I’m continuing to gather materials for my upcoming ISMIR 2016 presentation on Why Hip-Hop Is Interesting. One of my big themes is the melodic content of rap. Emcees are deliberate in their use of pitch, whether they’re singing or rapping or some combination of the two. In the post, I’ll analyze segments of three great emcees’ flow. I made the …
Category Archives: Music
Why hip-hop is interesting
Update: I’ve turned this post into an academic article. Here’s a draft. The title of this post is also the title of a tutorial I’m giving at ISMIR 2016 with Jan Van Balen and Dan Brown. Here are the slides: Why Hip-Hop Is Interesting from Ethan Hein The conference is organized by the International Society for Music Information …
Visualizing trap beats with the Groove Pizza
In a previous post, I used the Groove Pizza to visualize some classic hip-hop beats. But the kids are all about trap beats right now, which work differently from the funk-based boom-bap of my era.
Composing in the classroom
The hippest music teachers help their students create original music. But what exactly does that mean? What even is composition? In this post, I take a look at two innovators in music education and try to arrive at an answer. Matt McLean is the founder of the amazing Young Composers and Improvisers Workshop. He teaches his students composition using …
Rohan lays beats
The Ed Sullivan Fellows program is an initiative by the NYU MusEDLab connecting up-and-coming hip-hop musicians to mentors, studio time, and creative and technical guidance. Our session this past Saturday got off to an intense start, talking about the role of young musicians of color in a world of the police brutality and Black Lives Matter. The Fellows are …
More remixes of my Disquiet Junto remix
The same Disquiet Junto project that spawned this wildly recursive remix also involved a few more people remixing my remix. Here’s a family tree of the three first generation source tracks, the seven second generation remixes of those tracks, and the three third generation remixes of the second generation remixes. You can hear the three third-generation metaremixes below.
Recursive remixes
Here’s a strange and interesting thing that happened to me. The assignment for Disquiet Junto project 233 was to remix three tracks. The assignment for Junto project 234 was to metaremix one of the remixes from project 233. One of the people whose remix I metaremixed was listening to my track and accidentally had it playing in two different browser …
Prepping my rap and rock class at Montclair State
This summer, I’m teaching Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock at Montclair State University. It’s my first time teaching it, and it’s also the first time anyone has taught it completely online. The course is cross-listed under music and African-American studies. Here’s a draft of my syllabus, omitting details of the grading and such. I welcome your questions, comments …
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John Dewey on music education as experience
If I’m going to understand progressive philosophies of education, then I need to understand John Dewey. So here we go. Dewey is a progressive hero. He was a supporter of women’s suffrage, a founding member of the NAACP, and was ahead of his time on the importance of multiculturalism. Contrary to what I had always assumed, he did not invent the …
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Ilan meets the Fugees
My youngest private music production student is a kid named Ilan. He makes moody trip-hop and deep house using Ableton Live. For our session today, Ilan came in with a downtempo, jazzy hip-hop instrumental. I helped him refine and polish it, and then we talked about his ideas for what kind of vocal might work on top. He wanted an …