Samuel Halligan’s awesome Pop-Up Piano for Ableton Live

I recently met a gentleman named Samuel Halligan, who, among other things, makes music education utilities using Max For Live. One of them is called Pop-Up Piano. If you use Max or Ableton and you could use some help learning music theory, you should go and download it immediately. It’s a Max For Live Device that you can place on any MIDI track in Ableton, or just open as a Max standalone. The concept is simple: as you play notes on a MIDI controller, or as MIDI plays back from a clip, the Pop Up Piano shows you the note names, and notates them on the staff. It also shows them on a cool pitch wheel. You can also set a particular key and scale, and then the Pop Up Piano will show you whether the notes you’re playing fall within that scale.

Samuel made this thing to help pianists navigate the Ableton Push. But I could see this being useful for any musician. I’m going to use it in my intro-level music theory course that I’m teaching at the New School this fall. I’d be interested to hear from any theory pedagogues out there how you would structure lessons or assignments around this tool. Continue reading “Samuel Halligan’s awesome Pop-Up Piano for Ableton Live”

Brandon Bennett: the ethnopedagogical remix

In this post, I present a remixed recording I made of hip-hop educator Brandon Bennett running a session of the afterschool Producer Club run by TechRow Fund at New Design Middle School in Harlem. From the beginning until 1:18, you hear Brandon lead a game of his own devising, where he raps lines with missing words, and the students have to call out what they think the word is. From 1:18 until 1:58, you hear a second round of the game. Finally, from 1:58 until the end, you hear Brandon coaching the kids as they write their own bars.

After Brandon led the game, then the kids took turns on the mic. Everyone was rapping over a beat playing from Brandon’s phone through the speakers. The mic ran into Ableton Live on my computer, and then out through the same speakers. That way, I could apply effects like compression, delay, and Auto-Tune as needed. I could also record whatever was coming in on the mic. I like to record the sessions, because if a student comes up with something good, then we have it documented for their future reference. Brandon and I will sometimes edit the high points of their freestyles into “proto-songs”, with the hope that they will inspire the students to expand on them in future sessions.

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Kumbaya

When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from Joan Baez:

But then I read on Anne C Bailey’s blog that “Kumbaya” is a Gullah song, named for the dialect version of the phrase “come by here.” Bailey’s post links to the earliest known recording, a 1926 wax cylinder whose performer is listed only as “H. Wylie.” This version is surprisingly funky for those of us raised on the white folkie version.

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Ableton Loop 2017 panel on music tech and education

Ableton just published the video of a panel I was part of at Ableton Loop 2017 with Dennis DeSantis, Jack Schaedler and Mel Uye-Parker. We talk about music tech and education. Very cool stuff.

You can also read my detailed accounts of Loop 2017 and Loop 2018.

New book chapter on the Groove Pizza

Springer just released this new edited volume on human-computer interaction in music contexts. It includes a chapter I coauthored with Sumanth Srivinasan on the design and pedagogical philosophy behind the Groove Pizza. Check it out!

New Directions in Music and Human-Computer Interaction

The Shinobi Cuts remix chain

I was invited by Jason Richardson to take part in a Shinobi Cuts remix chain, an album where each track is a remix of the previous track. The final remix is done by the creator of the track that started the whole thing off, making for a kind of musical strange loop. 

Escher - Drawing Hands

When you listen to the album, you’re listening to the music evolve, track by track. It’s a brilliant idea. In the era of streaming, we might reasonably ask what albums are even for. Why does some collection of tracks need to be listened to as a group and in a particular order? I like the idea of having an evolutionary structure tying the tracks together. Continue reading “The Shinobi Cuts remix chain”

New gig at the New School

It looks as though I’ll be teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at The New School’s Eugene Lang College for the next two semesters. If ever there was a place that aligns with my personality and approach, that is it. They showed me a music theory quiz that uses an image from this very blog.

That looks familiar

That’s a comforting thing to see in a job interview. I feel like I’ve arrived home.

Tim Eriksen is the best folk musician in the world

I grew up with folk music, attending schools run by hippies and a summer camp run by Pete Seeger’s family. But I didn’t realize that folk music could be cool until I got to college. It was there that my friend Jeremy Withers turned me on to a band called Cordelia’s Dad, fronted by a singer and multi-instrumentalist named Tim Eriksen. The band did extremely loud punk rock versions of old hymns, sea shanties, murder ballads, and other traditional repertoire not normally performed in a loud punk style. They also played more “normal” folk music on acoustic guitars and fiddles and dulcimers and such, with a bleak and gothic vibe. Sometimes they would do one acoustic set and one rock set at the same show. The Venn diagram overlap of people who like both of these things is not large. But a small group of my friends adored the band, and we followed them around like puppies. Cordelia’s Dad albums aren’t easy to find, and they’re not always easy to listen to when you do find them, but if you’re a certain kind of angst-ridden person, they can cure what ails you.

Tim has had a long and colorful career since then, and has gone on to be one of my favorite musicians in the world. He continues to play (mostly) traditional music on traditional instruments in a variety of non-traditional ways, for example, by playing banjo with a bow.

Tim Eriksen

A few nights ago, I went with my wife and six-year-old son to see Tim do a solo show in a church in Greenwich Village, which is where I took the picture above. (Tim’s own young son was in the audience too, and both kids were sleeping peacefully by the end.) I look at some of my musical enthusiasms from my late adolescence with embarrassment, but the older I get, the more sense Tim’s music makes, and I keep learning from it and being inspired by it.

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Mr Ethan, I want to hear you rap

I’m currently working with Techrow Fund to develop an afterschool music technology program called The Producer Club. We’re doing the pilot program at New Design Middle School in Harlem with a group each of sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders. Techrow had approached me to teach, but I suggested that, rather than hiring a middle-aged white dad, they should bring in some young hip-hop artists. So the instructors for the pilot are two producer/emcees named Brandon Bennett and Roman Britton, who I met through CORE Music NYC. You can read more about them and hear their music in this study of a CORE cypher. My role in the pilot is to support them, write lesson plans, and do other admin.

Brandon Bennett and Roman Britton, hip-hop educators

The Producer Club’s goal is to teach music technology, audio production, songwriting, beatmaking, and creative collaboration using a project-based approach. The participants will create a mixtape of original songs, beats and skits and release it on SoundCloud and other streaming platforms. In the course of creating their tracks, the kids will learn about microphones, MIDI, synthesizers, audio manipulation, and mixing. We’re dividing each group into two teams: Artists and Beatmakers. Halfway through the program, the teams will switch, so every participant will experience both roles.

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My year in (other people’s) music

I chose my top songs of 2018 based on a combination of their emotional impact and the number of times I listened to them (measured subjectively, I don’t actually keep track.) Some of these I included because I loved them, and some my kids made me listen to a million times. I didn’t include any of my own music in the list, because while I do listen to it all the time, I don’t want to seem like a malignant narcissist. (If you do want to hear my own greatest hits of the past year, they’re on my SoundCloud and Mixcloud.)

Donald Glover/Serato deepdream

I present the songs here in chronological order of adding them to my iTunes. Enjoy.

Continue reading “My year in (other people’s) music”