Wednesday, April 17, 2013
My NYU masters thesis is a drum programming tutorial system for beginner musicians. It uses a novel circular interface for displaying the drum patterns. This presentation explains the project’s goals, motivations and scholarly background. If you prefer, see it on Slideshare.
Filed in Autobio, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged ableton, dance, drum machines, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, midi, music notation, nyu, propellerhead, thesis, visualization
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
For those of you curious about what I’m up to in grad school, this is the big thing. Pardon the stilted language, but, you know, academia. See the slideshow! Title The Drum Loop: a Self-Guided Tutorial System for Programming Dance Rhythms Introduction Dance music production software has never been more accessible. However, even “beginner-oriented” programs [...]
Filed in Autobio, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged dance, design, drumming, hip-hop, interface, nyu, programming, thesis, visualization
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Quora user Andrew Stein asks: Musicians: How do you deal with playing songs that have very monotonous parts? I’m going to use James Brown’s Sex Machine as an example. Don’t get me wrong, I love the song. However, the rhythm guitar seems to be nothing but 2 chords played over and over and over with [...]
Filed in Music, Race and Identity
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Also tagged africa, classical, funk, groove, james brown, meditation, Music, prince, quora, repetition
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Computers have revolutionized the composition, production and recording of music. However, they have not yet revolutionized music education. While a great deal of educational software exists, it mostly follows traditional teaching paradigms, offering ear training, flash cards and the like. Meanwhile, nearly all popular music is produced in part or in whole with software, yet [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Software, Technology
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Also tagged algorithmic composition, classical, Composition, computers, dance, dj, figure, garageband, guitar, Hardware, hip-hop, Improvisation, interfaces, ipad, keybs, logic, midi, morton subotnick, Music, music teaching, nyu, pro tools, propellerhead, reason, skeuomorphism, Software, synths, visualization
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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, linkedin, 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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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, linkedin, medulla, nyu, repetition, singing
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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, linkedin, memory, nyu, teaching, transcribe
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Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter describes and defines the concept of recursion, and discusses its applications in computer science, consciousness, art, music, biology and various other fields. Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.
Filed in Math, Music, Writing
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Also tagged anthills, bach, books, buddhism, computer science, douglas hofstadter, emergence, escher, fractals, godel, meditation, recursion, Sampling, xkcd
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Thursday, October 20, 2011
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 [...]
Filed in Composition, Dance, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged 808, art blakey, bass, beatles, black sheep, bootsy collins, charles mingus, daft punk, dance, digable planets, duke ellington, electronica, funk, groove, herbie hancock, hip-hop, james brown, janet jackson, jazz, john coltrane, kanye west, ladysmith black mambazo, michael jackson, miles davis, morphine, paul simon, pop, rock, sequencing, talking heads, teddy riley
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Update: check out my own newest visualization scheme, the radial drum machine. See also a more scholarly review of the literature on visualization and music education. Computer-based music production and composition involves the eyes as much as the ears. The representations in audio editors like Pro Tools and Ableton Live are purely informational, waveforms and [...]
Filed in Composition, Interfaces, Math, Music, Music Theory, Software, Visual art
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Also tagged bjork, euler, funky drummer, interfaces, linkedin, melodyne, Music, music notation, networks, notation, reason, Recording, recycle, roger penrose, topology, visualization
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