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 [...]
Friday, September 30, 2011
Here are the areas of math that can most easily be understood in musical terms. Wave mechanics The concept of orbitals in quantum mechanics made zero sense to me until I finally found out that they’re just harmonics of the electron field’s vibrations. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Einstein conceptualized wave mechanics [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged bellringing, circle of fifths, combinatorics, discrete math, graph theory, linkedin, logarithms, Math, modular arithmetic, Music, neal stephenson, quora, recursion, school, wave mechanics
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Predictable unpredictability. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry because they engage our pattern-recognizers. But we only like patterns 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 again. And if the [...]
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to do the blues justice, and that’s diminished chords. To make a diminished chord, you start on [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, chords, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, fats waller, jazz, lambert hendricks and ross, Music Theory, robert johnson, roots, thelonious monk
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I follow science news the way normal dudes follow sports. If you’re geekily inclined like me, you may have heard that the particle physics people are getting closer to producing the Higgs boson. You may have wondered what that is exactly, and why you should care. The science press has nicknamed the Higgs “the God [...]
I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and [...]
Filed in Composition, Math, Music, Music Teaching, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged beatles, country, dance, electronica, fela kuti, hip-hop, jazz, looping, memory, modules, recursion, remixes, rza, structure, theodor adorno
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
If you’re in a band, chances are you feel like you’re supposed to be writing your own material. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales (should you, improbably, be selling albums.) Writing your own stuff isn’t just a financial consideration. The [...]
Filed in Autobio, Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged arrangement, big band, chet baker, copyright, count basie, duke ellington, frank sinatra, harmony, Improvisation, jay-z, jazz, john coltrane, lego, looping, memes, miles davis, modules, Music, Music Theory, my favorite things, originality, reharmonization, remixes, Sampling, swing, the sound of music
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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, recursion, revival revival, Sampling, screencaps, sequencing, visualization
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