This post is public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. This chapter goes after the big questions: What is music and why does it exist? I love chewing over this stuff.
Tag Archives: Steven Mithen
Composing speech
Robert Davidson’s first-ever tweet is a remarkable one: https://twitter.com/robcomposer/status/558447982807248896 Rob’s tweet raises three profound questions in my mind.
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. 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 …
Auto-tune (is) the news
See a followup post on the Gregorys’ breakout hit, the “Bed Intruder Song.” The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
Clap your hands, stomp your feet
The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original recording of “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer”, but there are some contenders. …
Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.
We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re …
Continue reading “Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.”