A followup post to White People And Hip-Hop First, a little on my background. I’m not from the suburbs, I’m from New York City. My experience growing up was an odd blend of the city and the suburbs. I lived in a posh little corner of an otherwise pretty tough neighborhood. I attended a very …
Continue reading “Why do suburban white kids like gangsta rap?”
Continuing my research into the use of games in music education, I found this: Custodero, L. (2002). Seeking challenge, finding skill: Flow experience in music education. Arts Education and Policy Review, 103(3), 3–9. The best music education happens in states of flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: the feeling of energized focus brought on by …
Here’s my final project for NYU’s Psychology of Music class, enjoy. Feel free to download this presentation or the full paper. Friends Don’t Let Friends Clap on One and Three: a Backbeat Clapping Study
In his book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, David Huron does some fascinating speculation about the evolutionary origin of laughter.
Part of a study for Psychology of Music at NYU The backbeat is a ubiquitous, almost defining feature of American popular and vernacular music. Clapping or snapping on the backbeats is generally considered by musicians to be more correct than doing so on the strong beats. However, audiences have a tendency to clap or snap on …
From from Sagan’s highly-recommended 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden: There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket”. Points are scored if the motion …
Continue reading “Carl Sagan explains why Pong is good for you”
No. Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band in 1957, when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. George Harrison joined the following year, when he was fourteen. (Ringo didn’t join the band until 1962.) Who were your friends when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Imagine yourself intensely and inseparably joined with these same people professionally, …
Susan McClary “Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” in Audio Culture, Daniel Warner, ed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, pp 289 – 298. This essay is the best piece of music writing I’ve read in quite a while. McClary articulates my personal ideology of music perfectly. Also, she quotes Prince! Here …
I’ve talked a lot of smack about high modernist music on this blog recently. Yesterday I got an email from a composer named Evan Kearney with some thoughtful reactions. Here’s what he had to say: [Y]ou wrote that you didn’t ‘get’ High Modernism (serialism, Webern, Pierre Boulez, Elliot Carter, etc.) and what it offered for …
I pride myself on having big ears, on listening to everything I can and trying to find the beauty in it. I’ve learned to enjoy some aspect of just about every kind of music. Every kind except one: high modernist twentieth century classical music. I just can not deal with it, at all. But I’m …
