“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Tag Archives: recursion
Sampling keyboards
One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator …
Jimi Hendrix, electronic musician
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated …
Mashups as micro-mixtapes
Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a …
How to make a hot beat
Here’s a more specific post on programming various well-known beats. The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention …
Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop
Like this sentence, computer programs and songs can refer to themselves. Many computer programs and songs are made of loops within loops within loops. Self-reference gives computers their extreme versatility. It also makes for richer, more interesting music.
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The natural history of the Funky Drummer break”
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 …
Continue reading “The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago”
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 …
Continue reading “The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death”