Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Toni Blackman asks, why worry?
Toni Blackman was a guest on the Clinical BOPulations podcast to talk about her song, “Why Worry,” and to discuss her freestyle rap practice in the context of music therapy. I did a remix of the song interspersed with Toni and her hosts’ discussion of it, enjoy: https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/toni-blackman-why-worry-clinical-bopulations-mix The track represents Toni’s first foray into …
Developing an intro-level music theory course
In the fall of 2019, I started teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School’s Eugene Lang College. It combines the usual Music Theory I content with a broader, more ethnomusicological perspective that brings in various forms of pop, non-Western musics, and (most excitingly for me) the blues. It’s an existing course, but I …
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Talking whiteness on the So Strangely podcast
Fellow NYU doctoral student and possessor of fabulous blue hair Finn Upham hosts a podcast called So Strangely that interviews music science researchers. (The podcast is named for the sublimely weird speech-to-song illusion.) Finn recently interviewed Juliet Hess, who is fearlessly examining the whiteness of university-level music education, and invited me along for additional music …
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The Groove Pizzeria
For his NYU music technology masters thesis, Tyler Bisson created a web app called Groove Pizzeria, a polyrhythmic/polymetric extension of the Groove Pizza. Click the image to try it for yourself.  Note that the Groove Pizzeria is still a prototype, and it doesn’t yet have the full feature set that the Groove Pizza does. …
Rob Walker on The Art of Noticing
Rob Walker has a new book out. I’m in it! You should buy and read it. Rob interviewed me about critical listening, that is, listening closely to music to try to mentally isolate the different instruments/sounds, and understand their relationships to each other, and to the whole. Critical listening can reveal whole new dimensions to …
Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher
Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I’m studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton’s 2018 Loop Summit. Ableton recently posted the video of Toni’s talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, …
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Samuel Halligan’s awesome Pop-Up Piano for Ableton Live
I recently met a gentleman named Samuel Halligan, who, among other things, makes music education utilities using Max For Live. One of them is called Pop-Up Piano. If you use Max or Ableton and you could use some help learning music theory, you should go and download it immediately. It’s a Max For Live Device …
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Brandon Bennett: the ethnopedagogical remix
In this post, I present a remixed recording I made of hip-hop educator Brandon Bennett running a session of the afterschool Producer Club run by TechRow Fund at New Design Middle School in Harlem. From the beginning until 1:18, you hear Brandon lead a game of his own devising, where he raps lines with missing …
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Kumbaya
When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …