Over on the Soundfly blog, you can see a video from our new harmony course in which I talk through the fascinating chord progression from “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Check it out!
Meet the audio file formats
There are a lot of audio file formats. Here are the ones you encounter most commonly.
Analog formats
Recorded sound consists of fluctuations in electrical current coming off of a microphone or mixing desk. Before computers, you translated that current into tiny smooth wiggles in the shape of the groove cut into a vinyl record, or tiny smooth wiggles in the alignment of magnetic particles embedded in tape. You can reproduce the original electrical current by dragging a needle along the groove, which vibrates a little magnet, or by running the tape over a little magnet.
Examples: Wax cylinders, vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape, cassettes
Pros: Analog formats can sound really great if your media are in good condition, and if you are listening through a good sound system.
Cons: Analog formats can sound terrible if the media get scratched, dusty, or demagnetized. You need to be very careful about physical degradation–every time you listen to a tape, you scrape a little bit of the coating off. You can’t make copies of analog media without introducing noise. And analog gear is expensive. Continue reading “Meet the audio file formats”
New online music theory course with Soundfly!
I’m delighted to announce that my new online music theory collaboration with Soundfly is live. It’s called Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords, and it gives you a practical guide to harmony for creators of contemporary pop, R&B, hip-hop, and EDM. We tie all the abstract music theory concepts to real-world musical usages, showing how you can use particular chord combinations to evoke particular feelings. I worked hard with the team at Soundfly on this over the past few months, and we are super jazzed about it.
Like my previous Soundfly courses, the Theory for Producers series, the chords class is a blend of videos, online interactives and composition/production challenges. The musical examples are songs by people like Adele, Chance the Rapper, and Frank Ocean. You can download the MIDI files for each example, stick them in your DAW, and dive right into hands-on music making.
Continue reading “New online music theory course with Soundfly!”
Milo’s first original song
At age four, Milo wrote a song! It was inspired by an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, where Stephen is lost in the old mine, and Sir Topham Hatt organizes a search party. The verses are a little confusing and are different every time he sings them, but the chorus is remarkably catchy.
Marked
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides
Pager, Devah. (2007). MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Page 21 of Pager’s book includes this chart, showing annual prison admissions for drugs by race in the United States. In the 1980s, we imprisoned roughly the same numbers of black and white people for drugs. There are about six times as many white people as black people in the population generally, so unless you believe that black people do drugs at six times the rate white people do, there would appear to have been some racism at work.
Then in the late 80s, there was an incredible jump in the number of black prisoners, leading to the present situation, where there are between two and three times as many black people in prison for drugs as white people. While America has become less racist in some respects, this statistic tells us that we are not making as much progress as we like to imagine. These facts also have implications for the history of hip-hop. You can see the rise of both gangsta and overtly socially conscious rap in large part as a response to the devastating effect of this sentencing disparity.
Ain’t No Makin’ It
Assignment for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson
If you’re looking for a gripping and highly readable (though depressing) sociological study, I strongly recommend this one.
The purpose of MacLeod’s study is to understand how class inequality reproduces itself, using the example of two groups of young men living in a housing project. He asks how these young people reconcile America’s dominant ideology of individual achievement, where success is based on merit, and economic inequality is due to differences in ambition and ability, with the reality of the participants’ own limited choices and opportunities. In particular, MacLeod addresses the question of whether education ensures equality of opportunity as it is purported to do.
Durkheim – Suicide
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides
Durkheim’s sociological classic sounds so much more sophisticated in the original French: “Le Suicide.”
All jokes aside, this is a personal topic for me, due its impact on my friends and extended family, not to mention artists I admire. Continue reading “Durkheim – Suicide”
Ideological and Theoretical Assumptions
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides
Artiles, A. J. (2011). Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Educational Equity and Difference: The Case of the Racialization of Ability. Educational Researcher, 40(9), 431-445.
Artiles explains how a civil rights victory for learners with disabilities has become a way to oppress racial minority students. He cites statistics showing that African Americans are more than twice as likely as their white peers to be diagnosed with intellectual disability and one and a half times as likely to be diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disturbance. Other minority groups are similarly over-represented. After kids get placed in special education, their academic outcomes are usually bad, and their economic prospects are correspondingly limited. Even within the disabled population, white students tend to do better than their minority peers. While poor kids are likelier to be diagnosed with disabilities, race is a significant predictor of diagnosis even if you control for poverty.
Intersectionality
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides. Images of interesting intersections from various sources.
Hill, C. P., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality.
Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”
See also an analysis of this tune’s amazing drum groove.
If you have even a passing interest in funk, you will want to familiarize yourself with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.”
If you are preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the movement of the hips, then the bassline needs to be a cornerstone of your practice.
Continue reading “Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon””