Note: I refer to mentors by their real names, and to participants by pseudonyms Ed Sullivan Fellows (ESF) is a mentorship and artist development program run by the NYU Steinhardt Music Experience Design Lab. It came about by a combination of happenstances. I had a private music production student named Rob Precht, who had found …
Continue reading “A participant ethnography of the Ed Sullivan Fellows program”
Denton, N. A., & Massey, D. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. The question endlessly debated by sociologists: is the black underclass the result of a) racism b) a culture of poverty c) welfare d) structural economic change or e) residential segregation? Denton and Massey say it’s choice e). “Residential segregation …
My favorite Bob Dylan song is “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding.)” It’s not the one I listen to the most, and it’s not the one I’ve given the most effort to singing or playing. But it’s the one that sounds the most “Bob Dylan-y,” the one that combines all of his many influences into the …
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Barab, S. A. (2014). Design-based research: a methodological toolkit for engineering change. In K. Sawyer (ed.) Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Vol 2, (pp. 233-270), Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Design-based research (DBR) is a subject close to my heart, because it was the basis …
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Alexander, K.L., Entwisle, D.R., & Olson, L. (2014) The Long Shadow: Family Background Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. The central message of The Long Shadow is that social mobility in America is a myth. The authors combine …
Since its launch, you’ve been able to export your Groove Pizza beats as WAV files, or continue working on them in Soundtrap. But now, thanks to MusEDLab developer Jordana Bombi, you can also save your beats as MIDI files as well. You can bring these MIDI files into your music production software tool of choice: Ableton Live, Logic, …
Cyclic Defrost, the uber-hip online Australian music magazine, features an interview I did with Jason Richardson. We talk blogging, sample culture, music visualization, mumble rap, and many other subjects. Check it out!
For Jan Plass‘ class on research in games for learning, I’m working on an experiment testing the effects of game soundtracks on cognitive performance. The game in question is All You Can ET, developed by the NYU CREATE Lab. Here’s the music: https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/all-you-can-et-soundtrack You’re hearing four versions of the basic 32-bar loop: fast major, fast minor, slow …
Continue reading “Testing the effects of game music on cognition”
Over on the Soundfly blog, you can see a video from our new harmony course in which I talk through the fascinating chord progression from “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Check it out!
There are a lot of audio file formats. Here are the ones you encounter most commonly. Analog formats Recorded sound consists of fluctuations in electrical current coming off of a microphone or mixing desk. Before computers, you translated that current into tiny smooth wiggles in the shape of the groove cut into a vinyl record, or …
