This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Key Musicians, Music, Music Business, Politics, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged ableton, afrika bambaataa, amazing grace, amen break, authenticity, bach, beatles, beyonce, biz markie, brian eno, classical, compulsory licensing, copyright, danger mouse, david shields, dj, dj earworm, dj premier, double dee and steinski, entropy, Evolution, fairlight cmi, fugees, girl talk, grandmaster flash, harold bloom, hip-hop, informationtheory, jay-z, jesse walker, john coltrane, jonathan lethem, linkedin, looping, marcus boon, mashups, memes, midi, missy elliot, mohawks, nas, nyu, originality, plato, plunderphonics, questlove, reason, Recording, remixes, richard dawkins, sasha frere-jones, stravinsky, susan blackmore, theodor adorno, walter benjamin, william gibson
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Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012) As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Music, Music Business, Politics, Sampling
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Also tagged beastie boys, biz markie, copyright, de la soul, DJ Kool Herc, george clinton, girl talk, linkedin, nyu, Politics, public enemy
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Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity. Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far [...]
Filed in Emotion, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Software
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Also tagged 808, 808s and heartbreak, autotune, classical, distortion, fiona apple, frank ocean, hip-hop, jay-z, john adams, kanye west, pop, posthuman, rnb, singing, soul, watch the throne
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Thelonious Monk’s beautiful ballad “Round Midnight” is said to be the most widely recorded and performed jazz tune — that is, a tune that was written specifically for jazz, not an adaptation of a showtune or pop song. It’s a testament to its popularity that it’s one of exactly two songs that Dave Chappelle knows [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Music
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Also tagged ballads, bebop, bud powell, carmen mcrae, Composition, cootie williams, dave chappelle, dizzy gillespie, ella fitzgerald, hip-hop, jazz, john coltrane, krs-one, linkedin, miles davis, oscar peterson, singing, thelonious monk
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Here are some recommended people to follow on Twitter. Most of them have blogs of various kinds which you can access via their Twitter profiles. For hip-hop, sampling and everything related: Questlove Kevin Nottingham Whosampled Grown Folks Music Wayne Marshall Hank Shocklee Jeff Chang For technology: Deb Chachra Tara Busch Paul Lamere For the highbrow [...]
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.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter describes and defines the concept of recursion, and discusses its applications in computer science, consciousness, art, music, biology and various other fields. Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.
Filed in Math, Music, Writing
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Also tagged anthills, bach, books, buddhism, computer science, douglas hofstadter, emergence, escher, fractals, godel, looping, meditation, recursion, xkcd
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Long before I got interested in electronic music, I was a fine arts guy. It bothers me that unauthorized appropriation of a music recording will get you sued, but visual artists who appropriate pop cultural materials get into museums and art history textbooks. Marcel Duchamp In ancient times and more traditional societies, there was never [...]
DJ BC is my favorite mashup artist right now. He deserves the nod just for Snoop’s Nu Shooz:
Filed in Autobio, Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged bangles, beatles, brian eno, danger mouse, dj bc, dj earworm, hip-hop, jay-z, linkedin, mashups, mia, nu shooz, pop, snoop dogg, soundcloud, wu-tang
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Thursday, October 6, 2011
Girl Talk doesn’t actually isolate sounds; it’s almost impossible to do that. You can use EQ to quiet background sounds to a limited extent, but there’s no way to perfectly isolate sounds from a mixed track. Girl Talk and other mashup artists rely heavily on a capellas (vocal-only mixes) and instrumentals, which are included with [...]