All microphones are analog. They convert pressure waves in the air into electricity. Pressure waves in the air vibrate a little piece of metal, and that generates a fluctuating electrical current. Different kinds of mics have different specific ways of doing this. In dynamic mics, the air vibrates a magnet. This magnet is wrapped in …
Continue reading “What is the difference between analog and digital recording?”
Last week in music tech class, we talked about audio recording, and how the placement of microphones relative to the voices or instruments can shape the sound of a recording. Mics don’t just pick up the sound of the voice or instrument itself. They also pick up the sound of the voice or instrument bouncing …
I am committed to teaching my New School music theory students something about the history of tuning in Western European music. I don’t expect them to retain any details or do any math, I just want them to know that the history exists. In preparation, I continue to refine my explanation of this history to …
Short answer: because math. Longer answer: because prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly. To understand what follows, you need to know some facts about the physics of vibrating strings: When you pluck a guitar string, it vibrates to and fro. You can tell how fast the string is vibrating by listening to the …
Final paper in History of Science and Technology with Myles Jackson – see also the presentation version When we ask what the field of gender studies has contributed to understanding the relationship between science and society, we must separate two classes of feminist critique: discussions of equity, and discussions of content. The equity critique is straightforward: …
I recently posted a track on SoundCloud that included the sonification of LIGO’s gravitational wave data. A student asked me what that meant. Since today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, what better time to try to formulate an answer? https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/ligo-chirp First, some context: 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes collided. Each was about thirty times as …
Linear music notation is good for reading, but it doesn’t tell you everything you want to know about underlying musical structure. Notes that are close to each vertically are not necessarily the most closely related. The concept of harmonic relatedness is a complex one, but there’s an excellent tool for beginning to get a handle on it: …
Before you can understand how digital audio works, you need to know a few things about the physics of sound. This animation shows a sound wave emanating through the air from a circular source — imagine that it’s a drum or cymbal. As you can see, sound is a wave, like a ripple in a …
My last post discussed how we should be deriving music theory from empirical observation of what people like using ethnomusicology. Another good strategy would be to derive music theory from observation of what’s going on between our ears. Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson has attempted just that in his essay, Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory …
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I thought it would be a good idea to follow that up with some ideas for how to make music theory more …
