Designing learning experiences with music technology: good for whom, good for what?

In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy to do. The first night of class, we got into a discussion of Noteflight, the online music notation editor. The debate we had is not specific to Noteflight; you could have it about any notation software. I use Noteflight a lot to embed music examples in this blog:

Noteflight and programs like it support naive trial-and-error learning by giving you lots of aural feedback. When you enter a note, you hear it. If you change its pitch, you hear the result. You can listen back to everything you write at any time. The software’s playback might sound stiff and awkward, but you will still get a good idea of how your music will sound.
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Hidden Place

At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine:

I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make conventional ideas sound strange. “Hidden Place” is a perfect example. Is it a pop song? An art song? A dance groove? A work of experimental ambient music? The answer is, yes, all of the above. The basic structure is pop boilerplate: verse-prechorus-chorus form, a looped bassline and ostinato-based groove organized into four or eight bar phrases. But on top of that standard foundation is a lot of weird stuff. Continue reading “Hidden Place”

The Anchor Song

Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack Exchange thread says they aren’t, with some useful historical context. The difference really comes down to pitch centrality. The C major scale has a strong sense of being centered around the note C, and it implies the whole complex system of tension and resolution that you learn about in music theory class. By contrast, C Ionian mode doesn’t so much “function” as it drifts around without really progressing.

It’s hard to find examples of Ionian! There are plenty of pop songs based on the white keys of the piano whose key centers are ambiguous between C major and A minor, but it’s hard to find a piece of major-scale music that just floats around. The closest thing I can think of is Björk’s beautiful tune “The Anchor Song”, with its delightfully angular saxophone arrangement that she wrote with Oliver Lake.

Björk has talked a bit about writing “The Anchor Song”, but only about the lyrics, not the music. She has conservatory training and is deliberate about all of her note choices, so I’m sure she constructed this tune with intention, but I don’t know what that intention was. I figured the tune out by ear a while ago, and came up with a guitar arrangement that I’m proud of, but I didn’t try to write it out. Recently I tried to warp the song out in Ableton, and I discovered that I could not suss the meter out at all.

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Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways

While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s tune “Sing Me Softly of the Blues.”

Here’s my transcription:

Presumably Dilla was drawn to this sample due to a combination of its harmony, rhythm and timbre. The sample’s basic harmony is a V-I cadence, B7 resolving to E. However, the B7 is really a bar each of B7b9 and F7(#11). These chords contain the not-very-E-major-ish notes C and F, respectively. Meanwhile, the E chord is actually E9sus4. That adds up to a lot of abstraction and ambiguity. The rhythm in the first bar of the sample is complex, too, a polyrhythmic-sounding half note triplet. The last note of the triplet extends into the rest of the bar, further blurring its metrical function. The timbre is pillowy and indistinct, thanks to the vibraphone’s inharmonics and the soft attack of the mallets.

Let’s dig into the sample flips!

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The diminished scale

When I want my music to sound mysterious, the diminished scale is a reliable tool in the harmonic toolkit. It worked for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and it can work for you!

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Relative minor, relative major

Every major key has a relative minor key. Think of it as an evil twin sibling. Relative minors are very widely used but not so widely understood. In particular, there’s a lot of confusion around the fact that major keys and their relative minors share the same key signatures and (mostly) the same pitches. But they sound and feel completely different. How can this be? Let’s dig in.

Here’s the C major scale. Click the image to play it on the aQWERTYon.

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We Don’t Talk About Bruno

Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this:

It isn’t even my favorite song in the movie; that distinction goes to “Surface Pressure.” But “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the one that’s burning up the pop charts.

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Theory Hacks with Ableton

I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live.

In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project.

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Technology Trends in Music Education

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 excited to be teaching it. My syllabus is below. I expect it to evolve a bit as the course goes on, especially toward the end of the semester as I adapt it to the needs and interests of the students. The reading list draws extensively on the same body of research and practice that informed Will Kuhn’s and my book Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity.

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The whole tone scale

Like diminished chords, the whole tone scale is not very widely used, but when you need that specific vibe, nothing else will do. Whole tone scales are easy to understand, because there are only two of them total. Whichever key you are in, there is a whole tone scale that includes the tonic, and another one that doesn’t. I have never seen a useful naming system for these two scales, so I call them yin and yang.

Notice that the notes not found in yin are all the notes in yang, and vice versa. Another fun thing is that when you write the whole tone scales on the circle of fifths, they look exactly the same as they do on the chromatic circle – all the yang scale tones just switch places with their counterparts a tritone away. Symmetry! Continue reading “The whole tone scale”