The seminar I’ve been taking with Morton Subotnick is sadly drawing to a close. As part of the end of the semester, we were invited to Professor Subotnick’s home studio, a few blocks from NYU, to get a demonstration of the setup he uses in performances.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged ableton, avant-garde, buchla, classical, Composition, electronica, experimental, Improvisation, morton subotnick, nyu
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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, looping, marcus boon, mashups, memes, 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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Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the [...]
I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden [...]
This weekend my electronica band Revival Revival is doing some shows for the first time in many months. We’ll be doing a lot of what my non-electronic-musician friends consider to be cheating. The lead vocals and guitar will be live, as will some of the synths. Everything else will be canned, recordings played back from [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Music, Recording, Software
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Also tagged authenticity, electronica, guitar, Improvisation, lionel richie, michael jackson, miles davis, pop, pro tools, reason, remixes, revival revival, songwriting
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In keeping with my posts thinking of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as electronic musicians, I thought I’d round out the techno-hippie trifecta with the Dead. Their fans might lean to the crunchy granola side, and they did some of their most endearing work in unplugged mode, but for the most part the Dead were [...]
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common [...]
Filed in Composition, Evolution, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged cassettes, dna, Evolution, family, genealogy, memes, Music Theory, originality, sample maps, Sampling, sequencing, songwriting
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My friend Adam, a non-musician but devoted music fan, asked me why sampling is good. He’s used to hearing me defend sampling from the accusation that it’s bad, but he’d never heard a positive argument for it. In case you’ve ever asked the same question, here’s my answer.
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged beyonce, brian eno, chi-lites, copyright, disney, Evolution, fan art, fans, funky drummer, grateful dead, intellectual property, janet jackson, joni mitchell, kickstarter, lil wayne, manu dibango, memes, michael jackson, monkeysphere, Music, public domain, remixes, Sampling, songwriting, swv
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.”
Filed in Hardware, Improvisation, Music, Recording
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Also tagged authenticity, autotune, brian eno, electronica, harmony, imogen heap, Improvisation, interface, keybs, Music, pop, remixes, Sampling, synths
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged dna, electronica, Evolution, funk, funky drummer, hip-hop, james brown, memes, mutation, recursion, recycle, remixes, Sampling, sequencing, songwriting, visualization
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