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 [...]
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Predictable unpredictability. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry because they engage our pattern-recognizers. But we only like patterns 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. And if the [...]
Sunday, September 4, 2011
The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is [...]
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
When teaching guitar, I find that my students need the most help with groove. Students come to me expecting to learn chords, scales, riffs and ultimately entire tunes. I do teach those things, but after a little guidance, anyone can learn them on their own just as well from books, videos, web sites and so [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged funk, funky drummer, groove, guitar, hip-hop, linkedin, meditation, rhythm, swing, time
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I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Is lip-synching to a recording a form of music? It’s definitely dance, of a specific kind. But is it music, or just mime? I feel instinctively that Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” routine on the Motown 25th Anniversary is a musical performance, one of the all-time great ones. So I guess I consider lip-synching to be [...]
Filed in Dance, Key Musicians, Music
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Also tagged ashlee simpson, billie jean, dance, lil wayne, lipsynching, michael jackson, moonwalk, purists, singing, tv
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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
One night, Anna was watching me Twitter over my shoulder. After a while, she announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is effectively a real-world immersive internet game. The scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Social Media, Software, Writing
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Also tagged blogging, civilization, recursion, simcity, Social Media, social networks, stats, twitter, Video Games, wordpress
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“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged beatles, brian eno, david byrne, Improvisation, meditation, mixing, philosophy, Recording, recursion, reggae, remixes, sly and the family stone, talking heads, tape, tape editing, time
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Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as: the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Software
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Also tagged abstraction, black box, brain, computers, Evolution, microchips, neuroscience, recursion, transistors
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money. So I needed to step up my game in terms of workflow and file management. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in college, using Windows 3.1 and good old Wordperfect 6. Then the Microsoft hegemony set in [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Software, Writing
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Also tagged cruft, design, feature creep, flow, indexcards, interface, minimalism, omnioutliner, plain text, psychology, rtf, scrivener, Writing
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