Pedagogical remixing with Splice

My newest music student is a gentleman named Rob Precht. As is increasingly the case with people I teach privately, Rob lives many time zones away, and he and I have never met face to face. Instead, we’ve been conducting lessons via a combination of Skype and Splice. It’s the first really practical remote music teaching method I’ve used, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Rob came to me via this very blog. He’s a semi-retired lawyer who took some piano lessons as a kid but doesn’t have much other music training or experience. He approached me because he wanted to compose original music, and he thought (correctly) that computer-based production would be the best way to go about it. He had made a few tracks with GarageBand, but quickly switched over to Ableton Live after hearing me rave about it. We decided that the best approach would be to have him just continue to stumble through making original tracks, and I would help him refine and develop them.

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Hip-hop top 100

I was asked on Quora to give a list of my favorite hip-hop songs, because what better source is there than a forty-year-old white dad? (I am literally a mountain climber who plays the electric guitar.) I did grow up in New York City in the 80s, and I do love the music. But ultimately, I’m a tourist in this culture. For a more definitive survey, ask Questlove or someone. These are just songs that I like.

Run-DMC

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Diverge, converge, diverge, converge

Soon after I became a composer, Marc Weidenbaum made me a meta-composer. Which I guess makes him a meta-meta-composer? A hyperproducer? There isn’t a word for what Marc is, aside from “awesome.” The most concise way I can think of to describe what he does: he writes reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet and then gets internet strangers to make it. Each track on this playlist is a reading of my score called “Divergence/Convergence,” and each one is quite different from the next.

Here’s Marc’s version of the narrative behind all this music. In a nutshell: I was asked to write a score for the NYU Laptop Orchestra. They performed it. I got a recording of the performance and remixed it. Marc assigned the members of the Disquiet Junto to “perform” the score solo. I got to have the strange and delightful experience of hearing all of the diverse music that resulted.

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Making chords from scales

Jazz musicians think of chords and scales as two different ways of looking at the same thing: a group of pitches that sound good together. If you organize the pitches sequentially and play them one at a time, you get a scale. If you stack them up and play them simultaneously, you get chords. Here’s a guide to some of the most commonly-used scales in Western music and their moods. And here’s a guide to the most commonly-used chords.

To make a chord, you start on the first note of a scale and then move up it in thirds, meaning that you skip every alternating note. To get more notes for your chord, just keep adding thirds on top.

  • If you start on the first scale degree, add the third scale degree, and then add the fifth scale degree, you get a simple three-note chord called a triad.
  • If you add the seventh scale degree on top, you get a seventh chord.
  • Next you come to the ninth note of the scale, which is really just the second note an octave up. Adding it gives you a ninth chord.
  • Then you come to the eleventh note of the scale, which is the fourth note an octave up. Adding it gives you an eleventh chord.
  • Finally, you arrive at the thirteenth note of the scale, which is the sixth note an octave up. Adding it gives you a thirteenth chord.
  • The next third after the thirteenth is just the root of the scale. You’ve now used every possible note in your chord.

Hear extended chords built from a variety of scales:

Here’s a simplified chart of this song:

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Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody

My computer dictionary says that a melody is “a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying.” There are a lot of people out there who think that rap isn’t music because it lacks melody. My heart broke when I found out that Jerry Garcia was one of these people. If anyone could be trusted to be open-minded, you’d think it would be Jerry, but no.

I’ve always instinctively believed this position to be wrong, and I finally decided to test it empirically. I took some rap acapellas and put them into Melodyne. What I found is that rap vocals use plenty of melody. The pitches rise and fall in specific and patterned ways. The pitches aren’t usually confined to the piano keys, but they are nevertheless real and non-arbitrary. (If you say a rap line with the wrong pitches, it sounds terrible.) Go ahead, look and listen for yourself. Click each image to hear the song section in question. Continue reading “Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody”

When does a speech turn into a song?

Daniel Jacobson, a musician in Ireland, was inspired by this post to give the following speech:

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Circular rhythm visualization talk at Spotify

Today I got to talk about rhythm visualization in general and the Groove Pizza in particular at the Spotify Monthly Music Hackathon. Click the image to see my talk, I start at 1:23:47.

Circular rhythm talk at Spotify

Here are my slides:

Want me to come to your school, company, meetup or whatever, and do this talk? Or something like it? Get in touch.

 

The harmonica explains all of Western music

If you want to understand the vast cultural struggle taking place in the study of Western harmony, you could do worse than to start with the harmonica. This unassuming little instrument was designed in central Europe in the 19th century to play the popular music of that time and place: waltzes, oom-pah music, and light classical. All of this music is “diatonic,” meaning that it’s based around the major scale, the do-re-mi you learned in elementary school. It’s also the harmony that you learn if you take a typical formal music theory class.

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What even is digital art

The mighty river of social media recently brought an essay to my attention, The Arts Electric by Tom Uglow. His central point is that the computer has not yet fulfilled its potential as an art medium.

A piece of digital art, by me

I started out agreeing with him, and ended thinking he’s missing the point. Let’s dissect! Continue reading “What even is digital art”

Lifelong general music

I’ve been blessed that both institutions where I teach music technology give me considerable freedom in how I do it. I find the music side to be quite a bit more interesting than the technology side, so I center my classes around creative music-making, and we address technical concepts as we encounter them. I’m learning that this approach is an unusual one, that music school is more about learning repertoire and technique and less about discovery and invention. I got some validation for my approach from The New Frontier: Secondary Project-Based General Music by Michael Hayden. His essay is basically proposing that all high school kids get to take my Music Tech 101 class.

Montclair State Music Tech 101

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