I was looking at a collection of perfectly looped gifs on Buzzfeed and thinking about how they remind me of sample-based electronic music. In both cases, you’re taking a piece of a linear recording and making it cyclical. Do it wrong and it’s extremely irritating. Do it right and it’s mesmerizing. I’ve given a lot …
Category Archives: Technology
The Groove Pizza
Update: this post is out of date. See the current Groove Pizza here. Walking to the subway this morning, I had a bright idea for how to make the Drum Loop more kid-friendly by representing the radial grid as a pizza. Here’s a very quick concept sketch: To really make this work, I wouldn’t just …
Reflections on the MOOC
This week marks the conclusion of the first iteration of Play With Your Music, the music production MOOC I’ve been contributing to this past semester. Creating and running the MOOC has been a learning experience for everybody involved. It certainly has been for me. I do most of my music teaching one on one, and …
Thesis presentation
Here’s the presentation I’ll be giving of my masters thesis next week, enjoy.
Teaching audio and MIDI editing in the MOOC
This is the fifth in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. See also the first, second, third and fourth posts. Soundation uses the same basic interface paradigm as other audio recording and editing programs like Pro Tools and …
Continue reading “Teaching audio and MIDI editing in the MOOC”
Teaching expressive use of audio effects in the MOOC
This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. See also the first, second and third posts. After PWYM participants have tried mixing using just levels and panning, the next step is to include audio effects …
Continue reading “Teaching expressive use of audio effects in the MOOC”
Play With Your Music curriculum design – learning to listen
This is the second in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. Read the first post here. Alex is fond of the phrase “pedagogies of timbre and space.” By that, he means: ways of studying those aspects of recorded …
Continue reading “Play With Your Music curriculum design – learning to listen”
Designing a music production MOOC
In my capacity as a research assistant to Alex Ruthmann, I’ve been getting to work on a bunch of cool projects. The first one to come to fruition is a MOOC (massively open online course) about music production. It’s called Play With Your Music, and it starts November 1st. The project is spearheaded by the …
Teaching math with the Drum Loop
I’ve undergone some evolution in my thinking about the intended audience for my thesis app. My original idea was to aim it at the general public. But the general public is maybe not quite so obsessed with breakbeats as I am. Then I started working with Alex Ruthmann, and he got me thinking about the …
Software design as research
Brown, A. (2007). Software Development as Music Education Research. International Journal of Education & the Arts. Volume 8, Number 6. My thesis is supposed to include a quantitative research component. This had been causing me some anxiety. It’s educational and creative software. What exactly could I measure? I had this vague notion of testing people’s …