Junto trios

In the past three weeks, thanks to the magic of the Disquiet Junto, I’ve participated in the creation of three musical trios with six strangers from the internet. Here’s a family tree of the nine tracks we all did:

Junto trios

Artist names are in black, “part one” tracks are in blue, “part two” tracks are in red, and “part three” tracks are in green. We followed Marc Weidenbaum’s prompts for part one, part two, and part three. Hear all the music we all made below.

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Theory for Producers

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new interactive online music course called Theory for Producers. It’s a joint effort by Soundfly and the NYU MusEDLab, representing the culmination of several years worth of design and programming. We’re super proud of it.

Theory for Producers: The Black Keys

The course makes the abstractions of music theory concrete by presenting them in the form of actual songs you’re likely to already know. You can play and improvise along with the examples right in the web browser using the aQWERTYon, which turns your computer keyboard into an easily playable instrument. You can also bring the examples into programs like Ableton Live or Logic for further hands-on experimentation. We’ve spiced up the content with videos and animations, along with some entertaining digressions into the Stone Age and the auditory processing abilities of frogs.

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Pedagogical remixing with Splice

My newest music student is a gentleman named Rob Precht. As is increasingly the case with people I teach privately, Rob lives many time zones away, and he and I have never met face to face. Instead, we’ve been conducting lessons via a combination of Skype and Splice. It’s the first really practical remote music teaching method I’ve used, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Rob came to me via this very blog. He’s a semi-retired lawyer who took some piano lessons as a kid but doesn’t have much other music training or experience. He approached me because he wanted to compose original music, and he thought (correctly) that computer-based production would be the best way to go about it. He had made a few tracks with GarageBand, but quickly switched over to Ableton Live after hearing me rave about it. We decided that the best approach would be to have him just continue to stumble through making original tracks, and I would help him refine and develop them.

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All student work should go on the web

Well, it’s official. All of my students are now henceforth required to post all music assignments on SoundCloud. It solves so many problems! No fumbling with thumb drives, no sharing of huge files, no annoyances with incompatible DAWs. No need to mess with audio-hostile Learning Management Systems. Everyone gets to listen to everyone else’s music. And best of all, the kids get into the habit of exposing their creative work to the blunt indifference of the public at large. Students can comment on and fave each others’ tracks, and so can randos on the web. It really takes the “academic” out of academic work.

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Announcing the Peter Gabriel edition of Play With Your Music

You may have noticed a lot of writing about Peter Gabriel on the blog lately. This is because I’ve been hard at work with Alex Ruthmann, the NYU MusEDLab, and the crack team at Peer To Peer University on a brand new online class that uses some of Peter’s eighties classics to teach audio production. We’re delighted to announce that the class is finished and ready to launch.

Play With Your Music - Peter Gabriel edition

Here’s Alex’s video introduction:

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Anatomy of a Disquiet Junto project

I participate in Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto whenever I have the time and the brain space. Once a week, he sends out an assignment, and you have a few days to produce a new piece of music to fit. Marc asks that you discuss your process in the track descriptions on SoundCloud, and I’m always happy to oblige. But my descriptions are usually terse. This week I thought I’d dive deep and document the whole process from soup to nuts, with screencaps and everything.

Here’s this week’s assignment, which is simpler than usual:

Please answer the following question by making an original recording: “What is the room tone of the Internet?” The length of your recording should be two minutes.

Data Centre

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From my SoundCloud stats

A complete list of countries from which people have listened to my SoundCloud tracks, in order of number of listens:

United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Russian Federation, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Argentina, Sweden, Turkey, India, Georgia, Chile, New Zealand, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Colombia, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, Philippines, Austria, Bulgaria, South Africa, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Norway, Singapore, Latvia, Korea, Tunisia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia, Thailand, Peru, Croatia, Slovakia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Egypt, Lithuania, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Algeria, El Salvador, Albania, Kuwait, Slovenia, Belarus, Luxembourg, Guadeloupe, Ecuador, Uruguay, Jamaica, Martinique, Iceland, Pakistan, Mauritius, Malta, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Bermuda, Paraguay, Sri Lanka, Angola, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Qatar, Yemen, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Brunei Darussalam, Botswana, French Polynesia, Ethiopia, Guam, Panama, Jersey, Viet Nam, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Myanmar, Armenia, Haiti, Reunion, Oman, Nicaragua, Montenegro, Monaco, Sudan, Iraq, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Tanzania, Djibouti, Cote D’Ivoire, Bahrain, Barbados, Netherlands Antilles, Antigua and Barbuda, Andorra.

There are parts of South America, Africa and the Middle East not represented here, but otherwise this covers just about the entire world. Being a musician in the future is weird.

That ill tight sound

Chapman, Dale. “That Ill, Tight Sound”: Telepresence and Biopolitics in Post-Timbaland Rap Production. Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 155–175.

Chapman examines the impact that Timbaland has had on popular music production, and what his significance is to the broader culture. While Timbaland himself is no longer the tastemaker he was at his peak ten or fifteen years ago, his sonic palette has become commonplace throughout the global pop landscape.

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Is Dan Savage’s internet campaign against Rick Santorum moral?

Oh my, yes.

From Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia entry:

A controversy arose following Santorum’s statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press that was published on April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum said the priests were engaged in “a basic homosexual relationship”, and went on to say that he had “[…] no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts”; that the right to privacy, as detailed in Griswold v. Connecticut, “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution”; that, “whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family”. When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality”.

Rick Santorum is guilty of hate speech. In a perfect world, Dan Savage would have addressed Santorum’s ignorance and bigotry in a loving, Gandhi-esque fashion, but I give Savage credit for creativity and effectiveness. His Google bombing campaign might be juvenile and vengeful in tone, but he’s fighting speech with speech in an exceptionally clever way, and has drawn a lot of attention to a worthy cause. What’s more moral than protesting hate speech nonviolently?

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What are some possible innovations for Delicious going forward?

This is a melancholy topic for me. There was a time when my Delicious network feed was the first site I looked at in the morning, my favorite source of news and serendipitous new knowledge, and the primary repository for my short-form writing. Now I barely ever use it.

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

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