The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common ancestor, all human music has a shared origin in the calls of our primate forebears.
Archive for the ‘science’ Category
Songwriting and genealogy
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Auto-tune the cosmos
Friday, September 25th, 2009Not much context to offer on this except that I saw it on Wayne Marshall’s Twitter, it has Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and it’s beyond delightful.
Welcome to warp zone
Monday, August 17th, 2009When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how you can jump many times your height, as if you’re a bug.
Tuning systems, jigsaw puzzles, Giant Steps and Tetris
Friday, August 14th, 2009Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune”
If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.
Brian Eno writes songs with the mixing desk
Sunday, August 9th, 2009Samples and DNA
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Everybody who posts on Craigslist wanting to start a band includes a list of influences. To me those ads all read like wish lists of samples. Whether you end up recreating a sound live or using a sample directly makes little difference in terms of the mental creative process. Every band I’ve ever been in yearned unconsciously for sampling. We’d try for the feeling of Stevie Wonder in Talking Book, or fifties Miles, or Led Zeppelin IV. This idea that sampling is uncreative flies directly in the face of all of my experience. Most sample-based musicians I’ve worked with are more inclined to artistic risk-taking than the ones who exclusively use live instrumentation. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about connecting with other people. Sampling, like its predecessors quoting and referencing, is a powerful connection method.
How musical instruments work
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
Auto-tune (is) the news
Friday, July 24th, 2009The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
A synthesizer is like an axe
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on some dude’s blog.
There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of Herbie and Quincy Jones demonstrating Herbie’s Fairlight CMI in 1983. (more…)
Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re trying to do it by mechanical means. Our great-grandparents would have been astounded at how cheap and ubiquitous timekeeping devices have become. In my apartment alone, I can get accurate time measurements from two computers, the cable box, two cell phones, a drum machine, a metronome, an ipod, a thermometer with a built in clock, and a digital camera. Probably the least reliable timekeeping device in here is our analog clock.
Before the explosion of cheap electronics, most people had no external way to keep time so accurately. Before the industrial revolution, there wasn’t much need to. The only reason you would have needed precise timekeeping was for music and dancing. (more…)