This is one of my favorite Andrew Huang videos. Beyond their jokey aspects, Andrew’s videos make a profound point about just how flexible recorded sound can be. This is useful information if you want to break out of the cliches, if you have bad source material to work with, or if you just enjoy pushing …
Continue reading “How to make drums and synths from literally any sound”
This video recently made the rounds on Facebook: I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I …
Continue reading “Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live”
Last week I was Ableton’s guest for Loop, their delightful “summit for music makers.” I was on a panel about technology in music education, and I got to meet a lot of amazing people and hear some good music too. Here’s my live Twitter feed from the event if you want a fine-grained accounting. Otherwise, …
The vocoder is one of those mysterious technologies that’s far more widely used than understood. Here I explain what it is, how it works, and why you should care. Casual music listeners know the vocoder best as a way to make the robot voice effect that Daft Punk uses all the time. Here’s Huston Singletary …
The good people at Noteflight have started doing weekly challenges. I love constraint-based music prompts, like the ones in the Disquiet Junto, so I thought I would try this one: compose a piece of music using only four notes. The music side of this wasn’t hard. My material tends not to use that many pitches …
Recently someone posted this performance of the Chaconne from Bach’s violin partita in D minor on an eleven-string guitar by Moran Wasser. My favorite interpretation by an actual violinist is Viktoria Mullova’s. I appreciate her straightforward and unsentimental approach. I also enjoy the version from Morimur, and I’m not alone. It’s one of the most …
Continue reading “Teaching myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live”
Ableton recently launched a delightful web site that teaches the basics of beatmaking, production and music theory using elegant interactives. If you’re interested in music education, creation, or user experience design, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
For Jan Plass‘ class on research in games for learning, I’m working on an experiment testing the effects of game soundtracks on cognitive performance. The game in question is All You Can ET, developed by the NYU CREATE Lab. Here’s the music: https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/all-you-can-et-soundtrack You’re hearing four versions of the basic 32-bar loop: fast major, fast minor, slow …
Continue reading “Testing the effects of game music on cognition”
Note-taking for User Experience Design with June Ahn Don Norman discusses affordances and constraints in The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter Four: Knowing What To Do. User experience design is easy in situations where there’s only one thing that the user can possibly do. But as the possibilities multiply, so do the challenges. We can deal with …
Since George Michael died, I’ve been enjoying all of his hits, but none of them more than this one. Listening to it now, it’s painfully obvious how much it’s about George Michael’s struggles with his sexual orientation. I wonder whether he was being deliberately coy in the lyrics, or if he just wasn’t yet fully in touch …
