My last post discussed how we should be deriving music theory from empirical observation of what people like using ethnomusicology. Another good strategy would be to derive music theory from observation of what’s going on between our ears. Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson has attempted just that in his essay, Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory …
Category Archives: Science
Toward a better music theory
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I thought it would be a good idea to follow that up with some ideas for how to make music theory more …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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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Hereditary units in music
Another thought-provoking Quora question: Are there any hereditary units in music? The question details give some context: In his blog post “The Music Genome Project is no such thing,” David Morrison makes an edifying distinction between a genotype and a phenotype. He also makes the bold statement “there are no hereditary units in music.” Is …
Minsky on music
Music, Mind and Meaning by Marvin Minsky is a gold mine of inspired speculation about the origins and functions of music. I’ve assembled some choice quotes below. If visual art is our way of playing with and studying space, then music is our way of playing with and studying time. Can one time fit inside …
Getting ready for the recording studio
Here’s an interesting Quora thread about what you should know before booking a rock band session. I can’t improve on the excellent post by Bruce Williams, but I have a few things to add. The challenge of recording is 10% technical and 90% psychological, especially if you’re inexperienced. You may be as cool as a …