Friday, September 30, 2011
Here are the areas of math that can most easily be understood in musical terms. Wave mechanics The concept of orbitals in quantum mechanics made zero sense to me until I finally found out that they’re just harmonics of the electron field’s vibrations. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Einstein conceptualized wave mechanics [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged bellringing, circle of fifths, combinatorics, discrete math, graph theory, linkedin, logarithms, Math, modular arithmetic, neal stephenson, quora, recursion, school, symmetry, wave mechanics
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Predictable unpredictability. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry because they engage our pattern-recognizers. But we only like patterns up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention again. And if the [...]
Saturday, September 10, 2011
I’ve been lucky enough to experience heightened and altered consciousness from music making, listening and dancing. Chasing that feeling motivates me to keep making and studying music, in spite of the lousy pay. I’m reading a wonderful book right now by William Benzon called Beethoven’s Anvil. Benzon looks at the state of brain research and [...]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
The odds of your making a living performing your own material are small, vanishingly small. But there are a lot of ways to make a living in music. If you do succeed at the singer-songwriter path using the tips listed in the other answers, mazel tov. In the likelihood that the singer-songwriter-musician thing doesn’t pay [...]
I’m a huge stone age dork, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings was catnip for me.
“Ye-yeah” and “baby” are open-ended expressions of love, enthusiasm and general positive energy. They might be specifically directed at a loved one, but usually they’re directed at everyone and no one and have no particular meaning at all. Pop lyrics aren’t about conveying specific information. They’re about sound for the sake of sound. The voice [...]
To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in [...]
I’m mostly glad to see the album go the way of the buggy whip. It’s rare that a band can get two or three decent songs together, much less eleven or twelve sequenced in a thoughtful way. Not everything that gets released is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I’m relieved to be able to [...]
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There’s a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. Read about it here: Humans’ success as a species is due entirely to our social organization, and [...]