Well, it’s official. All of my students are now henceforth required to post all music assignments on SoundCloud. It solves so many problems! No fumbling with thumb drives, no sharing of huge files, no annoyances with incompatible DAWs. No need to mess with audio-hostile Learning Management Systems. Everyone gets to listen to everyone else’s music. …
Tag Archives: NYU
Panel on games in education
I contributed a chapter to a soon-to-be-released book, Learning, Education and Games (Volume One): Curricular and Design Considerations. I wrote about the potential value of video games in music education. The book will be out in October 2014. Here’s the table of contents. We’re having a launch party on October 9th at the NYU Game …
Shared sample projects
My students at NYU and Montclair State are beginning to venture into producing their own tracks. There are two challenges facing them, the small one and the big one. The small challenge is learning the tools: remembering where the menus are and which key you hold down to turn the mouse pointer into a pencil, …
My music education
I’m writing a chapter of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education. Here’s a section of what I wrote, about my own music learning experiences. Most of my music education has happened outside of the classroom. It has come about intentionally, through lessons and disciplined practice, and it has come about unintentionally, through …
My NYU course this fall
Starting this week, I’m teaching my very first full course at NYU, the undergraduate Music Education Technology Practicum. Exciting! Here’s the syllabus.
A DIY video about DIY recording
For the benefit of Play With Your Music participants and anyone else we end up teaching basic audio production to, MusEDLab intern Robin Chakrabarti and I created this video on recording audio in less-than-ideal environments. This video is itself quite a DIY production, shot and edited in less than twenty-four hours, with minimal discussion beforehand …
Making rhythm tutorial videos
I’m continuing to crank out educational videos for Play With Your Music. Part of the process involves remaking old videos as both my chops and the facilities in NYU’s Blended Learning Lab improve. Here’s my series on the basics of rhythm: We’ve made several improvements, some technical, some creative. The most immediately noticeable one is …
What’s up with Ethan
Here’s a quick update on what is going on in my life. First, most importantly: Milo is walking but not yet talking; he’s waving, but not yet high-fiving; he’s eating with a spoon, but only getting the food into his mouth two thirds of the time. He’s totally delightful. Since I graduated from the NYU …
Announcing the Peter Gabriel edition of Play With Your Music
You may have noticed a lot of writing about Peter Gabriel on the blog lately. This is because I’ve been hard at work with Alex Ruthmann, the NYU MusEDLab, and the crack team at Peer To Peer University on a brand new online class that uses some of Peter’s eighties classics to teach audio production. …
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Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live
I just completed a batch of new music, which was improvised freely in the studio and then later shaped into structured tracks. https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/tabla-breakbeat-science I thought it would be helpful to document the process behind this music, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I expect to be teaching this kind of production a lot …
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