The Groove Pizza

Update: this post is out of date. See the current Groove Pizza here.

Walking to the subway this morning, I had a bright idea for how to make the Drum Loop more kid-friendly by representing the radial grid as a pizza. Here’s a very quick concept sketch:

Groove pizza

To really make this work, I wouldn’t just plop a JPEG of a pizza under the existing UI. I’d want a cartoon pizza rendered in a flat-color style. Instead of colored wedge cells, drum hits would be represented by stylized pepperoni, sausage, anchovies, olives, mushrooms and so on. I’ll throw it on the ever-expanding “future work” pile.

Usually I like to make everything on this blog freely available to whoever wants to use it, but The Groove Pizza is ⓒ Ethan Hein 2013, all rights reserved.

Another radial drum machine

I’ve been working on my thesis app this whole time in the serene knowledge that there’s very little precedent for what I’m trying to do. However, I just learned that I’m wrong, that there’s an app out there with a lot of broad similarities to mine: Loopseque, made by Casual Underground. At first glance, I was alarmed; had I been scooped? Has all my work been in vain? The superficial similarities are hard to miss:

Loopseque

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The radial drum machine: background and inspiration

Update: I now have a functioning prototype of my app. If you’d like to try it, get in touch.

My NYU masters thesis is a drum programming tutorial system for beginner musicians. It uses a novel circular interface for displaying the drum patterns. This presentation explains the project’s goals, motivations and scholarly background.

If you prefer, see it on Slideshare.

My thesis proposal

For those of you curious about what I’m up to in grad school, this is the big thing. Pardon the stilted language, but, you know, academia. See the slideshow!

Update: I now have a functioning prototype of my app. If you’d like to try it, get in touch.

Title

The Drum Loop: a Self-Guided Tutorial System for Programming Dance Rhythms

Introduction

Dance music production software has never been more accessible. However, even “beginner-oriented” programs like Apple’s Garageband presume significant musical knowledge. Would-be dance producers who have access to formal music education are ill served by Eurocentric teaching methods and curricula. By and large, those wishing to learn drum programming are largely left to their own devices. This is unfortunate, because learning how to create beats does not only benefit electronic dance musicians. The ability to actively create and alter rhythms and to match their visual notation with the resulting sounds in real time sharpens the rhythmic abilities of any musician.

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Dreaming of a masters thesis

Update: see a more formal draft of my thesis proposal.

For my NYU masters thesis in Music Technology, I’m designing a beginner-oriented music learning app for the iPad and similar devices. It will approach music the way I wish I had been taught it, and the way I’ve been teaching it to my private students.

I’m motivated in this project by a few axiomatic beliefs:

  • Everyone is born with the capacity to learn music. That capacity just needs to be activated in the right way.
  • Anyone can and should participate in music actively. Like cooking or sports, music need not be totally mastered to benefit the participant, and it should definitely not be the exclusive province of specialists.
  • Beginners should study music they’re familiar with, and that they like.
  • Music teaching for beginners should follow an Afrocentric paradigm that relates to pop, rock and hip-hop. That means starting with rhythm, and treating melodic instruments as percussion.

So here’s what this means for music teaching.

  • Beginners should learn pentatonics first, then mixolydian. Music education customarily begins with the major scale, but pentatonics and mixolydian are closer to pop, rock, hip-hop and dance common practice.
  • Beginners should work modally for a long time. Being constrained to a certain unvarying group of notes frees up mental bandwidth to think melodically and rhythmically. The best mode to work in is the ambiguous major/minor tonality of the blues. Again, this reflects the majority of the American mainstream.
  • Only after becoming familiar with blues should students embark on the major scale and diatonic harmony. Traditional music theory pedagogy is based on rules laid down in the eighteenth century. While these rules are of historical interest, their conflict with current music makes them tedious and alienating.

The app will start with drum programming, giving you templates for basic dance styles (hip-hop, techno, rock) and letting you customize them. Once you have some mastery of loop programming and rhythms, the app takes you into basic MIDI sequencing, first with single-note basslines, then simple pentatonics, and on to chords. For the visual aesthetic, I plan to avoid skeuomorphism entirely. The interface will consist entirely of geometric shapes in flat colors and large text. Here’s a concept image:

Minimalist sequencer

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