Polymeter vs polyrhythm

As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image:

The most concisely I can put this into words: in polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, but the downbeats aren’t. In polyrhythm, the downbeats are aligned, but the grid lines aren’t.

Continue reading

Erroll Garner meets the Carpenters

When I teach remixes in music tech class, I like to make the analogy to radical jazz arrangements of standards. Technically, John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix of the version from The Sound of Music, but it occupies the same cultural role as a remix. (In fact, I just accidentally typed it as, John Coltrane’s remix of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix. There you have it.) One of my favorite ever jazz “remixes” is Erroll Garner’s version of “(They Long To Be) Close To You” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which the Carpenters had a number one hit with in 1970.

Continue reading

What is going on in this Noname beat?

Hip-hop in the post-Dilla era has been pushing the boundaries of rhythmic dissonance. The coolest and most mysterious groove I’ve heard in a rap song lately is “Sunny Duet” by Noname.

The rhythms here are bananas and I struggled for quite a while to figure out what was going on. I got very excited for a minute when I thought I realized that the hi-hats are playing a septuplet grid.

I was wrong, though, it’s not the hi-hats doing that rhythm, it’s the “doot doot doot” backing vocals. But I went to the trouble of learning how to do tuplets in Dorico and made the graphic, so you might as well enjoy it.

Continue reading

Jazzy harmony and crazy tuplets in Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1

Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 in B-flat Minor is particularly hip.

All this metrical instability is easier to parse over a steady beat, so I made this remix:

I thought that a “nocturne” was supposed to evoke the night, or dreams or something, but no, it just means “a piece of music meant to be played at night,” like in a salon setting.

Continue reading

The Groove Pizzeria

For his NYU music technology masters thesis, Tyler Bisson created a web app called Groove Pizzeria, a polyrhythmic/polymetric extension of the Groove Pizza. Click the image to try it for yourself.

Note that the Groove Pizzeria is still a prototype, and it doesn’t yet have the full feature set that the Groove Pizza does. As of this writing, there are no presets, saving, or exporting of audio or MIDI. However, you can send MIDI via the IAC bus to the DAW of your choice (Mac OS Chrome only). You can also record the Groove Pizzeria’s output using Audio Hijack.

Like the Groove Pizza, the Groove Pizzeria is based on the idea of the rhythm necklace, a circular representation of musical rhythm. The Groove Pizza is a set of three concentric rhythm necklaces, each of which controls one drum sound, e.g. kick, snare and hi-hat. The Groove Pizzeria gives you two sets of concentric rhythm necklaces, each of which can have its own time duration and subdivisions. This means that you can use the Groove Pizzeria to make polyrhythm and polymeter.

Continue reading

Kumbaya

When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from Joan Baez:

But then I read on Anne C Bailey’s blog that “Kumbaya” is a Gullah song, named for the dialect version of the phrase “come by here.” Bailey’s post links to the earliest known recording, a 1926 wax cylinder whose performer is listed only as “H. Wylie.” This version is surprisingly funky for those of us raised on the white folkie version.

Continue reading

Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam”

One of my favorite guest verses in all of hip-hop is the one that Chance The Rapper does on Kanye West’s beautiful “Ultralight Beam.”

The song is built around an eight bar loop. (See this post for an analysis of the chord progression.) Chance’s verse goes through the loop five times, for a total of forty bars. It’s not at all typical for a rap song to include a one and a half minute guest verse–it’s almost enough material to make a whole separate song. By ceding so much space in his album opener, Kanye has given Chance the strongest endorsement possible, and Chance makes the most of his moment.

Chance The Rapper

Continue reading

User interface case study: Patterning

The folks at Olympia Noise Co recently came out with a new circular drum machine for iOS called Patterning, and it’s pretty fabulous.

Patterning

The app’s futuristic look jumps right out at you: flat-colored geometric shapes with zero adornment, in the spirit of Propellerhead Figure. There’s nothing on the screen that doesn’t function in some way. It’s a little dense at first glance, but a complex tool is bound to have a complex interface, and Patterning reveals itself easily through exploration.

Continue reading