Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Benjamin Teitelbaum’s study of Nordic nationalist music could not be any more timely. Gramsci diverged from classic Marxism when he argued that shifts in the cultural sphere create the conditions for political or economic change, rather than the other way around. Since Swedish nationalists do not …
Tag Archives: NYU
What is culture?
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels All of my social science professors have asked the class to define “culture” and no one is ever able to give a concise or satisfying answer. If a culture is discretely bounded and object-like, how do we understand the culture of people in borderlands, or migrants, …
Ethnomusicology and the voice
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Kane (2014) critiques Schaeffer’s notion of “reduced listening,” which ignores a sound’s referential properties and considers it independently of its causes or its meaning. Bracketing the question of whether this is even possible, is it desirable to restrict musical discourse so much by neglecting sound’s signifying …
Ethnomusicology and the body
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels It is such a strange artifact of Cartesian dualism that we have to specify experiences as being “bodily,” as if there were some other kind. It’s like specifying that a place is in the universe. Blacking (1977) observes that we can understand the convention of the …
The value of music
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels In a capitalist world, one job of anthropologists is to explain behavior that is “irrational” or “inefficient” (what even is the difference, right?) Anthropologists also get hired to understand the mindset of consumers, since economics has tended to regard individual humans as black boxes. When we …
Ethnomusicology and world music
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels People like me listen to world music to hope for and imagine a world without imperialism. I’ve sampled Central African pygmy music in my own work, and while I do a better job of attributing my sources than Deep Forest does, I’m motivated by the same …
The vocoder and Auto-Tune
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 …
My music technology syllabus
This is now out of date, see the current version I use variations on this project list for all of my courses. In Advanced Digital Audio Production at Montclair State University, students do all of these assignments. Students in Music Technology 101 do all of them except the ones marked Advanced. My syllabus for the …
Toward a Methodological Stance
Final paper for Approaches To Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Section 1: Reflections on Received View of Research I was raised by two medical researchers and a former astrophysicist, surrounded by stacks of quantitative journals. I rarely questioned the assumption that quantitative empirical research is the gold standard of truth, and that while subjective accounts …
Research proposal – Hip-Hop Pedagogy
Final paper for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Research questions Jamie Ehrenfeld is a colleague of mine in the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. She graduated from NYU’s music education program, and now teaches music at Eagle Academy in Brownsville. Like many members of the lab, she straddles musical worlds, bringing her training in …