I don’t know whether you’ve been following the feud between Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor, and if you haven’t, congratulations on using your free time more constructively than I use mine. But so anyway, the most infamous pop star of the moment (Miley) publically cited a well-respected elder stateswoman (Sinéad) as an influence. In response, …
Category Archives: Music
ComposerQuest podcast with Marc Weidenbaum
Quick note to say that one of my tracks appears in a podcast by Charlie McCarron, “Social Sound Experiments with Marc Weidenbaum.” Marc is the visionary mind behind the Disquiet Junto and is a thoughtful speaker on the nature of sound art, its relationship to music, and how to be a good critic, composer and …
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Experience designers design experiences
Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Morgan & Claypool. For this week’s reading on experience design for music education, we moved up a level to think about experience design generally. A lot of design theory tends to boil down to “Design things better!” Marc Hassenzahl’s book falls into that trap …
Drum Loop programming lesson concept images
Nearly getting scooped by Loopseque lit a fire under me to get some more concept images for my thesis app together. So here are some examples of the beat programming lessons that form the intellectual heart of my project. The general idea is that you’re given an existing drum pattern, a famous breakbeat or something …
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Another radial drum machine
I’ve been working on my thesis app this whole time in the serene knowledge that there’s very little precedent for what I’m trying to do. However, I just learned that I’m wrong, that there’s an app out there with a lot of broad similarities to mine: Loopseque, made by Casual Underground. At first glance, I …
Music students and maker culture
For Alex Ruthmann’s class, we’re reading Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life by the late Steve Dillon. If you can get past the academic verbiage, there’s some valuable technomusicology here, and some tremendous advocacy resources too.
Radial drum machine update
I’m planning to be done with my thesis by (gulp) December. My collaborator Chris and I got a basic prototype of the radial drum machine together over the summer using Max and Javascript. What we learned is that you don’t want to do an audio app in Max and Javascript, since it will be single-threaded …
Designing music learning experiences with technology
This semester I’m working as a research assistant to Alex Ruthmann at NYU. The job includes helping him with a new joint music education and music technology class, Designing Technologies & Experiences for Music Making, Learning and Engagement. Here’s the bibliography. The central class project is to create a music education technology experience — a lesson …
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Hi people in Alex’s class
Rather than starting a new blog from scratch, I’m going to use my existing blog. My posts related to this class will have the tag “music ed tech.” I also use the blog for a lot of other stuff. If you need blog or web help and Alex is busy, I can help you too.
Why isn’t repetitive music boring to listen to?
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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