Mixolydian mode

If you flatten the seventh note of the major scale, you get Mixolydian mode. It’s like a bluesier version of major.

Mixolydian is a medieval mode that fell out of favor with “art” music composers during the Baroque era. However, it stayed alive and well in various European folk traditions before having an explosion in popularity during the rock era, helped by its resemblance to the blues.

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Designing learning experiences with music technology: good for whom, good for what?

In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy to do. The first night of class, we got into a discussion of Noteflight, the online music notation editor. The debate we had is not specific to Noteflight; you could have it about any notation software. I use Noteflight a lot to embed music examples in this blog:

Noteflight and programs like it support naive trial-and-error learning by giving you lots of aural feedback. When you enter a note, you hear it. If you change its pitch, you hear the result. You can listen back to everything you write at any time. The software’s playback might sound stiff and awkward, but you will still get a good idea of how your music will sound.
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Starfish and Coffee

My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:

According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.

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Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed

It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:

But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:

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Transcribing Noname

Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.”

The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name.

In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or Lil’ Kim. Noname sings a clear melody on the G-flat major pentatonic scale, so even when her pitch is casual, it’s still obvious what note she’s pointing at. However, Noname’s flow is quite a bit more rhythmically complex and ambiguous than the relatively straightforward sixteenth note grid of boom-bap. The main question for me is how literally to take her performance. There are phrases where it sounds like she might have mentally conceived of a string of straight sixteenths, but then dragged or rushed for effect. Or maybe she did all these complex tuplets deliberately? Rather than try to read her mind, I ultimately opted to write out her performed rhythms as exactly as I could. Continue reading

Noteflight as a DAW

The good people at Noteflight have started doing weekly challenges. I love constraint-based music prompts, like the ones in the Disquiet Junto, so I thought I would try this one: compose a piece of music using only four notes.

Noteflight weekly challenge

The music side of this wasn’t hard. My material tends not to use that many pitches anyway. If you really want to challenge me, tell me I can’t use any rhythmic subdivisions finer than a quarter note. Before you listen to my piece, though, let’s talk about this word, “compose.” When you write using notation, the presumption is that you’re creating a set of instructions for a human performer. However, actually getting your composition performed is a challenge, unless you have a band or ensemble at your disposal. I work in two music schools, and I would have a hard time making it happen. (When I have had my music performed, the musicians either used a prose score, learned by ear from a recording, or just improvised.) Noteflight’s target audience of kids in school are vanishingly unlikely to ever hear their work performed, or at least, performed well. Matt Mclean formed the Young Composers and Improvisers Workshop to address this problem, and he’s doing amazing work, but most Noteflight compositions will only ever exist within the computer.

Given this fact, I wanted to create a piece of music that would actually sound good when played back within Noteflight. This constraint turned out to be a significantly greater challenge than using four notes. I started with the Recycled Percussion instrument, and chose the notes B, E, F, and G, because they produce the coolest sounds. Then I layered in other sounds, chosen because they sound reasonably good. Here’s what I came up with: Continue reading

The Groove Pizza now exports MIDI

Since its launch, you’ve been able to export your Groove Pizza beats as WAV files, or continue working on them in Soundtrap. But now, thanks to MusEDLab developer Jordana Bombi, you can also save your beats as MIDI files as well.

Groove Pizza MIDI export

You can bring these MIDI files into your music production software tool of choice: Ableton Live, Logic, Pro Tools, whatever. How cool is that?

There are a few limitations at the moment: your beats will be rendered in 4/4 time, regardless of how many slices your pizza has. You can always set the right time signature after you bring the MIDI into your production software. Also, your grooves will export with no swing–you’ll need to reinstate that in your software as well.

We have some more enhancements in the pipeline, aside from fixing the limitations just mentioned. We’re working on a “continue in Noteflight” feature, real-time MIDI input and output, and live performance using the QWERTY keyboard. I’ll keep you posted.

Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”

See also an analysis of this tune’s amazing drum groove.

If you have even a passing interest in funk, you will want to familiarize yourself with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.”

If you are preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the movement of the hips, then the bassline needs to be a cornerstone of your practice.

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QWERTYBeats design documentation

QWERTYBeats logoQWERTYBeats is a proposed accessible, beginner-friendly rhythm performance tool with a basic built-in sampler. By simply holding down different combinations of keys on a standard computer keyboard, users can play complex syncopations and polyrhythms. If the app is synced to the tempo of a DAW or other music playback system, the user can easily perform good-sounding rhythms over any song. 

This project is part of Design For The Real World, an NYU ITP course. We are collaborating with the BEAT Rockers, the Lavelle School for the Blind, and the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. Read some background research hereContinue reading