Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48

The authors discuss the ways that user interface design for music production and teaching software is informed by embodied cognition, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that all metaphors trace their roots to states of the human body, which are the only basis for abstract thought that we possess. The closer a metaphor is to a state of the body, the easier it is for us to understand.

In music, the most obvious bodily metaphors are rhythm and repetition, which we experience throughout the sensory world, not just in music. We also use a variety of spatial metaphors for music, referred to by the authors as image schemas. Listeners commonly conceive of music using images of containers, cycles, verticality, balance, the notion of center-periphery, and (in the case of western melodies) a narrative of source-path-goal.

An example of the container schema is the statement “Bb is in the key of F.” We imagine the key of F as a container, with Bb as one of its contents. We think of chords as being stacked vertically, like a pile of bricks. When we conceive melodies, we think of the line going for a metaphorical walk, with altitude standing in for pitch: “The melody starts on F, goes up to Bb, down to A, and then lands back on F.” (However, the “pitch-as-height” metaphor is muddied by the circularity of pitch class, and by the fact that we feel ascending pitch movement differently from ascending.) We may use alternative image schemas; that higher pitches are brighter, and lower pitches are darker. We are on stronger footing with the notion of the tonic as “home base” — we imagine a piece that modulates through different keys as going out on a journey and then returning home.

People approach software equipped with bodily image schemas, learned and innate. The highest praise one can give to an interface is that it is “intuitive.” The authors define an intuitive interface as one that allows the user to apply prior knowledge and existing image schema: innate, sensory-motor, embodied, cultural, or expert.

The authors evaluate two software programs in terms of their intuitiveness, or lack thereof. The first is Harmony Space, a program written by one of the paper’s authors to “systematically and richly designed to exploit spatial metaphors for harmonic concepts.” (Unfortunately, this software is no longer available online, aside from low-resolution screenshots.) Harmony Space organizes the diatonic pitches onto a grid with the topology of a torus, organized by Euler’s tonnetz scheme. This organization helps users understand harmony in terms of spatial proximity. In Harmony Space, adjacent notes form diatonic thirds and triads. Chords and scales form distinctive geometric shapes. The user can transpose chords and other patterns by simply moving the shapes around on the grid. While this is an elegant didactic tool, it is only partially useful. By design, Harmony Space totally neglects rhythm. The authors discuss the difficulty of designing a visualization scheme for rhythm that is as elegant as the tone grid.

The other software program evaluated is Apple’s Garageband. Since Apple includes it for free with Macs, Garageband has become widely used by amateurs. It is a simplified version of Logic, using the same multitrack tape recorder metaphor as most other DAWs. This metaphor is not immediately intuitive, but it is easily learned — users quickly learn to imagine a chorus of voices, with each voice occupying its own horizontal track. The left-to-right timeline is also immediately intuitive once the user sees it in action. Garageband adds an appealing loop library to the basic recording functionality. The loops can be altered by the user in a full-fledged MIDI editor.

The authors praise Garageband for its combination of versatility and accessibility, but they miss some of the program’s shortcomings as a tool for beginner self-teaching. Garageband offers many attractive-sounding loops and instrument sounds, but offers no suggestion as to how to make good musical use of those materials. It does not suggest, for example, that by western pop tradition, loops sound best when repeated two, four, eight or sixteen times. Also, it makes no attempt at showing harmonic relationships; users are left to trial and error to find musical chord/scale combinations. Ideally, Garageband’s MIDI editor would suggest to the user which notes would actually sound good, perhaps by coloring chord tones green, extensions yellow and dissonant notes red.

Garageband and Harmony Space are intriguing, but surely better visual metaphors for music have yet to be implemented. For example, while the “container” for chords is intuitive, it is also misleading, since the chord is comprised of tones, not a box for them. A better image would be tones as atoms and chords as molecules built from those atoms, which gets at their relational nature better. As the molecule becomes a more familiar image, it will become available as an “intuitive” image schema.

I anticipate that the next generation of beginner-oriented production software will draw not on the tape recorder metaphor, but on the sampler. I could imagine simplified version of the Session View in Ableton Live, allowing the user to build songs out of musical “legos,” dragging and dropping in real time.

See also a post collecting my favorite music visualization systems.

Carmen McRae was a good friend of Monk’s, and for my tastes, she sings this song better than anyone. Her tart, unsentimental intellect matches Monk’s own approach to music perfectly. Here she is performing “Round Midnight” in 1962.

Monk wrote his biggest hit back in the late 1930s, but he didn’t have a recording contract at the time and couldn’t get anyone else interested. A few years later, however, his luck changed. His friend Bud Powell was playing piano in a band led by former Ellington Orchestra trumpet star Cootie Williams. Powell convinced Williams to record “Round Midnight” in 1944.

The record made an impact, and “Round Midnight” became Cootie Williams’ theme song. Other musicians became interested in the tune as well. Dizzy Gillespie did a recording in 1947, for which he wrote his own distinctive intro and ending.

Monk himself liked Dizzy’s intro and ending so much that he promptly began including them in his own performances of his tune.

Later in 1947, Monk finally got to record his tune for the first time.

Much as I love Monk’s own playing, this recording is an awkward one, with a lame-sounding film noir arrangement in the horns. Fortunately, Monk recorded “Round Midnight” many more times over the course of his life. He tended to play it quite a bit faster and more abstractly than other interpreters. Here’s a live version from sometime in the sixties.

Monk’s best recordings of the tune were solo piano versions. My favorite is the one on The Composer, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. The one on Thelonious Himself is good too.

The definitive version of “Round Midnight” is the one by Miles Davis, as recorded on his 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight (a widely used alternate name for the tune.)

Miles honed this arrangement in performances for years before finally recording it. He plays Dizzy’s intro on muted trumpet, in a severely stripped-down form. His take on the melody is similarly minimalist, using many fewer notes than the original. At the end of the head at 2:40, Miles inserts a whole new section of his own invention, a shout chorus that jumps unexpectedly into major tonality, played on unmuted trumpet. The shout chorus sets up John Coltrane’s assertive and energetic tenor sax solo. Then Miles brings the mood back down with his muted take on Dizzy’s ending. This recording was a jukebox hit in black neighborhoods, and it went a long way toward cementing Miles’ iconic status in the jazz world. If you had to explain jazz to a visitor from outer space, you could do worse than this recording.

Every jazz singer has attempted “Round Midnight” at one point or another. To pick one of many great versions, here’s Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by Oscar Peterson.

As do most singers, Ella omits the intro and ending. The most complete vocal version, and maybe the most beautiful, is by Carmen McRae again, from her highly recommended 1988 album Carmen Sings Monk.

Everything’s here: all the sections, with the melody as written and also as interpreted by Dizzy Gillespie, all with lyrics. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the last word on “Round Midnight” — at least until the next evolution.

Hip-hop might point the way forward. The intro to Luchi De Jesus‘ recording of “Round Midnight” is sampled in “A Friend” by KRS-One.

Want to try playing “Round Midnight” yourself? It’s well worth it, you’ll learn a lot about music that way. The problem is finding a decent chart. Be warned that some of the chords in the infamous Real Book version are wrong, and it also omits Dizzy’s intro and ending. A more accurate transcription can be found in Hal Leonard’s lovingly rendered Thelonious Monk Fake Book, but that chart also leaves out the intro and ending. When I did the tune with my former jazz group, I decided to just transcribe the missing sections myself. Feel free to download my chart here.

Any crucial versions I missed? Leave them in the comments.

First of all, here’s the original version from Snow White.

Once you’ve got the tune in your head, listen to the Miles Davis recording.

The long intro uses a pedal point, which just means that bassist Paul Chambers plays the same note over and over, creating a feeling of floating suspense. Drummer Jimmy Cobb plays gentle waltz time with his brushes: one-and-two-and-three-and, one-and-two-and-three-and. (Most jazz tunes are in four-four time, so each bar would have four beats.) Pianist Wynton Kelly plays some improvised figures based mostly on arpeggios.

At 0:40, Miles Davis enters, playing the melody on muted trumpet. Even though he interprets the tune’s timing very loosely and adds some ornaments of his own, you should have no trouble singing the words along with him. This section is called the head, and as is the case with a lot of jazz tunes, it’s thirty-two bars long. In case you’re a music reader, here’s the chart.

At 1:17, Miles begins his solo. Over the same thirty-two bar form of the original song, Miles improvises a new melody. He chooses his notes spontaneously, but not randomly — the solo has to make sense against the song’s chords as they go by. You can keep track of the form by continuing to sing the words, and hear how Miles’ playing interacts with them. Miles was famous for his dark and moody style, with unhurried pacing. He plays fewer notes than his virtuosic sidemen, using frequent silences. You can hear him going back and forth between a tuneful style that refers back to the original melody and a more abstract approach, choosing notes that form patterns for their own sake, sometimes rubbing tensely against the chords.

Each pass through the form of the song is called a chorus. Miles plays three choruses — you can sing the words three times over his solo. At 2:26, Miles ends his second chorus with a funky repetitive riff on one note. At 3:05, the end of the third chorus, he reiterates the one-note riff and extends it, allowing it to spill over past the end of the form with a nonchalance that’s typical Miles.

At 3:11, there’s a more energetic feeling in the drums as Jimmy Cobb switches from the soft-sounding brushes to the louder and more percussive sticks, and Hank Mobley begins his tenor saxophone solo. Hank doesn’t come off on this recording spectacularly well — he was new to Miles’ band, and didn’t yet have his feet under him. Also, his softer and more lyrical improvisational style sounds a little schmaltzy compared to Miles’ acidic tone. (In fairness, to hear Hank at his best, check out his classic album Soul Station.) After two choruses, Hank runs out of ideas at around 4:18, and he comes to kind of a lame conclusion. The risk of failure (or incomplete success) is exactly what makes jazz improvisation the exciting art form that it is.

Next comes Wynton Kelly’s piano solo, at 4:26. As in his intro, he plays a lot of arpeggios, short fragments that call and respond to each other. Wynton sounds a lot more relaxed and on his game than Hank Mobley, no surprise since he was a veteran Miles Davis sideman. Wynton gets a chorus and a half, and at 5:24, Miles takes over, restating the second half of the melody. Then there’s a short interlude on the same pedal point as the intro before the final solo. This is a pretty unusual structural move — Miles clearly wants to set the stage for the dramatic climax, the entrance of John Coltrane.

A little back story is helpful here. Coltrane had played tenor sax in Miles’ regular group on and off through the second half of the fifties. Together, the two of them had created some of the best and most famous recordings in jazz history, including Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind Of Blue. (Go buy them! You won’t regret it.) At the time of the “Prince” recording session, Coltrane had recently left Miles to lead his own staggeringly great band, but he happened to be visiting the studio that day, so Miles invited him to sit in.

What you’re hearing at 5:52 is Coltrane playing with zero preparation, just sight-reading the chord chart. That may sound impressive, but it’s actually pretty common for jazz recording sessions. What you should be impressed by is the effortless intensity and power of Coltrane’s improvisation. His solo gradually builds in complexity until by the start of the second chorus, he’s playing full doubletime, cramming twice as many notes into each measure as the pulse of the tune would suggest. His lines twist and spiral with a complexity unmatched by anyone else in jazz at that time. It isn’t just his technical ability that makes Coltrane great. Even at speed, his note choices all make emotional sense, and his lines have a rock-solid melodic structure to them. If you slow Coltrane’s solos down, they become quite tuneful, even catchy. It’s one thing to be able to throw a lot of notes around; it’s a lot more rare to have all those notes tell a compelling story.

After a short interlude, Miles plays the head out, the final statement of the melody. Usually the head out is identical to the head, but in this case, Miles just plays the first half of it. Then there’s an outtro, much the same as the intro, a piano groove over the pedal point in the bass. Wynton Kelly plays more freely than he did on the intro, using darker and crunchier harmonies, probably inspired by Coltrane’s solo. Finally, the tune winds to a spontaneous close, by a hand signal or eye contact among the players. You can hear that Jimmy Cobb doesn’t quite land in the same spot as everyone else, he carries over a few extra beats. Then someone in the room makes a mysterious “pop” sound with their mouth, and the tune is over.

Most mainstream jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-solos-head form. The band plays the melody, then different musicians play solos on the melody’s form and chord progression, and then the band plays the melody again. There are infinite variations on this basic structure. You can get a taste for them just by listening to different versions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” which has been recorded many times by jazz musicians over the years. Miles himself was inspired by Dave Brubeck’s 1957 recording, which is faster and doesn’t have the pedal-point interludes.

I chose this example specifically because it’s a well-known song to most of you reading this. Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through adaptations of standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to tunes that were popular seventy years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply a ton of historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome. Happy listening.

Original answer on Quora

If the music resists all attempts at finding temporary key centers and harmonic relationships, then it’s just annoying. Serialism has always gotten on my nerves for that reason; it seems to be specifically designed to resist musical sense-making.

Original question on Quora

For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question on Quora

Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

The top row shows the fundamental frequency, the one you hear as the pitch — say it’s a violin string playing A 440. The second row shows the first harmonic, the string vibrating in halves, producing A 880. The harmonic is quieter than the fundamental, so you aren’t necessarily conscious of it, but you can isolate it by lightly touching the string at its halfway point while playing. The other rows show other harmonics, vibrations of the string in integer ratios, each producing a pitch that’s an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. The second harmonic is E 1320; the third is A 1760; the fourth is C# 2200.

In an ideal string, the harmonics would continue to get infinitely higher, beyond the range of your hearing. As the harmonics get higher, they also get quieter and subtler. Still, they all have an impact on the overall sound of the instrument. All musical instruments have overtones: winds, the human throat, speaker cones, even well-tuned drumheads.

Read more about how harmonics form the basis of western music theory.

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I’d put “Oh Yoko” up there too. “Imagine” has a gorgeous melody, but the lyrics are like something an eighth grader would write.

Paul: “Live And Let Die”

A close second: “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

George: “I’d Have You Anytime”

Kind of a toss-up with “Isn’t It A Pity.”

Ringo: um, I dunno, maybe “Pure Gold”

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Harry Truman played classical piano.

Richard Nixon played classical piano too, and even composed a bit.

Condoleeza Rice has pro-quality classical chops. Don’t miss her appearance on 30 Rock.

Former federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan attended Juilliard and played professional alto sax and clarinet in the Woody Herman band before going into finance. Unfortunately, I can’t find a video.

Of course, there’s Bill Clinton and his famous sax solo.

Mike Huckabee plays respectable rock bass. Here he is playing with Def Leppard, don’t miss.

Finally, who could forget former Attorney General and singer-songwriter John Ashcroft? Awful though he is, the song is weirdly catchy.

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Composition
Duke Ellington – “Concerto For Cootie”

Blues feeling
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”

Romance
Count Basie – “Lil Darlin’”

Effortless virtuosity
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – “Joy Spring”

Reinterpreting pop music
Miles Davis – “Someday My Prince Will Come”

Funk
Herbie Hancock – “Fat Albert Rotunda”

Soul-searching and inner flight
John Coltrane – “Venus”

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