A Quora user asks why we don’t get bored when listening to repetitive music. This is related to the equally interesting question of why we can play repetitive music without getting bored. Why is there so much joy in repetition? Humans are pattern recognizers. You’d think that once you’d learned the pattern of a repetitive …
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Quora user Jennifer Ha asked me: What is your process of composing music? She goes on: For me I have to wait for the right inspiration given to me very irregularly. But it seems others can compose with chords deliberately. How do you compose, and do you feel proud of it all the times (i.e. know …
The word is from Greek, “poly” meaning many and “phony” meaning voice. This is as opposed to monophony — one voice. Originally, polyphony literally meant multiple people singing together. Over the course of musical history, the term has become more abstracted, referring to multiple “voices” played on any instrument. And usually, polyphony means that the …
For my final project in Advanced Audio Production at NYU, I created a 5.1 surround remix of the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun.” You can download it here. If you don’t have surround playback, you can listen to the stereo version: I was motivated to create a surround remix of a Beatles song by hearing …
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This past November, I had the privilege of performing in the fourth Disquiet Junto concert of 2012 in the apexart gallery.
Susan McClary “Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” in Audio Culture, Daniel Warner, ed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, pp 289 – 298. This essay is the best piece of music writing I’ve read in quite a while. McClary articulates my personal ideology of music perfectly. Also, she quotes Prince! Here …
Matthew D. Thibeault. Wisdom for Music Education From the Recording Studio. General Music Today, 20 October 2011. Stuart Wise, Janinka Greenwood and Niki Davis. Teachers’ Use of Digital Technology in Secondary Music Education: Illustrations of Changing Classrooms. British Journal of Music Education, Volume 28, Issue 2, July 2011, pp 117 - 134. Digital recording studios …
I’ve talked a lot of smack about high modernist music on this blog recently. Yesterday I got an email from a composer named Evan Kearney with some thoughtful reactions. Here’s what he had to say: [Y]ou wrote that you didn’t ‘get’ High Modernism (serialism, Webern, Pierre Boulez, Elliot Carter, etc.) and what it offered for …
The most fun Music Technology class I’m taking this semester is Advanced Audio Production with Paul Geluso. A major component of the class is learning how to listen analytically, and to that end, we were assigned to pick a song and do an exhaustive study of its sonic qualities. We used methods from William Moylan’s …
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Update: see extensive documentation of one of my Junto projects. A significant chunk of the music I’ve made in the past year has been prompted by a blogger and journalist named Marc Weidenbaum, proprietor of the fine electronic music web zine Disquiet. This is funny, because while I’ve had a number of online exchanges with …
