This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it …
Author Archives: Ethan
Sampling and semiotic democracy
Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012) As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to …
What we talk about when we talk about Kanye West
Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity. Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far …
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Encoding emotion
Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the …
From my SoundCloud stats
A complete list of countries from which people have listened to my SoundCloud tracks, in order of number of listens: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Russian Federation, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Argentina, Sweden, Turkey, India, Georgia, Chile, New Zealand, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Colombia, Romania, Czech …
Programming languages as musical instruments
Alan Blackwell and Nick Collins. The Programming Language as a Musical Instrument. In P. Romero, J. Good, E. Acosta Chaparro & S. Bryant (Eds). Proc. PPIG 17, pp. 120-130. Any musician who wants to be competent with digital production tools has to take on qualities of a programmer. Music notation is itself a “programming language” …
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Improvisation in music games
Joshua Pablo Rosenstock. Free Play Meets Gameplay: iGotBand, a Video Game for Improvisers. Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 20, pp. 11–15, 2010. Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is …
Looping and stasis in Medúlla
Malawey, Victoria. Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla. Music Theory Online, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2010. The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music …
The post-fidelity era
Guberman, Daniel. Post-Fidelity: A New Age of Music Consumption and Technological Innovation. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp 431–454 Guberman divides the history of recorded music into two distinct sections: the fidelity era, stretching from Thomas Edison through the invention of the compact disk, and the post-fidelity era, beginning with the …
Teaching music with looping
Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69 When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, …