Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity. Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far [...]
Also filed in Emotion, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Software
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Tagged 808, 808s and heartbreak, autotune, classical, distortion, fiona apple, frank ocean, hip-hop, jay-z, john adams, kanye west, pop, posthuman, rnb, Sampling, singing, soul, watch the throne
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Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the [...]
Malawey, Victoria. Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla. Music Theory Online, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2010. The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music [...]
Also filed in Composition, Emotion, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Tagged africa, attention, audio editing, bjork, Composition, linkedin, looping, medulla, nyu, repetition, singing
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Octaves are notes that you hear as being “the same” in spite of their being higher or lower in actual pitch. (Technically, notes separated by an octave are in the same pitch class.) Play middle C on the piano. Then go up the C major scale (the white keys) and the eighth note you play [...]
Friday, December 16, 2011
A musical pitch is a blend of many different frequencies beside the fundamental. Here’s a visualization of the different vibrational modes of an ideal string. The string’s movements are the sum of all these different modes simultaneously.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The more I learn about biology, the less I believe in free will. All of our behavior results from a bunch of molecules bouncing around according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Seen that way, we don’t have any more free will than pebbles being tumbled down a river. We think we have free will [...]
Thursday, November 3, 2011
I know this melody as the cartoon snakecharmer song. Here’s a kid playing it on bass clarinet: I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book [...]
Also filed in Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Music
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Tagged beatles, cartoons, cliches, das racist, folk, jazz, linkedin, louis armstrong, memes, middle eastern music, pop, quora, stereotyping, steve martin, they might be giants
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
The Quora question that prompted this post asks: Why has music been historically the most abstract art form? We can see highly developed musical forms in renaissance polyphony and baroque counterpoint. The secular forms of this music is often non-programmatic or “absolute music.” In contrast to this, the paintings and sculpture of those times are [...]
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter describes and defines the concept of recursion, and discusses its applications in computer science, consciousness, art, music, biology and various other fields. Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.
Also filed in Math, Music, Writing
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Tagged anthills, bach, books, buddhism, computer science, douglas hofstadter, emergence, escher, fractals, godel, looping, meditation, recursion, Sampling, xkcd
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Saturday, October 29, 2011
The parts of your brain that do your abstract thinking are very tightly interconnected with the parts that control your muscles. In fact, some of that abstract thinking is done by the same brain regions that control your muscles. We don’t yet know why a specific brain region produces a given specific thought, but the [...]