Turntablists use record players to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. The record player as musical instrument is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound [...]
Filed in Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged a tribe called quest, afrika bambaataa, apache, dj, dj premier, funky drummer, grand mixer dst, grandmaster flash, herbie hancock, hip-hop, Improvisation, looping, mashups, music notation, peter piper, rahzel, remixes, rhythm, rockit, run-dmc, Sampling, scratch, turntablism, wu-tang
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Internet, Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged daft punk, delicious, design, drum machines, electronica, fun, interface, Internet, inudge, minimalism, multitracking, reason, remixes, sequencing, Social Media, tenori-on, toys, web browser
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.
Filed in Dance, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Video Games
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Also tagged america, beatles, dance, electronica, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, Recording, remixes, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, Video Games
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It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Filed in Dance, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged dance, ddr, guitar hero, Improvisation, japan, jazz, king of the hill, miles davis, Music, music notation, Video Games
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Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most [...]
Filed in Composition, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged chameleon, computer science, computers, electronica, fractals, herbie hancock, Improvisation, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, Math, Music, music notation, programming, recursion
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Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below. When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged apple, computers, desktop, eighties, interface, metaphor, microsoft, nintendo, recursion, super mario bros, windows
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Music is really just orderly vibrations: in the air, in instrument bodies, in speaker cones, in tiny hairs in your inner ear, in electromagnetic fields in wires, in patterns of neurons firing in your brain. If you understand the math behind these vibrations, it can help you understand how music works. Surprisingly, it can also [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Theory, Physics
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Also tagged guitar, harmonics, harmony, Math, molecules, Music, Music Theory, overtones, Physics, resonance, Science, strings, vibration
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In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Music, Software
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Also tagged electronica, hip-hop, mashups, Music, music notation, notation, reason, recursion, revival revival, Sampling, screencaps, sequencing, symmetry
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How do you get sound in and out of a computer? There are two steps. You have to turn the sound into electricity, and then you have to turn the electricity into numbers. Turning sound into electricity At the physical level, a sound is a rhythmic vibration of air molecules. Your ears can detect subtle [...]
Filed in Hardware, Math, Music
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Also tagged audio, audio editing, binary, electronica, imaginarynumbers, Math, Music, perception, pro tools, Recording
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Tuesday, November 18, 2008
I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one.
Filed in Social Media, Writing
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Also tagged database, design, flickr, images, interface, Internet, juxtaposition, memes, miyamoto, outlining, social networks, Video Games, Writing
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