This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am …
Author Archives: Ethan
The whole tone scale
Like diminished chords, the whole tone scale is not very widely used, but when you need that specific vibe, nothing else will do. Whole tone scales are easy to understand, because there are only two of them total. Whichever key you are in, there is a whole tone scale that includes the tonic, and another …
My current Intro to Music Technology syllabus
There is no required text for this class; all of the readings are online. However, if you are a music education major or you plan to teach music technology, I recommend buying Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity by Will Kuhn and myself.
Things I wrote this year
I wrote a tremendous amount this year, due to a combination of pandemic-induced academic underemployment and pandemic-induced confinement to quarters. The big headlines are that I published a book with Will Kuhn, and completed a draft of my doctoral dissertation. The book we really wrote in prior years and just did the final revisions and …
Living for the City
This Stevie Wonder classic is an iconic blues-based groove combined with some very non-blues-based harmony. Stevie sang all the parts and played all the instruments, including the sumptuous analog synth sounds designed with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie’s brother Calvin Hardaway is the main character in the spoken interlude. Ira Tucker Jr of the …
The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths
The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram: It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths: In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from …
Continue reading “The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths”
Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”
In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works …
Morning Dew
Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending …
The harmonic family tree
My blog stats have made it crystal clear that very few of you want to read about tuning systems. However, a vocal minority of you do love reading about them, and I definitely enjoy writing about them. So, let’s dig in and see how much Western harmony we can derive from the natural overtone series!
Seventh chords in just intonation vs 12-TET
I enjoy listening to Jacob Collier explain his music more than I enjoy the music itself. His arrangement of “Moon River” is mostly exhausting. However, Miles Comiskey pointed me to an interesting moment in this explainer video at the 1:04:22 mark where Jacob talks about how Kontakt enables you to change your instrument tuning on …
Continue reading “Seventh chords in just intonation vs 12-TET”