In this post, I compare and contrast the soundscapes of two iconic sample-based tracks: “Regiment” by David Byrne and Brian Eno, and “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb. Recorded ten years apart using very different technology, these two tracks nevertheless share a similar structure: dance grooves at medium-slow tempos centered around percussion and bass, overlaid …
Continue reading “The Schizophonia of David Byrne, Brian Eno, and The Orb”
The most fun Music Technology class I’m taking this semester is Advanced Audio Production with Paul Geluso. A major component of the class is learning how to listen analytically, and to that end, we were assigned to pick a song and do an exhaustive study of its sonic qualities. We used methods from William Moylan’s …
Continue reading “Sonic analysis of “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe”
Update: see a more formal draft of my thesis proposal. For my NYU masters thesis in Music Technology, I’m designing a beginner-oriented music learning app for the iPad and similar devices. It will approach music the way I wish I had been taught it, and the way I’ve been teaching it to my private students. …
For my grad school thesis, I’m designing an intro-level music education app. I’m operating within the techno/hip-hop paradigm, with an Afrocentric rhythm-oriented approach. Electronic dance music production software had brought me much joy over the years, joy that I’m eager to spread to more people. I firmly believe that everyone is a potential musician, and …
I pride myself on having big ears, on listening to everything I can and trying to find the beauty in it. I’ve learned to enjoy some aspect of just about every kind of music. Every kind except one: high modernist twentieth century classical music. I just can not deal with it, at all. But I’m …
Update: one of the photos below currently appears on Mort’s Wikipedia page. Pretty cool. The seminar I’ve been taking with Morton Subotnick is sadly drawing to a close. As part of the end of the semester, we were invited to Professor Subotnick’s home studio, a few blocks from NYU, to get a demonstration of the …
This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it …
Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012) As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to …
Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the …
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 …
