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 …
Author Archives: Ethan
Graceland
I recently saw Under African Skies, the documentary about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and it was spellbinding. The music is so beautiful, the politics are so agonizing. I watched it with my mom and sister, which is appropriate since Graceland was in heavy rotation through my childhood. Mom isn’t a big pop scholar and knew next …
Who cares if you listen?
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 …
My first foray into iOS music
I’ve toyed around with several iPhone and iPad music apps. Many are intriguing and fun, but few have inspired me into making “real” music. In preparation for the next Disquiet Junto project, I downloaded Nodebeat and tried some improvisation. The app combines randomness and control in an intriguing way. I also like the fine microtonal …
Inside Morton Subotnick’s studio
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 …
Originality in Digital Music
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 …
Sampling and semiotic democracy
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 …
What we talk about when we talk about Kanye West
Here’s an email conversation I’ve been having with my friend Greg Brown about Kanye West’s recent albums. Greg is a classical composer and performer with a much more avant-garde sensibility than mine. The exchange is lightly edited for clarity. Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far …
Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about Kanye West”
Encoding emotion
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 …
From my SoundCloud stats
A complete list of countries from which people have listened to my SoundCloud tracks, in order of number of listens: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Russian Federation, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Argentina, Sweden, Turkey, India, Georgia, Chile, New Zealand, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Colombia, Romania, Czech …