This is the third in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. See also the first and second posts. So, you’ve learned how to listen closely and analytically. The next step is to get your hands on some multitrack …
Category Archives: Music
Play With Your Music curriculum design – learning to listen
This is the second in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. Read the first post here. Alex is fond of the phrase “pedagogies of timbre and space.” By that, he means: ways of studying those aspects of recorded …
Continue reading “Play With Your Music curriculum design – learning to listen”
Designing a music production MOOC
In my capacity as a research assistant to Alex Ruthmann, I’ve been getting to work on a bunch of cool projects. The first one to come to fruition is a MOOC (massively open online course) about music production. It’s called Play With Your Music, and it starts November 1st. The project is spearheaded by the …
Teaching math with the Drum Loop
I’ve undergone some evolution in my thinking about the intended audience for my thesis app. My original idea was to aim it at the general public. But the general public is maybe not quite so obsessed with breakbeats as I am. Then I started working with Alex Ruthmann, and he got me thinking about the …
Tabla Breakbeat Science
Update: we’re working on an album. Listen to it here. Last semester I did a project for my psychology of music class that studied the way people clap to funk/dance music. I was testing to see whether my subjects knew to clap on the backbeats or not. I didn’t give them any prompting as to …
Software design as research
Brown, A. (2007). Software Development as Music Education Research. International Journal of Education & the Arts. Volume 8, Number 6. My thesis is supposed to include a quantitative research component. This had been causing me some anxiety. It’s educational and creative software. What exactly could I measure? I had this vague notion of testing people’s …
Hip-hop transcriptions
There’s a great Tumblr called Hip-Hop Transcriptions. It consists solely meticulous transcriptions of classic beats and rhymes by Charlie Hely. The mere fact of these transcriptions is fairly wonderful, but even better is the way that Hely lays out his charts. He uses graph paper, with each box representing a sixteenth note. This makes the …
Constructivist learning and Scratch
Brennan, K. (2013). Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation, In and Out of School. Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had the very good fortune to attend a fancy elementary school run on solid constructivist principles. In sixth grade I got to experience the “hard fun” of Sprite …
Against Music Theory – some commentary
My fellow music tech student Laura Dickens had some thoughts about my recent music theory rant. This is a lightly edited version of our Facebook conversation. Laura: Have you ever read any Susan McClary? I feel like you could probably get into that… Me: Yes! Susan McClary is the best! She shares my belief in …
Against music theory
I am mercifully finished with music theory in grad school and couldn’t be happier about it. You may find this surprising. My blog is full of music theory. How could a guy who enjoys thinking about music in analytical terms as much as I do have such a wretched time in my graduate music theory …