I have come to believe that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label …
Category Archives: Music
The longest sample chain
Music evolves the way life does: through change in the heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations. Most of the heritable characteristics of music are abstractions like rhythm patterns and chord progressions. However, you can also see heritability at work more obviously in the form of sampling. It’s especially illuminating when a song samples a …
Toni Blackman’s hip-hop meditation
Toni Blackman‘s hip-hop education practice resembles music therapy as much as it does traditional music teaching, so it makes perfect sense that she would release a hip-hop meditation album. I did a remix of my favorite parts for my dissertation mixtape: Toni argues that freestyling builds authentic confidence that comes from the soul, and that …
Samuel Halligan’s awesome Pop-Up Piano for Ableton Live
I recently met a gentleman named Samuel Halligan, who, among other things, makes music education utilities using Max For Live. One of them is called Pop-Up Piano. If you use Max or Ableton and you could use some help learning music theory, you should go and download it immediately. It’s a Max For Live Device …
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Brandon Bennett: the ethnopedagogical remix
In this post, I present a remixed recording I made of hip-hop educator Brandon Bennett running a session of the afterschool Producer Club run by TechRow Fund at New Design Middle School in Harlem. From the beginning until 1:18, you hear Brandon lead a game of his own devising, where he raps lines with missing …
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Kumbaya
When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …
Ableton Loop 2017 panel on music tech and education
Ableton just published the video of a panel I was part of at Ableton Loop 2017 with Dennis DeSantis, Jack Schaedler and Mel Uye-Parker. We talk about music tech and education. Very cool stuff. You can also read my detailed accounts of Loop 2017 and Loop 2018.
New book chapter on the Groove Pizza
Springer just released this new edited volume on human-computer interaction in music contexts. It includes a chapter I coauthored with Sumanth Srivinasan on the design and pedagogical philosophy behind the Groove Pizza. Check it out!
The Shinobi Cuts remix chain
I was invited by Jason Richardson to take part in a Shinobi Cuts remix chain, an album where each track is a remix of the previous track. The final remix is done by the creator of the track that started the whole thing off, making for a kind of musical strange loop. When you listen to the …
New gig at the New School
It looks as though I’ll be teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at The New School’s Eugene Lang College for the next two semesters. If ever there was a place that aligns with my personality and approach, that is it. They showed me a music theory quiz that uses an image from this very blog. That’s …