This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am …
Category Archives: Technology
My current Intro to Music Technology syllabus
There is no required text for this class; all of the readings are online. However, if you are a music education major or you plan to teach music technology, I recommend buying Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity by Will Kuhn and myself.
Nahre Sol introduces Billie Eilish to the classical canon
In this fascinating video, Nahre Sol composes accompaniment for an isolated Billie Eilish vocal in the styles of various canonical composers. The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due …
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The blues and the harmonic series – a visual guide
Does the harmony of the blues come from the natural overtone series? Is it a just intonation system that later got shoehorned into Western twelve-tone equal temperament? Whether the blues comes from just intonation, or just intonation happens to sound like the blues, this is a rich and promising avenue of inquiry, both for understanding …
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The problem with just intonation – a visual guide
Tuning is the final frontier of my musical understanding. I start reading about it, and then I hit a big table of fractions or logarithms and my eyes immediately glaze over. However, tuning is important and interesting! So I continue to struggle on. Fortunately, as with so many music theory concepts, the right computer software …
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Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed
It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so: But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:
Kicking out the JAMS
That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. Email me if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF.
Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne
You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this): This …
Lonely Woman but it’s Gregorian chant
This morning I saw this tweet: Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant — wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020 I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I …
Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of …
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