For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one. I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see …
Author Archives: Ethan
Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester
I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes …
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Introducing my first podcast guest, my daughter
Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.
AI slop and musical creativity
Next week, my NYU graduate seminar on technology in music education is supposed to start talking about AI: large language models, prompt-based generators, stem separation and so on. I am not feeling much enthusiasm for this unit, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we are currently talking about YouTube, which is a richly …
A couple of media hits
I’m quoted in an Associated Press article talking about why pop music in 2025 is so bleak and in MusicRadar talking about Radiohead’s “Let Down”, the template for every Coldplay song and an expression of Jonny Greenwood’s love of Steve Reich. MusicRadar wanted an explainer on “Let Down” because it’s currently red hot on Tiktok. I suspect …
Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd on MusicRader
Big week for publication for me! I’m back on MusicRadar with articles about two 1970s rock classics, “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath and “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Both songs are so familiar, and built from such unremarkable musical components, that I didn’t realize how weird they both are until I got in …
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Yet another podcast update
Apparently some people listen to podcasts on YouTube. So, if you are one of these people, now you can listen to mine there (though some episodes might be unavailable due to copyright strikes; I’m working on that.)
Podcast update, and I guess blog update
I think I found a good solution to the dilemma of wanting my posts to reach the maximum number of people while also wanting to make some money from all this labor. I decided to keep the podcast free and to pair each episode with a subscribers-only newsletter that includes notated transcriptions and other musicological …
Aretha Franklin and Art Garfunkel on the pod
The podcast format doesn’t allow me to show notation like my blog post on the subject does, but it does allow me to overlay Aretha and Art Garfunkel with their tempos aligned so you can compare their rhythmic phrasing aurally. So, pros and cons. Aretha Franklin sings Bridge Over Troubled Water by Ethan Hein way …
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An homage to Otis Redding on the pod
This episode includes some reharmonization of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of The Bay” to show how goofy it would sound if Otis had used the “correct” chords from the key of G major. I want to do more of these kinds of “remixes” in future episodes, I like the idea of making songs worse by …