Blogging about blogging

I started posting writing online long before I had any academic ambitions. I wrote for self-promotion, self-expression, and because I wasn’t sure what else to do with myself. I did a lot of what I would now call a reflexive and reciprocal process for research into music and related topics. As it turns out, this was a good habit to have when I went to grad school. I have posted most of my masters and doctoral level writing assignments, notes, papers, and research materials on the web. In the process, I have met an incredible lot of people who I would not have met otherwise.

XKCD on blogging

For a while I was only posting about innocuous music and technology-related topics: theory, production, general appreciation. But as I go deeper into the intersection of music education and hip-hop, my posts have been getting more political. This material attracts supporters and allies, which is gratifying, but also heated criticism, and, since the dawn of the Trump era, a growing volume of hate speech. The constructive feedback comes in the form of affirmation, social contacts, corrections, arguments, tips, and directions for further inquiry. Some of these interactions are direct, in the form of comments or replies on social media, but I also get plenty of indirect feedback via my Google alerts. Research and writing are lonely undertakings, and feeling myself connected to a lively conversation at all times has been an invaluable motivator.

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Why do people think music should be free?

The best way to get a professional recording artist angry is to say that everybody has a right to download their music for free. The outrage is well-motivated. Recording music at the pro level is expensive, in time as well as money. Just because it’s easy to pirate music, why have we as a society all of a sudden decided that it’s acceptable? Shoplifting is easy too, and we don’t condone that. My musician friends sometimes feel like the world has gone crazy, that in the blink of an eye their work went from being valuable to worthless. How could this change have happened so fast?

I have a theory, and if you’re a musician, or you aspire to be one, you won’t like it: people are right to expect music to be free.

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Why do people love music so much?

We’re attracted to music for the same reason we’re attracted to fire: it’s been a critical survival tool for us for hundreds of thousands of years.

Partying in the stone age

Music cognition is one of the first high-level brain functions to emerge in infants, coming long before walking and talking. It’s also one of the last to go in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Music (and its twin sibling dance) are fundamental tools for soothing infants, for attracting mates, and for motivating and bonding groups ranging from kindergarten classes to infantry units. It enables us to both express our emotions and to actively modulate them, both within ourselves and among one another. Music is one of the very few known cultural universals. It’s incredibly ancient — there’s good reason to believe that it precedes language in human evolutionary history. There’s plausible speculation that it precedes bipedal walking as well. It’s no great mystery why people like it.

The real mystery is why we in modern western civilization developed the perverse idea that music is a frivolity. Steven Pinker, an otherwise very smart person who should know better, describes music as “auditory cheesecake.” Here in America, we relegate music-making to highly skilled experts, while most of us participate in it passively or not at all. We shouldn’t be surprised that depression, violence, drug abuse and suicide are epidemic in our country, even among our unprecedented levels of wealth, stability and safety. Lack of musical participation is both a cause and symptom of our unhappiness, and it demonstrates the failure of modern civilization to meet our emotional needs. In other human societies, probably in most of them throughout our deep history, music has always been a part of daily life, on a level with cooking or gossip. We would be wise to restore routine music-making to its proper place in the center of our lives.

Provoked by this Quora thread, which includes an answer by Hans Zimmer.

Will musicians ever be replaced by robots?

A Quora user asks whether artificial intelligence will ever replace human musicians. TL;DR No.

David Cope and Emily

If music composition and improvisation could be expressed as algorithmic rule sets, then human musicians would have reason for concern. Fortunately, music can’t be completely systematized, much as some music theorists would like to believe it can be. Music is not an internally consistent logical system like math or physics. It’s an evolved set of mostly arbitrary patterns of memes. This should be no surprise; music emerges from our consciousness, and our consciousness is an evolved system, not an algorithmic one. We can do algorithmic reasoning if we work really hard at it, but our minds are pretty chaotic and unpredictable, and it isn’t our strong suit. It’s a good thing, too; we may not be so hot at performing algorithms, but we’re good at inventing new possible ones. Computers are great at performing algorithms, but are lousy at inventing new ones. Continue reading

Why isn’t repetitive music boring to listen to?

A Quora user asks why we don’t get bored when listening to repetitive music. This is related to the equally interesting question of why we can play repetitive music without getting bored. Why is there so much joy in repetition?

"Chameleon" by Herbie Hancock

Humans are pattern recognizers. You’d think that once you’d learned the pattern of a repetitive piece of music, it would quickly get boring, and then annoying. Sometimes, that is in fact what happens. I don’t enjoy Philip Glass’ music; it makes me feel like I’m stuck in the mind of someone with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I adore James Brown and Fela Kuti, and my iTunes library is stuffed with loop-based hip-hop and electronica. So what’s going on? Why do I find Philip Glass annoying, but not James Brown?

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My process of composing music

Quora user Jennifer Ha asked me: What is your process of composing music? She goes on:

For me I have to wait for the right inspiration given to me very irregularly. But it seems others can compose with chords deliberately. How do you compose, and do you feel proud of it all the times (i.e. know you couldn’t have done better)?

I have two methods of composition: improvisation and collage. I use the computer for both. At the moment, my software of choice is Ableton Live. Before that I mostly used Pro Tools and Reason. It’s been a long time since I “composed” something on a piece of paper (except for music school assignments.)

Composing with Ableton Live

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Getting ready for the recording studio

Here’s an interesting Quora thread about what you should know before booking a rock band session. I can’t improve on the excellent post by Bruce Williams, but I have a few things to add.

The challenge of recording is 10% technical and 90% psychological, especially if you’re inexperienced. You may be as cool as a cucumber onstage and then turn into a nervous wreck when the tape rolls. Your band may be great friends until the time pressure of the studio brings out unsuspected conflicts and dysfunction. Fortunately, all of this stuff can be prepared for.

Recording

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Is it boring to play repetitive music?

Quora user Andrew Stein asks:

Musicians: How do you deal with playing songs that have very monotonous parts?

I’m going to use James Brown’s Sex Machine as an example. Don’t get me wrong, I love the song.  However, the rhythm guitar seems to be nothing but 2 chords played over and over and over with no variation (except for the bridge).  What is it like to have to play songs like that?  Even if you like the song, do you dread it, or do you just have fun as long as you are playing music?  If you are bored, how do you deal with it?  Does your mind wander while you play, or do you have to concentrate?

This is a profound question. It gets to the heart of the conflict playing out in Western music between linearity and circularity. European classical music takes the form of a linear narrative, a hero’s journey. Music from Africa (and many other places) tends to take the form of cycles, setting a mood rather than telling a story. This is a gross oversimplification, but it’s a useful one.

The major musical event of the past hundred years (in Western cultures anyway) has been the hybridization between European linearity and African (and Latin American and Asian) circularity. This has been most dramatic in the United States, with its big populations of immigrants and descendants of enslaved people. Our popular music has been getting more and more circular (more “African”) with every passing decade, from jazz to R&B to rock to funk to hip-hop. And our popular music makes its presence felt in every corner of the world.

James Brown is a critical figure in this story because he did his best work at a time when black Americans were beginning to assert pride in their roots and ethnic identity. (“Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”) JB made it an explicit goal to push his music in a more African direction: complex rhythmic grooves, minimal harmonic activity, improvisational chants instead of sung melodies, and trance-like repetition over long time scales. “Sex Machine” isn’t even his most repetitive groove. Check out “There Was A Time,” a four-bar cell repeated more or less identically for over seven minutes. And by the way, JB’s love of Africa was reciprocated; he influenced a generation of African musicians, most famously Fela Kuti.

So, to finally answer your question: If you approach “Sex Machine” with a Western classical value system, it certainly is going to seem “monotonous.” The classical term for that guitar riff is an ostinato, from the Italian word for “obstinate.” That’s not exactly a term of endearment. You may enjoy the song, but you’d naturally imagine that it’s intellectually unsatisfying and therefore boring to play.

Coming at “Sex Machine” from an Afrocentric perspective is different. The groove is devastating, effortless, and transporting. Adding variations to make it more narrative or “interesting” would only water it down and diminish its power. The groove isn’t really aimed at your prefrontal cortex. It’s aimed at the rest of your brain, your limbic system and motor cortex, not to mention your body from the neck down. The point of funk is to dissolve your conscious self into the holistic unity of the groove. As JB says in “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose,” “Check out your mind, swing on the vine, in the jungle brother.”

And as Prince sings, “There’s joy in repetition, there’s joy in repetition, there’s joy in repetition, there’s joy in repetition.”

Playing a James Brown groove is harder than it seems. Learning the riff is easy enough, but sustaining it at length takes Jedi-like focus. Playing funk well demands a certain relaxed intensity, and if that sounds like an inherent contradiction, it is. Keeping a balance between looseness and discipline takes more than musical skill; it requires you to be able to suspend your anxieties, your distracting thoughts and your self-consciousness. Fortunately, the groove itself is a great tool to help you do exactly that.

Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?

No.

Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band in 1957, when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. George Harrison joined the following year, when he was fourteen. (Ringo didn’t join the band until 1962.) Who were your friends when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Imagine yourself intensely and inseparably joined with these same people professionally, socially and creatively, thirteen years later. When I was in my late twenties, I certainly wouldn’t wanted to have been trapped in a series of windowless rooms with my high school friends under enormous pressure to be brilliant. It would have been a miracle for the Beatles to keep a good working relationship any longer than they did under the best of circumstances. And the Beatles’ circumstances were not, emotionally speaking, ideal.

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What is an octave?

Octaves are notes that you hear as being “the same” in spite of their being higher or lower in actual pitch. (Technically, notes separated by an octave are in the same pitch class.) Play middle C on the piano. Then go up the C major scale (the white keys) and the eighth note you play will be another C an octave higher. The “oct” part of the word refers to this eight step distance up the scale.

From a science perspective, octaves are pitch intervals related by factors of two. When a tuning fork plays standard concert A, it vibrates at 440 Hz. The A an octave higher is 880 Hz, and the A an octave lower is 220 Hz. Any note with the frequency 2^n * 440 will be an A. It’s a central mystery of human cognition why we hear pitches related by powers of two as being “the same” note. The ability to detect octave equivalency is probably built in to our brains, and it isn’t limited to humans. Rhesus monkeys have been shown to be able to detect octaves too, as have some other mammals.

Original post on Quora