Skip to content

Tag Archives: visualization

Image schemas in music software

I’m doing a ton of writing for grad school, and will be posting the highlights here. First off, an abstract and discussion of this article: Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48 [...]

Updated social flow

Every so often I like to document my ever-evolving internet presence. Here’s how things stand at the moment. Click the flowchart to see it bigger; explanation is below.

Is music the most abstract art form?

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 [...]

Visualizing music

When you do a lot of computer-based music production and composition, you’re working as much with your eyes as you are with your ears. It’s only natural to start wondering about other music visualization systems. The representations in audio editors like Pro Tools and Ableton Live are purely informational, waveforms and grids and linear graphs. [...]

Music theory and quantum mechanics

In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this: The picture shows a stylized nucleus with red protons and blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image. It makes a nice logo. Unfortunately, it’s also totally wrong. There’s an extent to which [...]

How does a computer work?

Computers can only do a few very simple operations consisting of flipping electrical switches on and off. You can represent numbers in patterns of the on-off states of sequences of switches. By flipping switches on and off in particular patterns, you can perform simple mathematical operations on the numbers. You can do more complex mathematical [...]

Another social media flowchart

Here’s a graphic I did for Spork Media explaining how an ideal social media setup for a restaurant. Click through for a detailed explanation. Who doesn’t love flowcharts?

Scales and emotions

Following up and expanding on a post about learning music theory with Auto-tune. See also a post about the major scale modes and an intro to minor keys. So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a [...]

Inside the recording process

The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording. I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting [...]

Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA

The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware [...]