Now that I have an office job, I’m spending a lot of time under headphones while I correct people’s grammar. It’s a good opportunity to explore the outer reaches of my music tastes. The office has some networked iTunes libraries heavy on the Pitchfork 500, and I have whatever I’m bringing from home. I’ve also …
Category Archives: Software
Loop mode: improvisation is composition is recording
Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s …
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Auto-tune (is) the news
See a followup post on the Gregorys’ breakout hit, the “Bed Intruder Song.” The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
A synthesizer is like an axe
I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of …
Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.
We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re …
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Jazz Jazz Revolution
It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop
Like this sentence, computer programs and songs can refer to themselves. Many computer programs and songs are made of loops within loops within loops. Self-reference gives computers their extreme versatility. It also makes for richer, more interesting music.
Songwriting and computer programming
Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most …
The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago
Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below. When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke …
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Be brave, go ahead and divide by zero
When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?