I’ve toyed around with several iPhone and iPad music apps. Many are intriguing and fun, but few have inspired me into making “real” music. In preparation for the next Disquiet Junto project, I downloaded Nodebeat and tried some improvisation. I like the result: The app combines randomness and control in an intriguing way. I [...]
Also filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software
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Tagged animoog, Composition, electronica, figure, Improvisation, ios, ipad, Music, nodebeat, random, touch
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Joshua Pablo Rosenstock. Free Play Meets Gameplay: iGotBand, a Video Game for Improvisers. Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 20, pp. 11–15, 2010. Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is [...]
Also filed in Composition, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software
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Tagged games, guitar hero, Improvisation, linkedin, nyu, play, rock band, Video Games
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Friday, December 17, 2010
I’ve always been more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy, but respect where respect is due, “Gimme Shelter” is a classic. It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing [...]
Also filed in Music, Recording
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Tagged audio editing, guitar, keith richards, merry clayton, michael jackson, Recording, remixes, rhythm, rock, rolling stones, Sampling, singing, sixties, tuning
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The best and most thought-provoking game of the DOS era was Starflight. Kids today, with their intuitive graphical user interfaces. They have no idea what a pain it was to use computers back in the eighties. DOS especially was an autistic nightmare. Bill Gates is some kind of genius to have convinced so many people [...]
Saturday, October 10, 2009
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except [...]
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Tagged bungie, christianity, halo, mashups, microsoft, remixes, ringworld, scifi, star trek, star wars, Video Games, xbox
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
My family does not, as a general rule, dance. Maybe individually. Very rarely together. It takes a wedding or bar mitzvah or other major state occasion to get even some of us on the dance floor. When left to our own devices, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. At least not until last Thanksgiving, when we tried [...]
Why are the Beatles still so cool? By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn’t why the Beatles are cool now. No, I mean the last few records, especially Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. If any of [...]
Also filed in Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Tagged abbey road, analog, audio, audio editing, beatles, common, divorce, hip-hop, john lennon, kanye west, mellotron, memes, mixtapes, multitracking, paul mccartney, prince, remixes, rock, rock band, Sampling, tape, tape editing, Video Games
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This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]
Also filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software
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Tagged composing, electronica, hip-hop, Improvisation, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, Sampling, sequencing, synths, Video Games
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.
Also filed in Dance, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching
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Tagged america, beatles, dance, electronica, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, Recording, remixes, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, Video Games, visualization
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There 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.
Also filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Physics
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Tagged chiptunes, guitar, Music, Music Theory, overtones, Physics, resonance, singing, synths, Video Games
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