Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is simplified, but the overall experience is qualitatively remarkably similar. The games also change their players’ listening habits. A non-musician friend told me that until he played through Beatles Rock Band as Paul McCartney, he had never paid attention to a song’s bassline. Now he hears all those familiar Beatles songs in a new and richer way, and generally has learned to listen like a musician.

There is one crucial difference between the games and real music-making, however, and that is the absence of improvisation. The player moves through the song like a train on a track, and the games penalize any variation from the prescribed notes. Not all real-life music is improvisational either, but there is usually some element of personal expressiveness. Not so in Guitar Hero. Mimicry is the only way to play.

Rosenstock recognizes this shortcoming, and has devised a game to try to address it. Working with students at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he developed iGotBand, an experimental video game that incorporates improvisation. The player interacts with an assortment of animated avatars. Each avatar presents a row of colored blocks, representing note sequences to be played on the game controller. By playing the avatar’s note sequence, the player can capture it as a fan. The goal is to collect the most fans. The player need not reproduce the note sequences exactly; they are free to use any rhythm and can interject notes of their choice.

Rosenstock’s game is an admirable attempt at incorporating improvisation into a music game, but he fails to address some basic problems. The improvisation in iGotGame has no bearing on the player’s success or failure, making it a nice but meaningless feature. Rosenstock readily admits this to be a problem, and discusses the challenges inherent in turning musical improvisation into a game.

Games and music share the verb “to play.” But in both domains, the word play has several distinct meanings. Rosenstock pithily equates play with freedom, and games with rules. He introduces the term paidia, meaning childlike play: spontaneous and unruly. The musical equivalent would be free jazz and other radical improvisational forms. By contrast, there is play as ludus: games with ordered rules, ranging from chess to basketball, along with nearly all video games. Here the analogy is to classical music, as well as more formally bound jazz styles like bebop. Ludus permits improvisation as well, but within much tighter constraints.

Like other music video games, iGotBand is an example of ludus. The improvisation aspect is a dash of paidia, but again, this aspect of the game has no bearing on the win condition. We can hardly blame Rosenstock for this shortcoming. How would one possibly devise an unambiguous system of rules for judging improvisation that meet the requirements of ludus?

Improvisation can certainly be done well or badly. I’m better at it than my beginner guitar students, and Thelonious Monk was enormously better at it than me. But how could you quantify what makes Monk better than me, and me better than my students? I doubt that such a quantification is possible, even in theory. Rosenstock makes a vague gesture in the direction of social networking as a solution, but this doesn’t address the problem. People on the internet would vote for whichever improvisation they preferred according to whatever inscrutable criteria we use to judge any creative work. There would still be no unambiguous win condition that would meet the expectation of a gamer. Improvisation might superficially resemble a game, but Rosenstock inadvertently demonstrates how fundamentally incompatible it is with a competitive set of rules.

A better direction for music games would be to remove the win condition entirely, and turn them into expressive media. The Guitar Hero interface could work well as a beginner-friendly production and composition tool. It could present familiar song forms like twelve-bar blues and some suggested riffs that the player could alter at will. The pioneering music game FreQuency included a mode where the player could remix the game’s song library. A further convergence between the gentle learning curve of the game world with the open-endedness of music software like Logic or Ableton Live would invite a great many people into making their own music, rather than just passively consuming it.

I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, na na na na, na na na naaah na na na na na na” part from “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Then I got to thinking, this cartoon is actually an inspired recipe for a mashup. So here we go:

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

Production

I put the track together using my new favorite software in the world, Ableton Live. I’ve historically been a Reason/Recycle guy, and while I’ve had Ableton sitting on my hard drive forever, it took me until recently to motivate to check it out. I’m glad I did, it’s been wildly inspirational. Here’s how the mashup looks in Ableton’s session view.

Land Of A Thousand Dances

I used the Wilson Pickett version of “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Here’s a live version — the hook comes at 0:46.

Hey Hey, Good Bye

The chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” is such a ubiquitous meme that it’s strange to think it was originally part of an actual song, rather than something written specifically to be chanted at sports games. It’s by an anonymous bunch of studio musicians who called themselves The Steam. Here they are in Austin Powers finery:

I also included the version by Bananarama, because who doesn’t love Bananarama?

Nas Is Like

The one song I put in that isn’t from the cartoon is “Nas Is Like” by Nas. I used it because the repeated “Nas Nas Nas is like, Nas is like” fits the sonic theme well, and because I needed a good strong beat for certain sections of my track.

Batman

The cartoon references Neal Hefti’s groovy theme song from the sixties TV Batman show. The thing is that there is no “na na na” part anywhere, it’s just the way everyone sings the guitar riff. I figured I’d just put it in rather than split hairs.

Katamari

The Japanese a capella voice with the bit of beatboxing at the end is “Sasasan Katamari” by Yu Miyake, from the classic video game Katamari Damacy.

Randall Munroe shares my love of this game and its infectious theme music:

Hey Jude

Finally, I conclude my mashup with the entire end section of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” a masterpiece of zen-like repetition.

Other na na songs

Songs I could have included, but didn’t:

• My Chemical Romance – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)”
• Akon – “Right Now (Na Na Na)”
• 112 – “Na Na Na Na”
• Jim Jones – “Na Na Nana Na Na”
• Tiffany – “Na Na Na”
• A.B. Quintanilla III Y Los Kumbia Kings – “Na Na Na”

Why are all these “na na na” songs so catchy?

I think nonsense syllables are crucial to good pop music. They enable emotional expression uncluttered by narrowly literal semantic meaning. “Na na na” can mean anything, everything or nothing. It’s a blank space to project whatever feeling you want onto it. I subscribe to the belief that music is much older than language, and that it reaches much deeper into the core of the brain. Like scat singing and obligato, singing “na na na” touches something much bigger and more ancient inside us than any specific set of lyrics can. Maybe that’s why these hooks are so much more memorable than the songs they come from. Anyway, enjoy the mashup, and thanks Randall Munroe for the best comic on the internet.

Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

Facebook as revolutionary tool

Kirkpatrick sees Facebook the way Clay Shirky and other tech utopians see Twitter: as a tool for overthrowing dictators. FB was conceived as a way to organize meeting your friends at the mall, but Kirkpatrick observes that it can be used to organize them to do more ambitious things too. Events in Egypt would seem to bear him out. However, Kirkpatrick later mentioned that FB is every bit as useful to law enforcement and other government entities. Detectives go to FB as their first investigative stop, and Mubarak’s secret police used FB to monitor dissidents and spread misinformation for years before the protest movement took off. So it’s a little simplistic to see FB purely as a way to stick it to the man.

Kirkpatrick sees FB first and foremost as a broadcast medium. A normal person doesn’t have, or want, the kind of genuinely public profile that suits Twitter or blogs. Most people are only writing online for an audience of people they know personally. FB is the first broadcast medium that automatically distributes content across your social network — you just post stuff and an algorithm handles the rest. FB’s algorithm has become opaque lately and it’s hard to figure out why a given item appears or doesn’t in my newsfeed, but the essential point remains valid.

Facebook games

FB is the biggest game platform in the world, by an enormous margin. Zuck and company were apparently quite surprised by the success of games in FB. It didn’t surprise their investors, though. I went to a talk by Reid Hoffman a few years ago and asked him if FB would ever charge money. No way, he said; the big money is going to come from in-game purchasing of virtual goods. While it seems insane to me that anyone would buy a nonexistent cow in Farmville, buy them they do. Facebook’s cut of Zynga’s revenues currently comes to about a million dollars a day, and there’s no reason that number can’t grow dramatically.

Facebook ads

Zuck doesn’t much like advertising. According to Kirkpatrick, the movie does get that aspect right; Zuck resisted introducing ads into FB early on, and even now, the ads are much less obtrusive than you might expect for a commercial web entity. FB is the most targetable advertising platform of all time. Zuck apparently hopes to have FB ads be so well-targeted that they’ll actually be a welcome presence in your life. That’s sweet.

I don’t know that FB ads will ever be useful, but I do expect their targeting to continue to get more precise. Google’s inferential targeting methods are comparatively blunt; they don’t even get your gender right a quarter of the time. FB knows your gender, age, relationship status, profession and more, and they know all that information about your friends too. This enables the kind of laserbeam demographic specificity that marketers have long yearned for.

What is Mark Zuckerburg trying to accomplish?

Kirkpatrick understandably wasn’t too impressed with The Social Network. He thought the “Mark Zuckerburg” character in the movie was a more accurate portrayal of Bill Gates. If anything, Kirkpatrick thinks Zuck is even more focused and ambitious than Gates, and while Zuck isn’t as profound a technical thinker, he does understand psychology a lot better. (I was unsurprised to learn that Zuck’s mom is a shrink.)

Zuck wanted to change the lives of college students, and there’s no doubt he’s accomplished that. Zuck now wants to change everyone’s life. Kirkpatrick doesn’t say why, or to what end. He means to be admiring, but he ends up making Zuck sound like a Bond villain. I think Zuck has done a great job making it easier to keep touch with your acquaintances and other weak ties. But FB isn’t the medium I’d use for any serious connection with people close to me. Pushing FB’s users to make their posts more public and more accessible to advertisers doesn’t exactly foster genuine emotional expression. FB is a staggeringly effective way for me to share witty banter and mass announcements, but I wouldn’t want to carry on any serious intimacy there.

I have no doubt that Zuck will get his wish to see FB become ubiquitous. The US has the most FB users because it has the most internet users overall. But there are other countries where FB users represent a much higher percentage of internet users. These are the countries where the internet is first and foremost a cell phone experience rather than a computer experience, and FB is one of the big drivers of smartphone sales. In Asia, you can get an FB-branded phone, and there’s been discussion of introducing something similar in the US.

Whatever is motivating Zuck, it isn’t (primarily) money. He’s certainly had ample opportunity to cash out. Three years ago Microsoft offered Zuck fifteen billion dollars for FB. Now, of course, Zuck will end up being worth a lot more than that, so maybe he is motivated by money after all, but still, imagine turning down that kind of cash before you’re twenty-five.

In the village, there is no privacy

Kirkpatrick cites the startling fact that as of a year or two ago, a majority of humans are living in cities for the first time in history. He sees FB as a way to return to village life. My early months with FB were a surreal and thrilling reunion with people I knew from every age and stage of my life, many of whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. It’s nice to have mobility and freedom to come and go, but it means that my friends and family are scattered around the world irretrievably, and that can be hard on the emotions. FB brings us back together like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

So that’s the good. The not-so-good is Zuck’s outspoken commitment to forcing transparency on our internet interactions. Since secrets are increasingly difficult to keep in the internet age, Zuck no longer sees a point in trying. This is the exact point where I depart from him. Zuck has the chain of causation backwards — FB is one of the major factors making it harder to keep secrets on the web, but I don’t see where that gives Zuck permission to unilaterally change people’s privacy settings to make it harder still.

Of course, no one has to join FB. But surely there must be some happy medium between having everything I type into the internet be public and not typing anything at all. I can reasonably expect my bank account to be private, and my e-mail. Is that naive? Maybe I’d like a forum to be able to talk about what’s going on in my life in a way that people close to me can access easily and that others can’t. I thought FB would be that forum, but I was wrong.

Strategic self-commodification

Jacqueline Maley, writing in The Age, observes:

[N]othing that occurs in people’s lives, as represented in social media, is disappointing or mediocre or even just neutral. Indeed, life, as reported on websites like Facebook and Twitter, is never merely good or mildly pleasing. It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. It’s amaaaaazing.

The more people I get connected to and the more public my posts are, the less substantive my activity on FB becomes. At this point I mostly only use it for innocuous jokes and trivia. I can’t imagine using FB to write anything vulnerable, or self-doubting, or angry, or really anything too personal. That severely limits the usefulness of the site for me. All my interactions on the site are starting to feel like advertising, of myself, my associations, my ideas. I don’t like that feeling. It’s not that I have any problem at all promoting myself online. I’m perfectly happy to practice strategic self-commodification on LinkedIn and Twitter and even on this blog. But being surrounded by my fellow villagers, slick self-promotion feels weird. It certainly is annoying when my friends use FB to market at me, and I’ve had to unfriend a few of the pushiest ones.

Resistance is futile

Whatever my misgivings are about my privacy, I still use FB every day. It’s an effortless way to share links and news, and much as I love Flickr, if I want a photo to get seen by people I know, I’ll put it on FB. (They get fifty million photo uploads a day right now.) I like seeing what my friends are doing and thinking, and I enjoy bantering with them. And for my loose ties and casual acquaintances, it’s easier for me to write FB messages than to try to keep track of email addresses, much less snail mail.

I know several novice internet users for whom FB is their entire online experience. FB likes that idea and they plan to run with it. Right now FB search is pretty lame, but Kirkpatrick expects them to dominate search someday. They’re planning some sort of tremendous e-mail service that would gather every interaction you’ve ever had with someone into one big thread. (Yes, but will it have BCC? That’s all I’d ask.) FB evolves constantly and fast, and so its growth is unpredictable. All I can say with certainty is that the growth isn’t going to slow anytime soon.

Back in the nineties there was a thing called groupware. Kirkpatrick astutely observes that groupware was the business precursor to FB, and that it had tremendous potential to change the nature of business. In studies, Lotus Notes and the like were shown to meaningfully improve productivity. But groupware never really took off on a grand scale. Kirkpatrick thinks it’s because middle management felt threatened by the hierarchy-flattening properties of social tools. Now social media has arrived in the enterprise, whether middle management wants it there or not. Plenty of big companies block FB on their intranets, but that doesn’t keep people from using it on their phones. Smarter organizations are trying to bring an FB-like functionality into their workflow by rolling out tools like Chatter and Yammer.

FB isn’t likely to dominate enterprise settings, but I do expect it to become omnipresent elsewhere on the web. For all my skepticism about FB and privacy, I’m relieved when I arrive at a site and discover I can log in using my FB profile, rather than having to create yet another login/password pair. I’m even happier when I can use my Twitter handle for that purpose.

Kirkpatrick doubts that any company poses much of a threat to FB. Google might dominate search right now, but social search is going to be more important in the coming years than algorithmic search, and Google hasn’t shown much adeptness at getting people to tell them about their social connections. While the Goog might be jealous of FB’s ubiquity and possible future search dominance, the two companies need each other. FB is going to sell a lot of Android phones in the next few years. Kirkpatrick describes a lot of “3D chess” going on between Google and FB, and Microsoft and Apple too. But he doesn’t see anyone seriously rivaling FB in the social world. A bigger challenge will come from governments, who may decide that they want control over their citizens’ online identities, and that it’s time to crack down. Until then, I, for one, welcome our new social network overlords.

Starflight came on two 360 kB floppy disks. That’s kilobytes, not megabytes. I have one-page Word documents bigger than that. And yet, the game world comprised hundreds of explorable planets, generated randomly by fractal algorithms. This was a revolutionary move, an early gesture toward the open-ended gameplay you see in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Starflight also had a compelling underlying narrative. Most of the time I don’t care about the story behind a game. The games I tend to prefer have no narrative at all, like Tetris, or a very nominal story that isn’t central to the gameplay, like Plants vs Zombies. But Starflight told a terrific story, revealed throughout the gameplay in intriguing fragments.

The storyline begins in the future on an Earthlike planet called Arth. An archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a faster-than-light starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. In the game, you captain one of these ships, based in a space station orbiting Arth.

Your mission, at first, is straightforward Star Trek boilerplate. You fly around looking for endurium and habitable planets. You also occasionally encounter various alien races, some friendly, some not.

As you do your exploring and interacting, you encounter clues to the real plot: something called the Crystal Planet is moving slowly but relentlessly across the galaxy, causing every star it passes to go supernova. You ultimately need to find the Crystal Planet and destroy it before your home sun blows up. There are some nice twists to this story. The Crystal Planet turns out to be made of endurium, the same substance that powers your ship. It further turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings, which are being destroyed by human spaceships. So what you’re doing is heading off a desperate act of self-defense by the helpless creatures you burn in your engine. It feels uncomfortably like being in the Bush Administration. Complicated.

In order to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, you have to do a little detective work on the Galactic Empire’s history, and in so doing, you discover the ‘mythical’ planet Earth. It’s Earth in the far distant future, with the familiar continents and climates, but devoid of human presence. Aside from a few ruined buildings, there’s no sign of our ever having been there. The post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t the sci-fi cliche it is now, and at the height of the Cold War it was alarmingly plausible. When you discover the deserted Earth, it’s a poignant moment. Poignancy is not a quality you find in too many computer games.

Technology has gotten a lot better in the video game world, but the writing hasn’t. I’d trade all the 3D graphics in the world for more game settings like Starflight.

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

The stats on my blog are a writerly gold mine. Anybody who clicks on one of my posts is voting for the ideas in that post. I tend to put stuff up when it’s about two thirds of the way done. Posts that get a lot of hits and comments get more attention and revision from me. My readers decide collectively what gets more attention, what gets polished up into presentable prose and what gets left as free form public note-taking. The really hot ones, about the Funky Drummer or Delicious or Auto-tune The News, are smooth and polished like the rocks in a particularly lively river.

No surprise: the internet loves Michael Jackson and Lil Wayne. Surprises: the internet loves math. Especially dividing by zero. The internet also loves quantum mechanics and its broad overlaps with musical harmonics.

Even better than the stats are the commenters. Moderating my comments is one of the most fun aspects of blogging. I get to be the editor of my own private little Atlantic Monthly. Asking for comments has been a good way for me to crowdsource research, mobilizing my smart friends and any internet stranger who happens along to gather unexpected new data.

I don’t approve all of my comments. Any blog attracts a lot of automated spam comments, some of which slip past the filter. Fortunately, spam is easily spotted. As for hate mail, I don’t get very much. Usually people who disagree with me just stop reading and move on. Long, thoughtful disagreement is even more rare. When someone does disagree with me at length, I take it as a token of respect and am happy to post and respond. This guy’s comment was an opportunity for me to practice my grownup debating skills, learning to disagree agreeably. This is a growth area for me, and the blog has been good for practicing.

Blogging from the iPhone has turned out to be an unexpected treat. I would have expected the phone to be a severely limited blogging tool compared to the full screen and keyboard. For editing HTML, the phone is not the right tool for the job, but it’s perfectly fine for writing prose. Editing and moderating from the WordPress iPhone app is still cumbersome, but the fact that it even exists and they give it away free is a near miracle. I wrote most of this post while waiting in lines. Who needs a Game Boy?

Here’s a list of all Halo’s sources, the ones I can think of anyway.

Every war movie

You play a space marine. You get dropped off in what’s basically a helicopter. You drive jeeps and throw grenades. There’s a particularly entertaining sequence where you’re driving around in what looks like an M1 Abrams tank.

Star Wars

Which is itself a mashup of many World War II movies. George Lucas spliced together a mixtape of dogfight scenes and then had Industrial Light & Magic recreate them shot-for-shot. One mixtape inspired another. The very first level of the game is lifted from the opening scene from Star Wars almost exactly. You fight your way off a spacecraft that’s been boarded and overrun by armored dudes shooting lasers. You make your way to an escape pod and launch it to the planet below. The only thing that’s missing is C-3P0.

Star Trek

In Halo’s universe the United Nations Space Command maps neatly onto Starfleet.

Alien and Aliens

The moody, cramped hallways with flickering lights. The helmet-mounted video cameras. The frequent sense of claustrophobic dread. The horror of humans being parasitized by aliens. One of the Covenant species looks kind of like the aliens in Aliens.

Ringworld

It’s set on a ringworld.

The Bible

Your foes are called the Covenant and the Flood. The game and the world it’s set on are called Halo.

The Song of Roland

Your holographic assistant Cortana is named after a sword.

All this borrowing and sampling is what makes Halo great. If it was “original” it would be tedious. You don’t need a ton of exposition and backstory if you’ve seen the movies or read the books that Halo is based on.

Any influences, references or outright thefts I missed? I know I must have. Hit me up in the comments.

Every Thanksgiving, or every other, the whole mishpokeh gathers at my mom and stepdad’s place in Vermont. We have a good time eating and hanging out, watching football on TV and taking walks on the dirt roads. In the past couple of years we’ve started reintroduced video games into the mix. Katamari Damachy was a hit with some of my younger cousins. But Dance Dance Revolution turned out to be the really big smash. It was my sister’s then-boyfriend, now-fiance who had the idea, and he deserves mad props for thinking of it. The whole clan got involved, from the toddlers up to the seniors.

Serious competition in DDR takes coordination and some athleticism, but if you just want to play for fun, just about anybody can give it a spin and enjoy doing it.

It bums me out that there are so many families like mine who deprive themselves of the essential social vitamins of group singing and dancing. If DDR can get us out of our shells, I say bring on the DDR.

Let’s say you’d never heard of the Beatles, and I played you “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” “Within You Without You,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” You wouldn’t have any reason to think they were written and recorded by the same people. They weren’t. The three songs are effectively solo John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney tunes, respectively. It’s wonderful to imagine that a single group of humans working together could have produced such wildly disparate sounds, and it was a royal bummer for me to find out that during long stretches of the Sgt Pepper’s sessions, the Beatles weren’t even talking to each other.

I think the late Beatles are still so relevant because they remind people my age and younger of our divorced parents. Their albums are extremely well-made art produced by a group of people in a failed and dysfunctional relationship. Yet the product bears a collective name, creating the illusion of a unified creative team. For legal reasons, the songwriting credits are mostly Lennon/McCartney, even after the two stopped writing and recording in the same room. It’s like how my mom retains my dad’s last name decades after their divorce and remarriage to other people. The mental process of trying to resolve the jagged stylistic contradictions in Sgt Pepper is familiar to me, it’s like squaring the conflicting values and loyalties of my parents and stepparents. Late Beatles albums are more like mixtapes than albums by a band.

I was always was more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy. Like me, the Beatles didn’t remotely hate their parents. Not the way rock stars usually do; not the way the Stones did. The Beatles revered their parents. They wrote songs for and about them. It’s mostly McCartney doing these songs, but my favorite John Lennon song ever is about his mother Julia. The Beatles were kid-friendly, too. Could you imagine the Stones writing “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’ Garden”?

Most rock musicians turn their angst into hedonistic defiance or anger. The Beatles turned most of their angst into wistfulness. Even when their music pushed boundaries, it mostly did so in a relatively polite, restrained way. Maybe the band kept so much composure in their later years because instead of playing in rowdy bars, they were performing for George Martin and the BBC engineers in their coats and ties. These straightlaced British civil servants were the only listeners present for most of the band’s live music-making after 1965, along with Yoko Ono. The Beatles’ poker face is uptight by rock standards, but it makes perfect sense for professionals in a high-tech work setting.

The advances in recording technology that gave the late Beatles albums so much of their imaginative sweep also contributed to their feeling of alienation. In the early years, the band recorded by getting together in a room and playing live to single-track tape. By the end, Paul McCartney could use multitracking to play every instrument on “Back In The USSR” and “Birthday”, as if he was Prince recording “When Doves Cry.” The tape collage stuff like “Revolution 9″ and the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is more like Aphex Twin than Chuck Berry. And the instrumentation moved steadily into synth and sampler territory. The flutes at the beginning of “Strawberry Fields” aren’t real, they’re tape samples in a Mellotron. Here’s a video about this early sampling keyboard – thanks, Nick Seaver.

The famous medley that ends Abbey Road is a sixteen-minute DJ mix of leftovers from the White Album and Let It Be. It was carefully edited into a seamless suite by McCartney and George Martin. The medley can’t exist outside of the recording medium. The Beatles never played it live, and to my knowledge no one else has either. How would you even approach it? I learned the first chunk on the guitar and it was a whole music education unto itself, but my rendition is not going to make you forget the original.

Given how electronic their sound was, it’s a shame that the Beatles have never allowed anyone to sample them. If they had been born twenty years later, they might well have tried their hand at loops and breakbeats. Their early songs are collages of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly. The later, more ambitious songs feel more “original” only because the source material for the collaged is more diverse. Wikipedia says:

According to Lennon, “Because” was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven‘s “Moonlight Sonata“. “Yoko was playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano … I said, ‘Can you play those chords backwards?’, and wrote ‘Because’ around them.

Another Beatles classical remix is “Blackbird.” It includes a fragment of Bach‘s Bourrée in E minor. It’s the ascending G major part, a loop that runs through the song. These guys are a narural fit for sample culture.

Not like people are waiting for permission to sample the Beatles. The white half of Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse, made his first big splash by combining Jay-Z‘s Black Album with the White Album into his breathtakingly copyright-infringing Grey Album. While no one is officially allowed to sample the Fab Four, some people have been allowed to use pieces of cover versions.

Common’s song “Forever Begins”, produced by Kanye West, samples a cover of “She’s Leaving Home” by Syreeta. The line “Father snores as his wife gets into…” loops under the verses. The sample cuts off “her dressing gown.” It’s a strange thing to rap over, but it works. (The track also uses another perfect sample, Steve Gadd’s snare drum intro to “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon.)

Here’s a screen shot of Beatles Rock Band – click through to see the fascinating vocal notation more clearly. It’s a combination of MIDI and standard music notation.

So what do you say, Beatles copyright holders? How about loosening up the restrictions a little? People are remixing the tunes anyway. Why not get in front of the situation and put the stems on iTunes or Amazon? Nothing can ever replace those albums, but why should the story end there? “Forever Begins” doesn’t take anything away from “She’s Leaving Home” any more than “Because” takes away from the Moonlight Sonata. We the fans have been remixing the songs in our heads for years anyway. Why not let us do it with computers too?

Here’s a remix/cover/mashup of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” combined with “Galang” by M.I.A. and “Slide” by Missy Elliot. Vocals by Babsy Singer, production and game controller synth by me.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.

The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

The title of this post comes from Cartman’s reaction when Stan’s dad pulls out his real guitar and plays “Carry On My Wayward Son.”

I’m a big fan of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I play the actual guitar, and have done it in several real bands. The video game experience isn’t exactly the same as playing real guitar, but it conveys a lot of the flavor. Music games are first and foremost about close listening, and so is playing music on instruments. The stuff you’re doing from the wrists down is automatic. Learning how to listen to other people while you play is the hardest and most important part of mastery of any instrument. Even if you’re performing solo, you need to learn to listen to yourself.

If you really want to listen intently, it helps to be on your feet dancing. If you can’t dance on your feet, you can still do it in your imagination. Guitar Hero and Rock Band aren’t as dance-oriented as some of the other music games, but getting your boogie on is still their basic point. Most of the fun of music is what’s happening in the room around it. Chords and scales are interesting, deeply interesting if you like math, but they’re just a means to an end, helping people have a good time.

I haven’t played it yet, but I imagine that Beatles Rock Band is like being in a very tight Beatles tribute band.

I’ve never been in a Beatles tribute band, but I try to get every band I play in to do some Beatles song. Playing their music is like a well thought-out series of challenging puzzles. The songs have beautiful internal logic, and they feel good under the fingers and in the voice. They’re more technically demanding than most rock songs, but they’re still accessible if you’re willing to put in the practice time. They promote flow.

The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Beatles Rock Band by Daniel Radosh called “While My Guitar Gently Beeps.” The designers of Beatles Rock Band are very concerned about the authenticity of the experience:

Between songs, players will hear the group warming up and bantering in the studio. Martin combed through hundreds of hours of tape to find these clips, but the chatter, recorded directly into microphones, lacked the subtle echo and ambient noise you would have heard if you were actually in the studio at the time. So after laying down a sound bed of background noise, Martin played the original clips through a set of speakers on the studio floor and rerecorded them through his mikes, this time with all the ringing acoustics of the room. Through the control-room window, Martin stared into the empty studio as if his mind’s eye could put physical form to the disembodied sounds. Across the decades a guitar was tuned, a snare drum rattled and John Lennon warmed up his voice for a new song called “Come Together:” He got teenage lyrics, he got hot rod baldy.

The concern is admirable, but also kind of goofy. How authentic can it be? It’s a video game. The whole point of a simulation is that it’s fake. And the game designers know that all the authenticity lies within certain prescribed limits. You don’t enter into virtual bickering during the recording of the last few albums. You don’t get to play drums as Paul on the songs from the White Album recorded while Ringo had temporarily quit the band.

Authentic or not, the game is doing the music world a big service. Beatles music rewards all of the attention you give it many times over. I’m glad that so-called non-musicians have an incentive to geek out over it. Daniel Radosh is right:

Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition. When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it.

Paul McCartney says he’s on board with the game enthusiastically: “You want people to get engaged.”

McCartney sees the game as “a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the 60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”

Yeah. You know what really makes me feel like I possess a song? If you let me remix it. But so, until then, this game is a good step.

Not everybody likes music-based video games. South Park’s parody of Guitar Hero gives voice to the widespread hostility that the rock world has towards anything virtual or electronic seeming. There’s the idea that because it’s not “real” music, Guitar Hero takes away from actual musical skill.

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels.

The Beatles are natural candidates for virtual treatment. From Revolver onwards, they were purely a studio band. Most of those later songs are difficult to play live, and some of them are impossible. In the later years there are the futuristic experiments with analog synths and sampling and tape editing. The Beatles at times resembled an electronica band more than a rock band. Paul McCartney even produced some experimental ambient techno with Delia Derbyshire, back when that meant vacuum-tube oscillators and reel-to-reel tape. He recognizes that the tools are less important than the art behind it.

The teacup clattered quietly on its saucer, and McCartney thought about the changes he’d seen in the music world. “There were no cassette recorders” when he and Lennon first started writing songs, he noted. “We just had to remember it. Then suddenly there were cassettes, then we were working on four track instead of two track, then you got off tape, then you’ve got stereo — which we thought just made it twice as loud. We thought that was a really brilliant move.” After the Beatles came CDs, digital downloads and now video games. “I don’t really think there’s any difference. At the base of it all, there’s the song. At the base of it, there’s the music.”

So if this is all about people enjoying music, why is there so much resistance from musicians? Why are real guitarists so threatened? I get the sense that videogame “rock drag” is offensive to people who don’t like any kind of drag. This is a tension that goes way back before video games. From Little Richard to Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, a lot of popular music is made by people who challenge our gender signifiers. Rock is a hypermasculine, ultraheterosexual form, but a lot of those dudes sing and dress and dance like chicks, and vice versa. Rock stars have a lot of leeway with gender roles that sports stars and politicians don’t. Rock is also pretty anxious about all of the crossdressing, an anxiety usually comes out disguised as a concern about authenticity.

The anxiety about music games also reminds me of rock’s ambivalence about synthesizers, especially among hard rock fans. Hard rock is supposed to be raw and authentic. Synthesizers are not considered by the hard rock audience to be raw or authentic. Metal fans never forgave Van Halen for the synth intro in “Jump.” They love to chuckle at the video of the band flailing to play along with the digital tape at the wrong speed and pitch. But even if they don’t like the idea of synths, rock fans find it hard to resist the sound. Rock is a sonically sophisticated art form, and if you really want to push the envelope, fattening up your guitar sounds with epically huge synthesizer waveforms can sound awesome. Warrant used to tour with a keyboard player who played from offstage and who they never mentioned.

I’ve made a commitment to let go of authenticity. I’ve had a lot more fun both listening to and playing music since I made that decision. Digital fakery feels more real to me than playing acoustic instruments half the time anyway. What matters to me is that everybody’s having a good time. Beatles drag has reliably been fun in other media, I see no reason why it won’t make a great video game.

Update: I finally did get to play Beatles Rock Band and it’s every bit as awesome as advertised. Also, here’s a good quote from a blog post by Jeff Vogel arguing that Rock Band is really a tool to facilitate deep listening:

I don’t want to make music. There are not enough hours in the day. I need a new creative outlet sucking up my time like I need a hole in my head. But I absolutely love to listen to music. And, when I play Rock Band, I play the songs I want to listen to, and I noodle along with them in a rhythmic, physical way that adds to my enjoyment of the song.

I still think this is pretty close to the experience of playing in a cover band, that it’s more a matter of studying existing music more closely than it is about expressing yourself. Playing is mostly about listening.