The value of music

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

In a capitalist world, one job of anthropologists is to explain behavior that is “irrational” or “inefficient” (what even is the difference, right?) Anthropologists also get hired to understand the mindset of consumers, since economics has tended to regard individual humans as black boxes. When we decide what to buy, we must be constructing our unique individual or ethnic identities and forging social ties. However, the world of cool market-based appraisal and the jungle of irrationality in our cultural lives may not be so cleanly separated. Graeber (2005) points out that in English we use the same word for “having good values” and “getting good value for our money.”

We prefer to separate the sphere of the market, where goods are fungible, to the sphere of ethics, where we hope they aren’t. “Exchanges within a sphere are commensurable; conversions between spheres are incommensurable and incite moral anxiety” (Lambek 2013, 143). This makes me think of the Simpsons episode when a home security system salesman admonishes Homer: “But surely you can’t put a price on your family’s lives!” Homer responds: “I wouldn’t have thought so either, but here we are.”

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Ethnomusicology and world music

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

People like me listen to world music to hope for and imagine a world without imperialism. I’ve sampled Central African pygmy music in my own work, and while I do a better job of attributing my sources than Deep Forest does, I’m motivated by the same impulse.

Timothy Brennan attributes the popularity of African diasporic music among white people to our unconscious desire to resist imperial capitalism. The same is true of world music.

More than just expanding tastes, world music characterizes a longing in metropolitan centers of Europe and North America for what is not Europe or North America… It represents a flight from the Euro-self at the very moment of that self’s suffocating hegemony, as though people were driven away by the image stalking them in the mirror (Brennan 2001, 46).

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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 demonstrating the vocoder in Ableton Live.

You may be surprised to learn that you use a vocoder every time you talk on your cell phone. Also, the vocoder gave rise to Auto-Tune, which, love it or hate it, is the defining sound of contemporary popular music. Let’s dive in!

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My music technology syllabus

This is now out of date, see the current version

I use variations on this project list for all of my courses. In Advanced Digital Audio Production at Montclair State University, students do all of these assignments. Students in Music Technology 101 do all of them except the ones marked Advanced. My syllabus for the NYU Music Education Technology Practicum has an additional recording studio project in place of the final project. Here’s the project list in Google Spreadsheet format.

Music Ed Tech Practicum image

I talk very little about microphone technology or technique in my classes. This is because I find this information to only be useful in the context of actual recording studio work, and my classes do not have regular access to a studio. I do spend one class period on home recording with the SM58 and SM57, and talk a bit about mic technique for singers. I encourage students who want to go deeper into audio recording to take a class specifically on that subject, or to read something like the Moylan book.

My project-based approach is informed strongly by Matt Mclean and Alex Ruthmann. Read more about their methods here.

I do not require any text. However, for education majors, I strongly recommend Teaching Music Through Composition by Barbara Freedman and Music Technology and Education: Amplifying Musicality by Andrew Brown.

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The aQWERTYon pitch wheels and the future of music theory visualization

Update: we have implemented these changes to the aQWERTYon, try them here

Try the scale wheel visualization here

The MusEDLab will soon be launching a revamped version of the aQWERTYon with some enhancements to its visual design, including a new scale picker. Beyond our desire to make our stuff look cooler, the scale picker represents a challenge that we’ve struggled with since the earliest days of aQW development. On the one hand, we want to offer users a wide variety of intriguing and exotic scales to play with. On the other hand, our audience of beginner and intermediate musicians is likely to be horrified by a list of terms like “Lydian dominant mode.” I recently had the idea to represent all the scales as colorful icons, like so:

Read more about the rationale and process behind this change here. In this post, I’ll explain what the icons mean, and how they can someday become the basis for a set of new interactive music theory visualizations.

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My first Musicto playlist

I have started working with a startup called Musicto, which creates playlists curated by humans around particular themes. For example: music to grieve to, music to clean house to, music to fight evil. My first playlist is music to sing your hipster baby to sleep.

Music to sing your hipster baby to sleep

These are songs I have been singing to my kids, and that I recommend you sing to yours. It isn’t just a playlist, though. Each track is accompanied by a short blog post explaining what’s so special about it. New tracks will be added regularly in the coming weeks. If you’d like, you can follow the playlist on Twitter. If this sounds like the kind of thing you might enjoy putting together, the company is seeking more curators.

Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality

I complain a lot on this blog about traditional approaches to teaching music theory. Fortunately, there are some alternatives out there. One such is Everyday Tonality by Philip Tagg. Don’t be put off by the DIY look of the web site. The book is the single best resource I know of for how harmony works across a broad spectrum of the world’s music.

Philip Tagg

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Noteflight as a DAW

The good people at Noteflight have started doing weekly challenges. I love constraint-based music prompts, like the ones in the Disquiet Junto, so I thought I would try this one: compose a piece of music using only four notes.

Noteflight weekly challenge

The music side of this wasn’t hard. My material tends not to use that many pitches anyway. If you really want to challenge me, tell me I can’t use any rhythmic subdivisions finer than a quarter note. Before you listen to my piece, though, let’s talk about this word, “compose.” When you write using notation, the presumption is that you’re creating a set of instructions for a human performer. However, actually getting your composition performed is a challenge, unless you have a band or ensemble at your disposal. I work in two music schools, and I would have a hard time making it happen. (When I have had my music performed, the musicians either used a prose score, learned by ear from a recording, or just improvised.) Noteflight’s target audience of kids in school are vanishingly unlikely to ever hear their work performed, or at least, performed well. Matt Mclean formed the Young Composers and Improvisers Workshop to address this problem, and he’s doing amazing work, but most Noteflight compositions will only ever exist within the computer.

Given this fact, I wanted to create a piece of music that would actually sound good when played back within Noteflight. This constraint turned out to be a significantly greater challenge than using four notes. I started with the Recycled Percussion instrument, and chose the notes B, E, F, and G, because they produce the coolest sounds. Then I layered in other sounds, chosen because they sound reasonably good. Here’s what I came up with: Continue reading “Noteflight as a DAW”

In praise of campy Batman

My son is deeply obsessed with Batman, like any four year old should be. His favorite articles of clothing include a Batman sweatshirt, Batman pajamas, and Batmobile-shaped slippers. When he plays Batman, he imagines his powers to include shooting bats out of his hands. And he loves the Batman theme song.

In fact, the boy loves this theme song so much that he insists I sing theme songs for all his other favorite superheroes. This is easy for Spider-man, who also has a great 60s vintage theme song. But I had to make up songs for Superman and Iron Man (which has meant improvising goofy lyrics to John Williams’ theme music and the riff from the Black Sabbath song, respectively.)

The only version of Batman that’s really age-appropriate for a four-year-old is the sixties one. This is just as well, because the late Adam West’s Batman is the best version all the way around.

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Cranes in the Sky

Solange Knowles is Beyoncé’s artsier younger sister. “Cranes In The Sky” is her biggest hit so far. It manages the rare feat of being both extremely catchy and extremely weird.

Solange helpfully explains her songwriting process on the invaluable Song Exploder podcast.

https://soundcloud.com/hrishihirway/song-exploder-solange

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