The most fun Music Technology class I’m taking this semester is Advanced Audio Production with Paul Geluso. A major component of the class is learning how to listen analytically, and to that end, we were assigned to pick a song and do an exhaustive study of its sonic qualities. We used methods from William Moylan’s [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Recording
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Also tagged ableton, analysis, attention, big boi, funk, hip-hop, janelle monae, melodyne, michael jackson, nyu, omnigraffle, paul geluso, production, r&b, Recording, visualization
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Saturday, October 6, 2012
I love music grad school and am finding it extremely valuable, except for one part: the music theory requirement. In order to get my degree, I have to attain mastery of Western tonal harmony of the common practice era. I am not happy about it. This requirement requires a lot mastery of a lot of [...]
Filed in Autobio, Music, Music Teaching, Politics
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Also tagged america, classical, harmony, history, learning, music teaching, Politics, rhythm
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Octaves are notes that you hear as being “the same” in spite of their being higher or lower in actual pitch. (Technically, notes separated by an octave are in the same pitch class.) Play middle C on the piano. Then go up the C major scale (the white keys) and the eighth note you play [...]
Friday, December 16, 2011
A musical pitch is a blend of many different frequencies beside the fundamental. Here’s a visualization of the different vibrational modes of an ideal string. The string’s movements are the sum of all these different modes simultaneously.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this: The picture shows a stylized nucleus with red protons and blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image. It makes a nice logo. Unfortunately, it’s also totally wrong. There’s an extent to which [...]
Filed in Math, Music Theory, Physics, Science
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Also tagged chemistry, einstein, electromagnetism, harmonics, linkedin, Math, orbitals, Physics, quantum mechanics, visualization
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
When I was a kid, I’d listen to music and wonder, why is this chord progression so much more satisfying than that one? Now I know the answer: secondary dominants, chords that temporarily change the key in a logical-sounding way. If you want to take your songwriting in a more sophisticated direction, you definitely want [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged alicia keys, bob dylan, cadences, chords, circle of fifths, Composition, country, elizabeth cotten, harmony, i got rhythm, jay-z, jazz, neil young, ragtime, secondary dominants, tritones
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It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can [...]
Filed in Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, classical, hall and oates, harmonic minor, jazz, keys, major scale, melodic minor, pop, rock, scales
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I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, deford bailey, folk, grateful dead, harmonica, howard levy, jazz, little walter jacobs, major scale, mixolydian, sonny terry, stevie wonder, toots thielemans
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I studied music theory for a good long time before it dawned on me that you can read the major scale right off the circle of fifths. Here’s the C major scale on the circle. The red notes are the ones in the scale and the grey ones are the ones outside the scale. The [...]
If you’re a guitarist, you may have noticed that it’s hard to get your instrument perfectly in tune. This is not your imagination. If you tune each string perfectly to the one next to it, the low E string will end up out of tune with the high E string. If you use an electronic [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged autotune, guitar, harmonics, harmony, history, Math, Music, tuning
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