Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The more I learn about biology, the less I believe in free will. All of our behavior results from a bunch of molecules bouncing around according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Seen that way, we don’t have any more free will than pebbles being tumbled down a river. We think we have free will [...]
Friday, November 18, 2011
Ella Fitzgerald lost some of her range as she got older, but her soul and phrasing got deeper and deeper. The series of duet albums she did with Joe Pass late in her life are exquisite.
Filed in Key Musicians, Music
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Also tagged age, drumming, ella fitzgerald, funk, Improvisation, jazz, joe pass, max roach, miles davis, soul
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The best remix/mashup tool that I’ve used is Ableton Live. For many years I used a combination of Recycle, Reason and Pro Tools, which was cumbersome and labor-intensive. Ableton handles the same tasks more easily and has a bunch of cool effects the other programs don’t.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Every so often I like to document my ever-evolving internet presence. Here’s how things stand at the moment. Click the flowchart to see it bigger; explanation is below.
Filed in Autobio, Internet, Social Media, Writing
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Also tagged blogging, facebook, flickr, google, instagram, instapaper, linkedin, networks, photography, seo, Social Media, soundcloud, twitter, visualization, wordpress, Writing
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Monday, November 14, 2011
For my tastes, you can’t beat the Ellington Nutcracker. Ellington’s Peer Gynt suite is also pretty wonderful. This one has inspired some remixing from me.
Filed in Music
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Also tagged aaron copland, chick corea, classical, django reinhardt, duke ellington, eumir deodato, jazz, john coltrane, oliver nelson, remixes, sibelius, uri caine, wayne shorter
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Thursday, November 3, 2011
I know this melody as the cartoon snakecharmer song. Here’s a kid playing it on bass clarinet: I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Music
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Also tagged beatles, cartoons, cliches, das racist, folk, jazz, linkedin, louis armstrong, memes, middle eastern music, pop, stereotyping, steve martin, they might be giants
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
The Quora question that prompted this post asks: Why has music been historically the most abstract art form? We can see highly developed musical forms in renaissance polyphony and baroque counterpoint. The secular forms of this music is often non-programmatic or “absolute music.” In contrast to this, the paintings and sculpture of those times are [...]
Saturday, October 29, 2011
The parts of your brain that do your abstract thinking are very tightly interconnected with the parts that control your muscles. In fact, some of that abstract thinking is done by the same brain regions that control your muscles. We don’t yet know why a specific brain region produces a given specific thought, but the [...]
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Improvising music is like giving a speech off the cuff. Before you can do it, you need to know some vocabulary and grammar. In music, the vocabulary is riffs, phrases, scales, sequences and other melodic building blocks. The grammar is music theory. It’s not necessary to learn either one formally, you can figure them out [...]
Dreaming doesn’t have an evolutionary purpose per se. It’s just an emergent property of the piecemeal way our brains have evolved, from the older and more automatic systems out to the newer, learning-enabled systems. I’ve seen it suggested by several different scientists that most animals go about their waking lives in a state similar to [...]