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

The authors discuss the ways that user interface design for music production and teaching software is informed by embodied cognition, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that all metaphors trace their roots to states of the human body, which are the only basis for abstract thought that we possess. The closer a metaphor is to a state of the body, the easier it is for us to understand.

In music, the most obvious bodily metaphors are rhythm and repetition, which we experience throughout the sensory world, not just in music. We also use a variety of spatial metaphors for music, referred to by the authors as image schemas. Listeners commonly conceive of music using images of containers, cycles, verticality, balance, the notion of center-periphery, and (in the case of western melodies) a narrative of source-path-goal.

An example of the container schema is the statement “Bb is in the key of F.” We imagine the key of F as a container, with Bb as one of its contents. We think of chords as being stacked vertically, like a pile of bricks. When we conceive melodies, we think of the line going for a metaphorical walk, with altitude standing in for pitch: “The melody starts on F, goes up to Bb, down to A, and then lands back on F.” (However, the “pitch-as-height” metaphor is muddied by the circularity of pitch class, and by the fact that we feel ascending pitch movement differently from ascending.) We may use alternative image schemas; that higher pitches are brighter, and lower pitches are darker. We are on stronger footing with the notion of the tonic as “home base” — we imagine a piece that modulates through different keys as going out on a journey and then returning home.

People approach software equipped with bodily image schemas, learned and innate. The highest praise one can give to an interface is that it is “intuitive.” The authors define an intuitive interface as one that allows the user to apply prior knowledge and existing image schema: innate, sensory-motor, embodied, cultural, or expert.

The authors evaluate two software programs in terms of their intuitiveness, or lack thereof. The first is Harmony Space, a program written by one of the paper’s authors to “systematically and richly designed to exploit spatial metaphors for harmonic concepts.” (Unfortunately, this software is no longer available online, aside from low-resolution screenshots.) Harmony Space organizes the diatonic pitches onto a grid with the topology of a torus, organized by Euler’s tonnetz scheme. This organization helps users understand harmony in terms of spatial proximity. In Harmony Space, adjacent notes form diatonic thirds and triads. Chords and scales form distinctive geometric shapes. The user can transpose chords and other patterns by simply moving the shapes around on the grid. While this is an elegant didactic tool, it is only partially useful. By design, Harmony Space totally neglects rhythm. The authors discuss the difficulty of designing a visualization scheme for rhythm that is as elegant as the tone grid.

The other software program evaluated is Apple’s Garageband. Since Apple includes it for free with Macs, Garageband has become widely used by amateurs. It is a simplified version of Logic, using the same multitrack tape recorder metaphor as most other DAWs. This metaphor is not immediately intuitive, but it is easily learned — users quickly learn to imagine a chorus of voices, with each voice occupying its own horizontal track. The left-to-right timeline is also immediately intuitive once the user sees it in action. Garageband adds an appealing loop library to the basic recording functionality. The loops can be altered by the user in a full-fledged MIDI editor.

The authors praise Garageband for its combination of versatility and accessibility, but they miss some of the program’s shortcomings as a tool for beginner self-teaching. Garageband offers many attractive-sounding loops and instrument sounds, but offers no suggestion as to how to make good musical use of those materials. It does not suggest, for example, that by western pop tradition, loops sound best when repeated two, four, eight or sixteen times. Also, it makes no attempt at showing harmonic relationships; users are left to trial and error to find musical chord/scale combinations. Ideally, Garageband’s MIDI editor would suggest to the user which notes would actually sound good, perhaps by coloring chord tones green, extensions yellow and dissonant notes red.

Garageband and Harmony Space are intriguing, but surely better visual metaphors for music have yet to be implemented. For example, while the “container” for chords is intuitive, it is also misleading, since the chord is comprised of tones, not a box for them. A better image would be tones as atoms and chords as molecules built from those atoms, which gets at their relational nature better. As the molecule becomes a more familiar image, it will become available as an “intuitive” image schema.

I anticipate that the next generation of beginner-oriented production software will draw not on the tape recorder metaphor, but on the sampler. I could imagine simplified version of the Session View in Ableton Live, allowing the user to build songs out of musical “legos,” dragging and dropping in real time.

See also a post collecting my favorite music visualization systems.

Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

Why has music been historically the most abstract art form?

I had an art professor in college who argued that all “representational” art is abstract, and all “abstract” art is representational. Any art has to refer back to sensory impressions of the world, internal or external, because that’s the only raw material we have to work with. Meanwhile, you’re unlikely to ever mistake a work of representational art for the object it represents. You don’t mistake photographs (or photorealistic paintings) for their subjects, and even the most “realistic” special effects in movies require willing suspension of disbelief.

Music seems more abstract than other art forms because it represents emotional states, symmetry and repetition, and other intangibles. But just because you can’t see or touch these things, doesn’t make them any less real. In preliterate societies, music was probably one of the best methods for storing and conveying complex stories and information.

Also, I dispute the idea that visual art started representational and then “progressed” toward greater abstraction. Architecture, textiles, tile work, face and body decorations and jewelry all use pattern, color and texture for their own sake, without any representational content.

Any one of the above images could pass as a music visualization or notation. I see a strong parallel between this kind of decorative art and the mathematical patterns in music — there’s the interest in interlocking patterns and symmetry for their own sake. Symmetry is a fact of the world, and both abstract art and music represent that fact clearly.

Original post on Quora

Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora

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 subatomic particles are like little marbles, but it’s a limited extent. Electrons do move around the nucleus, but they don’t do it in elliptical paths as if they’re little moons orbiting a planet. The true nature of electrons in atoms is way weirder and cooler.

Pictures are a terrible way to understand the nature of quantum particles. Music theory is much better.

Quantum particles are waves

The problem with textbook images like the one above is that they mislead you into thinking of particles as “things.” Particles aren’t things. They pop in and out of being in a rapid, flickery way that’s more like the way we think of energy. What we call “particles” are really just knots or bundles of energy fields.

Protons and electrons pull on each other the way refrigerators and magnets do. If electrons really were like little moons orbiting a planet, it seems like they could orbit at any distance, and could easily fall into the nucleus to collide with the protons. And yet, this never happens. Electrons always organize themselves into very specific spatial arrangements around the nucleus. This fact was totally mysterious until scientists started conceiving of electrons as probability waves in an energy field.

You can get a good idea of how particles really behave by looking at television static, which consists of huge numbers of electrons being fired at the screen at random. Now try to imagine “static” surrounding the nucleus of an atom, and you’ll get a much better picture of what’s going on than you get from imagining moons orbiting a planet.

When electrons are in orbit around an atom or molecule, their pattern of static isn’t random the way it is in TV static. When electrons orbit atoms, their energy fields are organized into patterns of overlapping ripples. You can explore these patterns with Paul Falstad’s interactive visualizations of the subatomic world — scroll down to the Quantum Mechanics sections for his simulated hydrogen atom. The colorful blobs show the probability of electrons being found in a particular place.

So what does this have to do with music theory? The electron field’s vibrations around an atom behave like harmonic oscillators. Electrons have harmonics, just like guitar strings do. Electron harmonics are three-dimensional instead of the one-dimensional harmonics of strings, but the underlying math is the same. These harmonics determine the arrangement and interactions of the electron wave, the same way that harmonics of a string form the basis of chords and scales. The electron field’s harmonics are called orbitals.

The physical world is made of electron harmonics

This screenshot of Falstad’s quantum harmonic oscillator applet shows the first harmonic of the electron field around an H2 molecule, two hydrogen atoms, each with one proton and one electron. This is the electron equivalent of the twelfth fret harmonic on a guitar string.

The blue blob represents the position of one electron, and the red blob is the other. At higher energy levels, the orbitals take on more complex shapes. There’s a direct analogy here to the more complex musical intervals that come from the higher harmonics in a guitar string.

You can think of the orbitals as a structure of cubbyholes, each of which can be occupied by one electron. The cubbyholes come in pairs, and electrons “prefer” to live in filled pairs of cubbyholes. All of the structure of objects and chemistry in the world arises from the way that atoms’ outer orbitals interact. If an atom’s outermost cubbyholes are unfilled, electrons from other atoms with unfilled orbitals can fill them, locking the atoms together into molecules. All solid and liquid materials are held together by this sharing of electrons between orbitals.

Here’s the molecular structure of ice, as rendered by Masakazu Matsumoto. The red balls are oxygen atoms. The blue ones are hydrogen atoms. The yellow rods represent the bonds caused by electrons shared between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms’ outermost orbitals.

The “sixness” of ice’s structure emerges from the way that hydrogen and oxygen orbitals combine to make open slots in groups of six. You can see the “sixness” repeated up at the macroscopic scale in the shape of snowflakes and frost.

If you raise the ice’s temperature to the melting point, what you’re really doing is shooting photons at the ice, knocking the electrons out of their orbitals so they can skip more freely from atom to atom. The atoms still stick together, but not as tightly, and not in so rigid an arrangement:

If you zap even more photons into the water, you can sever the bonds between the molecules completely, freeing them to bounce around independently in the state we perceive as steam. If you zap even more photons at the steam, you can rip the molecules apart and tear the electrons from the nuclei to form plasma. Even more energy will rip the nuclei into protons and neutrons, and ridiculously more energy will rip the protons and neutrons into their constituent up and down quarks. The quarks, protons, neutrons, nuclei, atoms and molecules are all vibrating energy fields with waveforms and harmonics of their own.

Whenever I’m bored, I like to try to imagine everything around me, all the matter and energy, as resonating energy fields, cohering the way pitches cohere into chords. Who says science isn’t fun?

Teaching science with music

Albert Einstein told interviewers that he often “thought in terms of musical architectures.” Einstein was an enthusiastic amateur violinist, and an early architect of quantum mechanics. These two facts are probably related.

Did Einstein make an explicit connection between musical harmonics and quantum harmonics? Maybe we’ll never know, but the connection exists, and future scientists can benefit from it. The concept of electron orbitals is really hard. When I was in high school, my (excellent) chemistry teacher told us not to even bother trying to visualize the true nature of electrons. She was right to not try to condescend to us or mislead us, but she gave up too easily. True, she didn’t have cool interactive computer visualizations, but the school did have a great music department. If I ever get a chance to teach chemistry, first I’m going to make sure the kids get some hands-on experience with harmonics. I’ll have them experience the way that it takes more energy to produce higher harmonics, and the way those higher harmonics produce more complex musical sounds. Then we’ll go back to chemistry class and I’ll bet the kids will have an easier time.

Below is a diagram showing a computer that can add one plus one to get two. It’s made out of an XOR gate and an AND gate, each of which is a relatively simple bunch of transistors wired together in particular ways. Transistors are just on-off switches that can be flipped electrically, so they have no moving parts (except electrons.) The beauty part is that the output wire of one transistor can be used to flip another transistor on and off.

The “numbers” in the diagram are just voltages: “zero” is zero volts, and “one” is (I think) 2.5 volts. The numbers in a computer are encoded in binary (base two) because it’s the most convenient way to physically realize them — voltage that’s pretty close to zero can be read as zero, and a voltage that’s pretty close to 2.5 can be read as one.
This simple adder has two input wires and two output wires. The input wires each represent a single binary digit, and the output wires together represent two binary digits. If one input wire has a voltage and the other doesn’t, the equivalent of adding one plus zero, the adder returns no voltage in the “twos” digit and a voltage on the “ones” digit. If there’s a voltage on both input wires, the equivalent of adding one plus one, the adder returns a voltage on the “twos” digit and no voltage on the “ones” digit, the binary number 10, or as we know it in decimal notation, 2.

Here’s a diagram of a four-bit adder, capable of adding numbers as big as sixteen. The diagram shows how adding seven (0111) plus twelve (1100) to get nineteen (10011) would work.
Wire together enough adders and other basic logic devices, set up at the right initial voltages, and you’ve got yourself a computer.

Original post on Quora

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 handy guide to the commonly used scales in western pop, rock, jazz, blues and so on. They’re shown in the way you’d program them into Auto-tune. Click each image to go to that scale’s Wikipedia page, where you can hear it, see it in traditional notation and pick up fun historical facts.

Major scales

These scales have a major third, which makes them feel happy or bright. See them side-by-side.

C major

Happy; can be majestic or sentimental when slow. The white keys on the piano. Examples: “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

C mixolydian

Bluesy, rock; can also be exotic/modal. Play over C7 chord. Same pitches as F major. Example: “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles.

C lydian

Ethereal, dreamy, futuristic. Same pitches as G major. Example: “Possibly Maybe” by Björk (from the line “As much as I definitely enjoy solitude…”)

C ahava raba

Exotic, Middle Eastern, Jewish. Same pitches as F harmonic minor. Example: “Hava Nagila.”

Minor Scales

These scales have a flat third, which gives them a darker and more tragic feel. See them side-by-side.

C natural minor

Sentimental, tragic. Same pitches as E flat major.

C harmonic minor

Tragic, exotic, Middle Eastern.

C melodic minor

Mysterious, jazzy, very dark. Example: sixties Coltrane. See a blog post about melodic minor.

C dorian

Hip, sophisticated, jazzy. Same pitches as B flat major. Example: “So What” by Miles Davis.

C phrygian

Spanish/Flamenco. Same pitches as A flat major.

Synthetic Scales

These scales are based on regular, symmetric patterns. See them side-by-side.

C chromatic

All the piano keys. Freefalling, anxiety-producing. Same pitches as every other chromatic scale.

C whole tone

Dreamy, underwater. Every other key on the piano. Same pitches as D, E, F sharp, G sharp and A sharp whole tone scales. Example: Background parts in the Simpsons theme song.

C diminished

Dark, mysterious. Same pitches as E flat, G flat and A diminished scales. Examples: movies about Dracula.

Pentatonics and blues

Pentatonic scales have five notes. The blues scale is the minor pentatonic plus the flat fifth. See them side-by-side.

C major pentatonic

Joyful; widely used in world and folk music. Major scale with 4th and 7th removed. Same pitches as A minor pentatonic. Here’s a blog post about playing pentatonics on guitar.

C minor pentatonic

Rock; widely used in world and folk music. Minor scale with 2nd and 6th removed. Same pitches as E flat major pentatonic. Here’s a blog post about playing pentatonics on guitar.

C blues

Blues, obviously. Works great over major and minor chords. Minor pentatonic with flat fifth added.

Making chords

To make basic chords from the major and minor scales, start with the first note, then skip to the third, then the fifth. Using C Dorian, that’s C, Eb, G. This is called a triad, and it’s the simplest type of chord.

To extend the chords, add in the seventh, the second/ninth, the fourth/eleventh, and the sixth/thirteenth. Using C Dorian, that’s Bb, D, F, A. The more notes you add, the more complex and dense the chord becomes.

You can also skip or leave out notes: C, Eb, Bb, F for example. Also, you can double notes (especially the first/root.)

Don’t put fourths/elevenths into major chords unless you leave the third out, it sounds very dissonant.

Have fun!

Update: thanks to the enthusiastic users of Stumbleupon, this is by far the most-read post on this blog. Thanks for all the Stumbles, folks!

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.

Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.

Here’s how the Funky Drummer loop looks in the Reason loop player and sequencer. The blue thing is the loop player itself, where you can add effects like filter sweeps and pitch shifting. Below, the sequencer shows eight repetitions of the loop, forming an eight-bar phrase, a metaloop.

Here’s the view inside one of the colored boxes in the sequencer, a single iteration of the loop.

Each red brick is a slice, a rhythmic event, a drum or cymbal hit. There are sixteen of them in this loop. Reason follows the dance music convention of thinking of a bar as sixteen sixteenth notes, so it considers the Funky Drummer loop to be one bar long. This convention makes me crazy; I prefer to think of it as two bars of eight eighth notes each. However you want to count it, musicians usually describe this as a sixteenth note feel. Hear the loop:

By removing every other slice of the loop, you change the groove from a sixteenth note feel to a more spacious eighth note feel. The silences have as much presence as the drum hits.

Here’s how the loop sounds in eighth notes.

You don’t need to play the slices of a loop in their original order. Reason lets you play the slices in any order at all. Here’s the Funky Drummer loop completely randomized:

I’m not posting an mp3 of this because it sounds terrible, but sometimes randomizing the slices of a sample can give unexpectedly delightful results. You get especially interesting sounds when you map the MIDI data from one loop to the audio from a different one. You can also try new combinations by playing the slices from a keyboard or other MIDI controller. The slices automatically map to the chromatic scale, so slice one is the lowest C on the keyboard, slice two is C sharp, slice three is D and so on.

The loop player gets even more interesting when you supply it with a melodic phrase. By playing pieces of the melody in different orders and shifting the individual notes up and down, you can effortlessly create new melodies from any existing sample. The combinatorial possibilities are dizzying.

I see a strong analogy between shuffling the pieces of a sample to create new music and shuffling DNA letters to create new organisms. In biological evolution, all new organisms come about by the semi-accidental reshuffling of existing organisms’ genomes. So, for instance, mutations can happen when a sequence of DNA gets repeated accidentally during copying:

I believe that new music comes about this way too. Before software like Reason and Recycle, the reshuffling of musical memes happened exclusively in musicians’ minds, or later on paper. The software extends the power of our recombinational imaginations to recorded music, not just imaginary music. Powerful stuff!