Here’s a more specific post on programming various well-known beats. The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching
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Also tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, looping, meditation, Music, programming, questlove, repetition, rhythm, time
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Like this sentence, computer programs and songs can refer to themselves. Many computer programs and songs are made of loops within loops within loops. Self-reference gives computers their extreme versatility. It also makes for richer, more interesting music.
Filed in Composition, Music, Software
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Also tagged audio editing, computers, fugees, hip-hop, looping, Music, programming, remixes, Sampling, self-reference
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Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most [...]
Filed in Composition, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged chameleon, computer science, computers, electronica, fractals, herbie hancock, Improvisation, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, Math, Music, music notation, programming, visualization
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“The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs is one of the most-sampled recordings in history. “The Funky Drummer” is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, but for the first decade after its release it was an obscure tune. It’s a nice groove, but as a song, [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged algorithms, audio editing, black thought, copyright, digging the crates, eminem, freestyle, funk, funky drummer, godel, hip-hop, james brown, looping, memes, mos def, Music, programming, remixes, rnb, Sampling, soul, susan blackmore
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Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below. When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged apple, computers, desktop, eighties, interface, metaphor, microsoft, nintendo, super mario bros, visualization, windows
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
When the computer crashes, it seems like it’s frozen. Actually, it’s still working as fast as usual. It only appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over. Computers have become [...]
Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as: the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Software
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Also tagged abstraction, attention, black box, brain, computers, Evolution, microchips, neuroscience, transistors
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In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Music, Software
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Also tagged electronica, hip-hop, mashups, Music, music notation, notation, reason, revival revival, Sampling, screencaps, sequencing, symmetry, visualization
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Thursday, January 8, 2009
Ethanhein.com has had 465,689 hits so far, mostly distributed among my blogs and mp3 pages. A single blog post about Family Guy generates a disproportionately large percentage of that traffic. October 2008 represents a typical month, with 40,611 hits total. That’s around 1,310 a day, 54 an hour. A large percentage of those are from [...]
Sunday, November 16, 2008
The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. [...]
Filed in Internet, Social Media, Writing
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Also tagged blogging, bookmarking, delicious, folksonomy, interface, Internet, neural, social networks, tagging
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