Songwriting and computer programming

Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow.

The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music is. The loop is the basic compositional unit of nearly every song you could dance to. The problem is that writing loops out sequentially is very tedious.

Rather than writing the same passage over and over, you can save yourself a lot of laborious writing by using repeat markers. They’re like the GOTO instruction in BASIC. Here are the first four bars of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock. This four-bar phrase repeats hundreds of times over the course of the song. You wouldn’t want to write them all out. With repeat markers, you don’t have to. Repeat markers give sheet music the topology of a clock face. 
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The natural history of the Funky Drummer break

“The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs is one of the most-sampled recordings in history.

But even though the track is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, for the first decade after its release, it was an obscurity. It’s not as catchy as James Brown’s big hits like “Sex Machine” or “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” It is hardly even a “song” at all, and it doesn’t have verses or choruses; instead, it’s just an open-ended groove, with extended solos traded back and forth between James Brown on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax.

It’s a mother

Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” That last word will turn out to be prophetic.

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The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago

Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below.

When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.

User interfaces are the first and most immediate form of computer instruction, and for many people the only instruction they ever receive. Not every interface designer teaches their own products equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There are plenty of computer science concepts that are common knowledge to programmers and engineers, but that are esoteric or totally opaque to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways. Most normal people don’t have mental models of a computer program’s inner workings, and rely entirely on the interface to provide the model.

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So what is the big deal with Einstein?

I’m a humanities guy, but I’ve never lost my childhood love of math and science. I’m looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider being fired up next year the way normal male Americans look forward to the NBA playoffs. I like to be an informed fan, and since Einstein is the Michael Jordan of scientists, I wanted to know what it is exactly that he figured out, and why it’s so important. Beyond the physics, I wanted to know what put Einstein into the pop pantheon alongside Bob Marley and John Lennon. You never see dorm room posters of Henry Clerk Maxwell or Neils Bohr. The only other scientist who comes remotely close in pop stature is Darwin, but aside from his dramatic beard, Darwin the person doesn’t register much beyond his theories. Why is Einstein such a rock star? Continue reading “So what is the big deal with Einstein?”

Be brave, go ahead and divide by zero

When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?

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Learning music theory with Auto-Tune

Auto-Tune makes producing music easier. It can also make understanding music theory easier. The way you dial up different keys and scales doesn’t just guide your ear, it also guides your eye.

Auto-tune

Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only at certain frequencies, the pitches of the melody. Auto-Tune helps by shifting the voice’s frequency to the closest desired piano-key pitch.

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The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death

When the computer crashes, it seems like it’s frozen. Actually, it’s still working as fast as usual. It only appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over.

Computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis, so it’s hard to get a feel for what’s going on in a looping failure.  Fortunately, Super Mario Bros has a famous bug known as the Minus World that lets you study an infinite loop in an entertainingly interactive form. Continue reading “The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death”

Brain vs computer: which is better?

Do computers think? Is the brain a computer? We use computers as metaphors for the brain and vice versa. Is the comparison apt? Brains and computers can imitate each other in limited ways. Deep down, how much similarity is there? Continue reading “Brain vs computer: which is better?”

Inside the black box

Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as:

the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. Continue reading “Inside the black box”

How transistors think

The parts of the computer that do the “thinking” are mostly made of little electronic switches called transistors. If you connect two wires to a transistor, you can use the voltage on one wire to control the voltage on the other. What’s especially handy for engineering purposes is that the presence or absence of a small voltage on one wire can control a wide range of voltages on the other wire. When voltage on the control wire changes, the transistor opens or closes the other wire to the flow of electricity in much the same way that a faucet controls the flow of water in a pipe.

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