User Interface Design for Music Learning Software

Computers have revolutionized the composition, production and recording of music. However, they have not yet revolutionized music education. While a great deal of educational software exists, it mostly follows traditional teaching paradigms, offering ear training, flash cards and the like. Meanwhile, nearly all popular music is produced in part or in whole with software, yet electronic music producers typically have little to no formal training with their tools. Somewhere between the ad-hoc learning methods of pop and dance producers and traditional music pedagogy lies a rich untapped vein of potential.

This paper will explore the problem of how software can best be designed to help novice musicians access their own musical imagination with a minimum of frustration. I will examine a variety of design paradigms and case studies. I will hope to discover software interface designs that present music in a visually intuitive way, that are discoverable, and that promote flow.

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Remixing “Here Comes The Sun” in 5.1 Surround

For my final project in Advanced Audio Production at NYU, I created a 5.1 surround remix of the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun.” You can download it here. If you don’t have surround playback, you can listen to the stereo version:

I was motivated to create a surround remix of a Beatles song by hearing the Beatles Love album in class.

I chose “Here Comes The Sun” because I have the multitracks, and because I heard potential to find new musical ideas within it. Remixing an existing recording is always an enjoyable undertaking, but the process takes on new levels of challenge and reward when the source material is so well-known and widely revered. Much as I enjoy Beatles Love, I feel that it didn’t take enough liberties with the original tracks. I wanted to depart further from the original mix and structure of “Here Comes The Sun.”

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Using Ableton Live to teach music

Here’s a presentation I gave at the December 2012 Advanced Ableton User Meetup at Tekserve, hosted by Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy. I speak about how useful Ableton Live is as a music teaching tool, using Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” as an example.

Very shortly after I concluded my talk, my wife went into labor with our son Milo. Quite a memorable night.

Make the music with your mouth

I’m a longtime closeted beatboxer. I do it while walking around, doing household tasks, in the shower, pretty much anywhere except in front of other people. My wife is remarkably tolerant of it, bless her, and my infant son has no choice but to listen to me do it. I don’t expect to ever beatbox for audiences, but I still  fascinating and delightful. It’s simultaneously modern and ancient — imitating high-tech drum machines, samplers and turntables, using the most ancient musical instrument of them all, the human body.

Again with the virtuoso Korean subway beatboxer

Growing up in New York City, I was exposed to a lot of beatboxing at the background level. The earliest track I can definitely point to as impacting my consciousness was “Make The Music With Your Mouth, Biz” by the great Biz Markie.

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Carl Sagan explains why Pong is good for you

From from Sagan’s highly-recommended 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden:

There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket”. Points are scored if the motion of the ball is not intercepted by the racket. The game is very interesting. There is a clear learning experience involved which depends exclusively on Newton’s second law for linear motion. As a result of Pong, the player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics – a better understanding even than that provided by billiards, where the collisions are far from perfectly elastic and where the spinning of the pool balls interposes more complicated physics.

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Live at apexart

This past November, I had the privilege of performing in the fourth Disquiet Junto concert of 2012 in the apexart gallery.

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Top tracks of 2012

Because I’m old and out of touch, most of these are pre-2012 songs that were new to me this year.

Nas — “The World Is Yours”

In 1994 I was not paying attention to hip-hop at all. My loss.

Blackalicious — “Swan Lake”

More vintage 1994 hip-hop. Samples three different cover versions of the Stylistics’ “People Make The World Go Round.” Hip.

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Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?

No.

Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band in 1957, when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. George Harrison joined the following year, when he was fourteen. (Ringo didn’t join the band until 1962.) Who were your friends when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Imagine yourself intensely and inseparably joined with these same people professionally, socially and creatively, thirteen years later. When I was in my late twenties, I certainly wouldn’t wanted to have been trapped in a series of windowless rooms with my high school friends under enormous pressure to be brilliant. It would have been a miracle for the Beatles to keep a good working relationship any longer than they did under the best of circumstances. And the Beatles’ circumstances were not, emotionally speaking, ideal.

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Meet Milo

Born 12/8/12, 6 pounds 7 ounces. We’re excited, and exhausted. See lots more pictures.

There’s joy in repetition

Susan McClary “Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” in Audio Culture, Daniel Warner, ed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, pp 289 – 298.

This essay is the best piece of music writing I’ve read in quite a while. McClary articulates my personal ideology of music perfectly. Also, she quotes Prince!

Here are some long excerpts.

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