Improvisation in music games

Joshua Pablo Rosenstock. Free Play Meets Gameplay: iGotBand, a Video Game for Improvisers. Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 20, pp. 11–15, 2010.

Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is simplified, but the overall experience is qualitatively remarkably similar. The games also change their players’ listening habits. A non-musician friend told me that until he played through Beatles Rock Band as Paul McCartney, he had never paid attention to a song’s bassline. Now he hears all those familiar Beatles songs in a new and richer way, and generally has learned to listen like a musician.

There is one crucial difference between the games and real music-making, however, and that is the absence of improvisation. The player moves through the song like a train on a track, and the games penalize any variation from the prescribed notes. Not all real-life music is improvisational either, but there is usually some element of personal expressiveness. Not so in Guitar Hero. Mimicry is the only way to play.

The South Park kids get their Guitar Hero on

Continue reading “Improvisation in music games”

Looping and stasis in Medúlla

Malawey, Victoria. Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla. Music Theory Online, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2010.

The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music at the macro level of phrases and sections. While shorter repetitive cells do appear in classical music, they are not always welcome. The term ostinato, from the Italian “obstinate,” does not connote approval. Popular music (and some minimalist classical) of the twentieth century has been significantly more repetitive, deriving its harmony from western Europe but its rhythms and circular loop-based structures from Africa and the Caribbean. The advent of synthesizers, drum machines and computers has strongly encouraged the trend toward cyclic repetition, since the default output of such devices is the endless loop.

Björk produced relatively conventional dance music early in her solo career, but her use of loops has become more sophisticated and complex over the course of her career. Her 2004 album Medúlla is comprised entirely from vocals, aside from the occasional synthesizer. Some of the songs are traditional songs and choral works, but most are built from vocals that have been heavily edited, sampled and looped in Pro Tools.

Continue reading “Looping and stasis in Medúlla”

The post-fidelity era

Guberman, Daniel. Post-Fidelity: A New Age of Music Consumption and Technological Innovation. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp 431–454

Guberman divides the history of recorded music into two distinct sections: the fidelity era, stretching from Thomas Edison through the invention of the compact disk, and the post-fidelity era, beginning with the iPod. He argues that, since about 2001, the listening public has come to value convenience, variety, personalization and curation over sound quality.

An emblematic image of the late fidelity era: the Maxell advertisement showing a wealthy young man in his home, sitting deep in an easy chair with a martini, getting physically blown away by giant, powerful speakers.

The emblematic image of the post-fidelity era: silhoutted people of both genders and diverse backgrounds, dancing with iPods.

Continue reading “The post-fidelity era”

Teaching music with looping

Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69

When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, green for choruses, orange for instrumental breaks and so on. This enables even non-readers to grasp the overall structure of the song. I then loop a short segment, usually significantly slowed, and have the student repeat it until they’ve attained some proficiency with it. As the student progresses, the loops get longer until they encompass entire sections. If a particular phrase is especially troublesome, I can send the student home with an mp3 of that phrase looped endlessly to practice over.

Continue reading “Teaching music with looping”

That ill tight sound

Chapman, Dale. “That Ill, Tight Sound”: Telepresence and Biopolitics in Post-Timbaland Rap Production. Journal of the Society for American Music (2008) Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 155–175.

Chapman examines the impact that Timbaland has had on popular music production, and what his significance is to the broader culture. While Timbaland himself is no longer the tastemaker he was at his peak ten or fifteen years ago, his sonic palette has become commonplace throughout the global pop landscape.

Continue reading “That ill tight sound”

Beatboxing and mashups are the new folk music

Thompson, Tok. Beatboxing, Mashups, and Cyborg Identity: Folk Music for the Twenty-First Century. Western Folklore, Spring 2011, 71-193.

Thompson’s provocative thesis is that folk music of the present is either produced entirely digitally, or is performed with the specific intent of imitating electronic sounds. Furthermore, the oral tradition intrinsic to folk music is now substantially taking place via the internet.

Thompson begins with a discussion of beatboxing, which began on the streetcorners of US cities, but has spread to every corner of the internet-using world, primarily via YouTube. Beatboxing may seem far afield from digital audio, since no form of music could be more “organic” or body-centered. But beatboxing began as a substitute for drum machines and samplers, and to this day, beatboxers strive to sound as much as possible like turntables, samplers and digital editing software.

Beatboxing enjoyed a brief and narrow popularity with hip-hop listeners in the 1980s, but since then it has vanished from the commercial landscape. For the most part, it is a form practiced and taught for creative gratification only. This satisfies Thompson’s requirement that a folk form be non-commrcial. While we traditionally associate folk music with specific regions, YouTube creates its own communities of shared musical vocabulary that transcend countries and continents. The best and most virtuosic beatboxer I’ve heard in many years was a young South Korean, visiting New York to busk the subways.

Again with the virtuoso Korean subway beatboxer

Continue reading “Beatboxing and mashups are the new folk music”

What is an octave?

Octaves are notes that you hear as being “the same” in spite of their being higher or lower in actual pitch. (Technically, notes separated by an octave are in the same pitch class.) Play middle C on the piano. Then go up the C major scale (the white keys) and the eighth note you play will be another C an octave higher. The “oct” part of the word refers to this eight step distance up the scale.

From a science perspective, octaves are pitch intervals related by factors of two. When a tuning fork plays standard concert A, it vibrates at 440 Hz. The A an octave higher is 880 Hz, and the A an octave lower is 220 Hz. Any note with the frequency 2^n * 440 will be an A. It’s a central mystery of human cognition why we hear pitches related by powers of two as being “the same” note. The ability to detect octave equivalency is probably built in to our brains, and it isn’t limited to humans. Rhesus monkeys have been shown to be able to detect octaves too, as have some other mammals.

Original post on Quora

Image schemas in music software

I’m doing a ton of writing for grad school, and will be posting the highlights here. First off, an abstract and discussion of this article:

Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48

The authors discuss the ways that user interface design for music production and teaching software is informed by embodied cognition, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that all metaphors trace their roots to states of the human body, which are the only basis for abstract thought that we possess. The closer a metaphor is to a state of the body, the easier it is for us to understand.

Continue reading “Image schemas in music software”

What is the worst aspect of the United States of America?

 

Continue reading “What is the worst aspect of the United States of America?”

Grad school update

This week I’ve begun classes towards a master’s degree in NYU’s Music Technology program. I’m going to be pretty overwhelmed with that for a couple of weeks, but then I expect I’ll be throwing a lot of course-related writing up soon. In the meantime, here’s a photo of Morton Subotnick’s Buchla synth. Can’t wait to try it out for myself.

Morton Subotnick's Buchla synth