Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg We have read some dense canonical European White Guys. None of them have been as difficult and off-putting as Freud. I would have rather read Civilization And Its Discotheques. Freud begins with the observation that for most of human history, our happiness has been tied to our …
Category Archives: Science
Music Matters chapter five
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. These are responses to the discussion questions at the end of chapter five, which discusses personhood and music education. Why should music educators be concerned with the nature of personhood? All forms of music, education and community music are …
Émile Durkheim – Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week, we read another cornerstone of the sociology canon: Émile Durkheim on where religion comes from. The book is very much a product of its time, with continual and annoying references to “primitive” religions and peoples. No question that Durkheim’s methodology doesn’t pass contemporary muster. But his theoretical insights are …
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Music Matters chapter three
This post is public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. This chapter goes after the big questions: What is music and why does it exist? I love chewing over this stuff.
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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Personhood and music education
With this post, I begin some public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. The goal here is to explain the book to myself, but if this is helpful to you in some way, good. What is the point of music education? For Elliott and Silverman, the goal is to develop each student as a …
Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza
We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see …
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What the heck is the LIGO chirp?
I recently posted a track on SoundCloud that included the sonification of LIGO’s gravitational wave data. A student asked me what that meant. Since today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, what better time to try to formulate an answer? https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/ligo-chirp First, some context: 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes collided. Each was about thirty times as …
Ultralight Beam
The first song on Kanye West’s Life Of Pablo album, and my favorite so far, is the beautiful, gospel-saturated “Ultralight Beam.” Say what you want about Kanye as a public figure, but as a musician, he is in complete control of his craft. See a live performance on SNL. The song uses only four chords, but they’re …
Please stop saying “consuming music”
In the wake of David Bowie’s death, I went on iTunes and bought a couple of his tracks, including the majestic “Blackstar.” In economic terms, I “consumed” this song. I am a “music consumer.” I made an emotional connection to a dying man who has been a creative inspiration of mine for more than twenty years, via “consumption.” That …