social groups. We’re part of nature, and so is everything we make and use.