Update: see a more formal draft of my thesis proposal. For my NYU masters thesis in Music Technology, I’m designing a beginner-oriented music learning app for the iPad and similar devices. It will approach music the way I wish I had been taught it, and the way I’ve been teaching it to my private students. [...]
Filed in Composition, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged dance, drumming, electronica, fun, music teaching, nyu, rhythm, sequencing, thesis
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Apple has long made a practice of giving away cool software with their computers. One of the coolest such freebies is Garageband. It’s a stripped down version of Logic aimed at beginners, and it’s a surprisingly robust tool. The software instruments and loops sound terrific, the interface is approachable, and it’s generally a great scratchpad. [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged apple, beginners, drumming, garageband, guitar, interfaces, ios, ipad, keybs, midi, Music, music teaching, Sampling, sequencing, songwriting
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As I contemplate my masters thesis, I’m looking for good examples of beginner-centric musical user interface design. Propellerhead’s new Figure app has been a source of inspiration for me. It’s mostly wonderful, and even its design flaws are instructive. I have a long history with Propellerhead’s software, beginning with Rebirth in 1998. I’ve made a [...]
Filed in Composition, Interfaces, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged beginners, design, drumming, electronica, figure, graphics, hipsters, interfaces, ios, music teaching, propellerhead, reason, rebirth, retro, skeuomorphism, synths, touch, visualization
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For my grad school thesis, I’m designing an intro-level music education app. I’m operating within the techno/hip-hop paradigm, with an Afrocentric rhythm-oriented approach. Electronic dance music production software had brought me much joy over the years, joy that I’m eager to spread to more people. I firmly believe that everyone is a potential musician, and [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged accordion, brian eno, drumming, haptic feedback, interfaces, keybs, midi, moog, morton subotnick, music notation, nyu, Video Games, visualization, xenakis
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This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Key Musicians, Music, Music Business, Politics, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged ableton, afrika bambaataa, amazing grace, amen break, authenticity, bach, beatles, beyonce, biz markie, brian eno, classical, compulsory licensing, copyright, danger mouse, david shields, dj, dj earworm, dj premier, double dee and steinski, entropy, Evolution, fairlight cmi, fugees, girl talk, grandmaster flash, harold bloom, hip-hop, informationtheory, jay-z, jesse walker, john coltrane, jonathan lethem, looping, marcus boon, mashups, memes, midi, missy elliot, mohawks, nas, nyu, originality, plato, plunderphonics, questlove, reason, Recording, remixes, richard dawkins, Sampling, sasha frere-jones, stravinsky, susan blackmore, theodor adorno, walter benjamin, william gibson
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Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012) As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Music, Music Business, Politics, Sampling
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Also tagged beastie boys, biz markie, copyright, de la soul, DJ Kool Herc, george clinton, girl talk, nyu, Politics, public enemy, Sampling
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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 [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged games, guitar hero, Improvisation, nyu, play, rock band, Video Games
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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 [...]
Filed in Composition, Emotion, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged africa, attention, audio editing, bjork, Composition, looping, medulla, nyu, repetition, singing
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Guberman, Daniel. Post-Fidelity: A New Age of Music Consumption and Technological Innovation. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp 431–454 Guberman divides the history of recorded music into two distinct sections: the fidelity era, stretching from Thomas Edison through the invention of the compact disk, and the post-fidelity era, beginning with the [...]
Filed in Dance, Hardware, Internet, Music, Music Business, Recording, Technology
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Also tagged audiophiles, cell phones, dance, hip-hop, mp3, nyu, pop, Recording, sodcasting, technomusicology
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Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69 When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, [...]
Filed in Music Teaching, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged ableton, attention, chunking, flow, looping, memory, nyu, teaching, transcribe
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