Fractal music

Continuing my series of posts on the ways that science might explain why we like the music we like. See also my posts on the science of rock harmony, harmony generally, and Afro-Cuban rhythms.

Quora user Marc Ettlinger recently sent me a paper by Sherri Novis-Livengood, Richard White, and Patrick CM Wong entitled Fractal complexity (1/f power law) determines the stability of music perception, emotion, and memory in a repeated exposure paradigm. (The paper isn’t on the open web, but here’s a poster-length version.) The authors think that fractals explain our music preferences. Specifically, they find that note durations, pitch intervals, phrase lengths and other quantifiable musical parameters tend to follow a power law distribution. Power-law distributions have the nifty property of scale invariance, meaning that patterns in such entities resemble themselves at different scales. Music is full of fractals, and the more fractal-filled it is, the more we like it.

Mandelbrot zoom

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Animated gifs and electronic music

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 of thought to how looping a segment of audio changes its meaning, but am only just starting to think about the visual equivalent.

George applauds

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Why is son clave so awesome?

One of the best discoveries I made while researching the Groove Pizza is the mathematician Godfried Toussaint. While the bookshelves groan with mathematical analyses of Western harmony, Toussaint is the rare scholar who uses the same tools to understand Afro-Cuban rhythms. He’s especially interested in the rhythm known to Latin musicians as 3-2 son clave, to Ghanaians as the kpanlogo bell pattern, and to rock musicians as the Bo Diddley beat. Toussaint calls it “The Rhythm that Conquered the World” in his paper of the same name. Here it is as programmed by me on a drum machine:

The image behind the SoundCloud player is my preferred circular notation for son clave. Here are eight more conventional representations as rendered by Toussaint:

Toussaint - visualizing son clave Continue reading “Why is son clave so awesome?”

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:

Groove pizza

To really make this work, I wouldn’t just plop a JPEG of a pizza under the existing UI. I’d want a cartoon pizza rendered in a flat-color style. Instead of colored wedge cells, drum hits would be represented by stylized pepperoni, sausage, anchovies, olives, mushrooms and so on. I’ll throw it on the ever-expanding “future work” pile.

Usually I like to make everything on this blog freely available to whoever wants to use it, but The Groove Pizza is ⓒ Ethan Hein 2013, all rights reserved.

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.

Play With Your Music

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 it’s been weird creating materials for a couple of thousand students I never see at all. (Though I guess that’s sort of what I’m doing on this blog.) My colleagues have been keeping close tabs on the community of participants, but my personal interaction has been limited by the course’s coinciding with crunch time for my thesis. So this post will be less about the students, and more about the teachers.

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Thesis presentation

Here’s the presentation I’ll be giving of my masters thesis next week, enjoy.

My masters thesis is done

Yaaaaay

You can read it here on the blog or as a PDF.

Can science make a better music theory?

My last post discussed how we should be deriving music theory from empirical observation of what people like using ethnomusicology. Another good strategy would be to derive music theory from observation of what’s going on between our ears. Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson has attempted just that in his essay, Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory of Music. The essay has an endearingly old-timey subtitle:

The Major Scale, The Standard Chord Dictionary, and The Difference of Feeling Between The Major and Minor Triads Explained from the First Principles of Physics and Computation; The Theory of Helmholtz Shown To Be Incomplete and The Theory of Terhardt and Some Others Considered

Wilkerson begins with the observation that music theory books read like medical texts from the middle ages: “they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases.” We can do better.

Standing waves on a string

Wilkerson proposes that we derive a theory of harmony from first principles drawn from our understanding of how the brain processes audio signals. We evolved to be able to detect sounds with natural harmonics, because those usually come from significant sources, like the throats of other animals. Musical harmony is our way of gratifying our harmonic-series detectors.

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Toward a better music theory

Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com.

I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I thought it would be a good idea to follow that up with some ideas for how to make music theory more useful and relevant.

The goal of music theory should be to explain common practice music. I don’t mean “common practice” in its present pedagogical sense. I mean the musical practices that are most prevalent in a given time and place, like America in 2013. Rather than trying to identify a canonical body of works and a bounded set of rules defined by that canon, we should take an ethnomusicological approach. We should be asking: what is it that musicians are doing that sounds good? What patterns can we detect in the broad mass of music being made and enjoyed out there in the world?

I have my own set of ideas about what constitutes common practice music in America in 2013, but I also come with my set of biases and preferences. It would be better to have some hard data on what we all collectively think makes for valid music. Trevor de Clerq and David Temperley have bravely attempted to build just such a data set, at least within one specific area: the harmonic practices used in rock, as defined by Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Temperley and de Clerq transcribed the top 20 songs from each decade between 1950 and 2000. You can see the results in their paper, “A corpus analysis of rock harmony.” They also have a web site where you can download their raw data and analyze it yourself. The whole project is a masterpiece of descriptivist music theory, as opposed to the bad prescriptivist kind.

Jimi Hendrix, common practice musician

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My collection of transcribed rhythm patterns

For my thesis, I’ve been gathering good drum machine patterns: classic breakbeats, genre templates and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Here they are, enjoy.

Classic breakbeats