Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Kane (2014) critiques Schaeffer’s notion of “reduced listening,” which ignores a sound’s referential properties and considers it independently of its causes or its meaning. Bracketing the question of whether this is even possible, is it desirable to restrict musical discourse so much by neglecting sound’s signifying …
Category Archives: Science
Ethnomusicology and the body
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels It is such a strange artifact of Cartesian dualism that we have to specify experiences as being “bodily,” as if there were some other kind. It’s like specifying that a place is in the universe. Blacking (1977) observes that we can understand the convention of the …
The vocoder and Auto-Tune
The vocoder is one of those mysterious technologies that’s far more widely used than understood. Here I explain what it is, how it works, and why you should care. Casual music listeners know the vocoder best as a way to make the robot voice effect that Daft Punk uses all the time. Here’s Huston Singletary …
Toward a Methodological Stance
Final paper for Approaches To Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Section 1: Reflections on Received View of Research I was raised by two medical researchers and a former astrophysicist, surrounded by stacks of quantitative journals. I rarely questioned the assumption that quantitative empirical research is the gold standard of truth, and that while subjective accounts …
Research proposal – Hip-Hop Pedagogy
Final paper for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Research questions Jamie Ehrenfeld is a colleague of mine in the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. She graduated from NYU’s music education program, and now teaches music at Eagle Academy in Brownsville. Like many members of the lab, she straddles musical worlds, bringing her training in …
A participant ethnography of the Ed Sullivan Fellows program
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 …
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American Apartheid
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 …
Design-Based Research
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 …
The Long Shadow
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 …
Marked
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Pager, Devah. (2007). MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page 21 of Pager’s book includes this chart, showing annual prison admissions for drugs by race in the United States. In the 1980s, we imprisoned roughly the same …