I’m doing a ton of writing for grad school, and will be posting the highlights here. First off, an abstract and discussion of this article: Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48 …
Category Archives: Technology
Who should you follow to keep up to date on digital music trends?
Here are some recommended people to follow on Twitter. Most of them have blogs of various kinds which you can access via their Twitter profiles. For hip-hop, sampling and everything related: Questlove Kevin Nottingham Whosampled Grown Folks Music Wayne Marshall Hank Shocklee Jeff Chang For technology: Deb Chachra Tara Busch Paul Lamere For the highbrow …
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How did Cher’s “Believe” come to be the first pop song to use Auto-Tune?
Auto-tune was already a well-established studio tool by the time “Believe” came out, though it was unknown outside the music industry.
Why do people watch music videos, especially tweens and teenagers?
I have a bunch of teenaged cousins, and they do the majority of their music listening on YouTube. They even DJ parties with it using playlists. Anytime they have a choice, they’ll always prefer music with some kind of video accompanying it, even if it’s just a still of the album cover.
How do you learn to remix/mashup songs?
The best remix/mashup tool that I’ve used is Ableton Live. For many years I used a combination of Recycle, Reason and Pro Tools, which was cumbersome and labor-intensive. Ableton handles the same tasks more easily and has a bunch of cool effects the other programs don’t.
Updated social flow
Every so often I like to document my ever-evolving internet presence. Here’s how things stand at the moment. Click the flowchart to see it bigger; explanation is below.
Visualizing music
Computer-based music production and composition involves the eyes as much as the ears. The representations in audio editors like Pro Tools and Ableton Live are purely informational, waveforms and grids and linear graphs. Some visualization systems are purely decorative, like the psychedelic semi-random graphics produced by iTunes. Some systems lie in between. I see rich …
How do you isolate samples like Girl Talk?
Girl Talk doesn’t actually isolate sounds; it’s almost impossible to do that. You can use EQ to quiet background sounds to a limited extent, but there’s no way to perfectly isolate sounds from a mixed track. Girl Talk and other mashup artists rely heavily on a capellas (vocal-only mixes) and instrumentals, which are included with …
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My top five SoundCloud tracks
The internet has spoken! These are the tracks of mine that you like the best, in order of listens. It comes as no surprise to me that three of them involve Michael Jackson, and two involve the Beatles. Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein Human Nature Megamix by …
Tune-Yards
Anna and I caught one of the best performances we’ve seen in years the other night by Tune-Yards. My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me …