I put up my course web site for History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which includes an assignment due the first day of class: read about Stephen Foster and “Old Folks at Home”, listen to recordings of the song by Al Jolson and Ray Charles, and write a one paragraph response. Within 24 hours of emailing the students that …
Continue reading “AI is harmful for learning which is why I’m banning it in my classes”
I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.
One of my back burner writing projects is a book chapter about generative AI in music education and why I think it’s a Bad Thing. In preparation, I reread Ted Chiang’s New Yorker essay about why AI isn’t going to make art, which I completely agree with. To put ourselves in the right frame of mind …
This week I wrote my first software review for MusicRadar, assessing a web app that promises to create sheet music from audio recordings. TL;DR it doesn’t do a great job.
We’re spending the last chunk of Advanced Popular Music Transcription talking about the sonic and timbral aspects of pop production. This week we’re focusing on identifying various instrument timbres and talking about their stylistic associations. I won’t be talking (much) about the guitar, because my students already know what guitar sounds like. Instead, I’ll focus …
Continue reading “Electric and electronic instruments of 20th century pop”
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 …
I spent this past weekend at Super MAGFest, where I led some sessions in their Jam Clinic. I was there at the invitation of Ashanti Mills, with whom I have had some great online conversations about participatory music cultures over the years. Before I explain what I was doing there, I need to explain the …
Kids need to learn how to read staff notation. However, they would rather look at the MIDI piano roll. My question is, why not show them both? Each view has its own affordances. Staff notation is more human-readable and space-efficient, but the piano roll is more discoverable for beginners. The staff doesn’t show microrhythmic subtleties, …
As of this writing, you can download a big collection of isolated Beatles multitracks from the Internet Archive. These multitracks have been in circulation for a while, but due to their complete illegality, they can be difficult to find. The Internet Archive is a stable download source, but we’ll see how long it takes for …
Deb Chachra, one of the smartest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet, has a new book out. You should read it! It’s not directly related to the subject of this blog but, hey, it’s my blog, I can write about whatever I want. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving, and what better thing to be …
