Japan doesn’t have a substantial psychedelic drug culture that I’m aware of, but you’d never guess it from Katamari Damacy.
The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
Filed in music, science, software, web
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Also tagged anxiety, audio editing, autotune, book, computers, evolution, hip-hop, joe biden, katie couric, martin luther king jr, mashups, music theory, news, politics, pop, rnb, steven mithen, tv, youtube
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on some dude’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
Filed in hardware, math, music, science, software
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Also tagged book, computers, drum machines, eighties, electronica, emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer” but there are some contenders. The compilation [...]
Filed in music
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Also tagged book, drumming, evolution, funk, funky drummer, james brown, lil mama, michael jackson, percussion, primates, queen, remixes, rhythm, rnb, sampling, seventies, sixties, soul, steven mithen, stone age
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We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re [...]
Filed in music, science
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Also tagged audience participation, book, clocks, coltrane, drumming, evolution, pro tools, quantum, rhythm, rubato, steven mithen, time
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It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Filed in music, software, video games
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Also tagged book, dance, ddr, guitar hero, improvisation, japan, jazz, king of the hill, miles davis, music notation, video games, visualization
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Biz Markie. Who doesn’t love him? Our broken intellectual property system, that’s who.
Filed in music
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Also tagged biz markie, book, christianity, copyright, criminal justice, fail, gilbert o'sullivan, hip-hop, looping, memes, remixes, sampling
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My friend Leo told me that he always faces a conflict when shopping for jazz records. He wants to show love for working musicians by buying their newer recordings, but then, he could always just pick up another Miles Davis album and know it’s going to be ridiculously good. Probably my favorite Miles album out [...]
Filed in music
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Also tagged audio editing, book, funk, improvisation, jazz, miles davis, music theory, recording, recursion, remixes, seventies, sixties, tape editing
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People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated [...]
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Also tagged analog, book, electricity, electromagnetism, electronica, feedback, guitar, harmonics, harmony, interface, jimi hendrix, music theory, recursion, remixes, resonance, tuning, wah pedal
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