The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School

Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of the Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in or near 1720, performed by the guitarist Christopher Parkening.

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Groove harmony

See also a study of groove melody

Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. This idea aligns with my experience of listening to and making groove-based music. I’d like to develop it further, to form a general theory of how groove harmony works.

I don’t plan to try to explain every kind of groove there is, but I do want to look for widely recurring patterns. My main goal is to save my students the many years of trial and error that it took me to figure out this vast and understudied area of musical practice.

Disclaimers: this isn’t any kind of complete theory, it’s me thinking out loud about a bunch of examples. I chose those examples because I like them and find them interesting, not because I’m trying to be systematic.

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Making music with students’ found sounds

Every semester, I have my music technology students do a project using found sound. They record environmental sounds with their phones, and then they create tracks that incorporate those sounds somehow. The only rule is that they have to use at least one found sound–it doesn’t have to be their own. Otherwise, they can use whatever other audio, MIDI or loops they see fit. The project satisfies several pedagogical goals. Students get a taste of field recording, and they start thinking about ways to use “non-musical” sounds in musical contexts. Also, because their phone recordings are usually of poor quality, they have to get creative with audio effects. I like to walk the class through my own approach to the project as well. Here’s what I came up with for my current Montclair State University students:

You can download the Ableton session here. I did some of the work before class: downloading a bunch of students’ sounds, identifying the best parts of them, and finding a good breakbeat to put underneath. I did the bulk of the production during class, with feedback from the students. Then I figured out the structure and applied some polish afterwards.

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Simple songs

I’m interested in a particular kind of pop song: mainstream-ish tracks that are so minimal in their melodic or lyrical content that they barely qualify as “songs,” yet manage to still be musically compelling. My paradigmatic examples:

“That’s The Way (I Like It)” by KC and the Sunshine Band

“Around The World” by Daft Punk

“Turn Down For What” by DJ Snake and Lil Jon

“Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell” by Das Racist

Calling these songs “simple” is not totally accurate, since the first three in my list feature lavish production. Still, the parts you can sing yourself are simple.

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The vocoder and Auto-Tune

The vocoder is one of those mysterious technologies that’s far more widely used than understood. Here I explain what it is, how it works, and why you should care.

Casual music listeners know the vocoder best as a way to make the robot voice effect that Daft Punk uses all the time.

Here’s Huston Singletary demonstrating the vocoder in Ableton Live.

You may be surprised to learn that you use a vocoder every time you talk on your cell phone. Also, the vocoder gave rise to Auto-Tune, which, love it or hate it, is the defining sound of contemporary popular music. Let’s dive in!

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Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality

I complain a lot on this blog about traditional approaches to teaching music theory. Fortunately, there are some alternatives out there. One such is Everyday Tonality by Philip Tagg. Don’t be put off by the DIY look of the web site. The book is the single best resource I know of for how harmony works across a broad spectrum of the world’s music.

Philip Tagg

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Groove challenges with the Groove Pizza

One of our key design principles at the NYU MusEDLab is not to confront beginners with a blank canvas. We want to introduce people to our tools by giving them specific, real-world music to play around with. That was the motivation behind creating presets for the aQWERTYon, and a similar impulse informs Ableton’s approach to their online music tutorials. The Groove Pizza comes with some preset patterns (specials), but there aren’t direct prompts for creative beatmaking. This post introduces some prototype prompts.

Groove Pizza logo

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Blues tonality

See a more beginner-friendly blues primer here. Read this treatise in Spanish, translated by Jesús Fernández.

Abstract

The blues is a foundational element of America’s vernacular and art music. It is commonly described as a combination of African rhythms and European harmonies. This description is inaccurate. Blues follows harmonic conventions that are quite different from those of Western European common practice. Blues harmony does not fit into major or minor tonality, and it frequently violates the “rules” of voice leading and chord function. But blues listeners do not experience the music as strange or dissonant. Instead, they hear an alternative form of consonance. In order to make sense of this fact, we need to understand blues as belonging to its own system of tonality, distinct from major, minor and modal systems. Because blues tonality is so widespread and important in Western music, I argue that we should teach it as part of the basic music theory curriculum. Continue reading

What are the greatest basslines ever?

The bassline is neglected by most non-musicians. But if you want to write or produce music, you quickly find out how important it is. The bassline is the foundation of the whole musical structure, both rhythmically and harmonically. The best basslines interlock with the drums and other rhythm instruments to propel the groove, without you necessarily even noticing them. I like the complex walking lines in jazz and melodic lines in highbrow rock, but the ones that really hit me where I live are basic riffs that loop and loop until they lift you into an ecstatic trance.

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

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The web browser as a musical instrument

Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on how people could use the web for production, not just sharing completed tracks. Then I got home and discovered the iNudge in my Delicious network feed:

Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.

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