Compositional prompts

One of the challenges in creating Theory for Producers (or any online learning experience) is how to build community. When you’re in a classroom with people, community emerges naturally, but on the web it’s harder. We’re using email to remind students to stay engaged over time, but we don’t want to end up in their spam folders. To make our emails welcome rather than intrusive, we decided to do Weekly Challenges, one-line prompts for music creation. Participants post their challenges in our SoundCloud group.

I’ve been doing something similar with guitar students for a long time, in person rather than via email, for example with the one-note groove. In coming up with more prompts, I’ve been drawing on my recent foray into prose scores, inspired by the example of Pauline Oliveros.

Pauline Oliveros

Really, you could think of my collection of prompts as very short and simple prose scores. Please feel free to use these, for yourself, for students, or for any other purpose. All I ask is that you drop me a line to tell me how you used them. Continue reading “Compositional prompts”

What the heck is the LIGO chirp?

I recently posted a track on SoundCloud that included the sonification of LIGO’s gravitational wave data. A student asked me what that meant. Since today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, what better time to try to formulate an answer?

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/ligo-chirp

First, some context: 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes collided. Each was about thirty times as heavy as the sun. The collision took a tenth of a second and released fifty times more energy than all the stars in the observable universe. Here’s how it looked:

Black holes collide

Of course, black holes being black, you can’t see them; the graphic shows the way that they would warp the appearance of stars behind them.

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Musical simples – Under Pressure

Let’s just get Vanilla Ice out of the way first. White people and hip-hop, oy.

“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie is a testament to the power of a great bass groove. The song itself is pretty weak sauce–it emerged out of studio jam sessions and it doesn’t sound like it was ever really finished. But what a bass groove!

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Musical simples – Teenage Dream

I’m working with Soundfly on the next installment of Theory For Producers, our ultra-futuristic online music theory course. The first unit covered the black keys of the piano and the pentatonic scales. The next one will talk about the white keys  and the diatonic modes. We were gathering examples, and we needed to find a well-known pop song that uses Lydian mode. My usual go-to example for Lydian is “Possibly Maybe” by Björk. But the course already uses a Björk tune for different example, and the Soundfly guys quite reasonably wanted something a little more millennial-friendly anyway. We decided to use Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” instead.

A couple of years ago, Slate ran an analysis of this tune by Owen Pallett. It’s an okay explanation, but it doesn’t delve too deep. We thought we could do better.

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Milo meets Beethoven

For his birthday, Milo got a book called Welcome to the Symphony by Carolyn Sloan. We finally got around to showing it to him recently, and now he’s totally obsessed.

Welcome To The Symphony by Carolyn Sloan

The book has buttons along the side which you can press to hear little audio samples. They include each orchestra instrument playing a short Beethoven riff. All of the string instruments play the same “bum-bum-bum-BUMMM” so you can compare the sounds easily. All the winds play a different little phrase, and the brass another. The book itself is fine and all, but the thing that really hooked Milo is triggering the riffs one after another, Ableton-style, and singing merrily along.

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Ultralight Beam

The first song on Kanye West’s Life Of Pablo album, and my favorite so far, is the beautiful, gospel-saturated “Ultralight Beam.” Say what you want about Kanye as a public figure, but as a musician, he is in complete control of his craft. See a live performance on SNL.

Ultralight Beam

The song uses only four chords, but they’re an interesting four: C minor, E-flat major, A-flat major, and G7. To find out why they sound so good together, let’s do a little music theory.

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Inside the aQWERTYon

Update: try the Theory aQWERTYon!

The MusEDLab and Soundfly just launched Theory For Producers, an interactive music theory course. The centerpiece of the interactive component is a MusEDLab tool called the aQWERTYon. You can try it by clicking the image below. (You need to use Chrome.)

aQWERTYon screencap

In this post, I’ll talk about why and how we developed the aQWERTYon.

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Theory for Producers

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new interactive online music course called Theory for Producers. It’s a joint effort by Soundfly and the NYU MusEDLab, representing the culmination of several years worth of design and programming. We’re super proud of it.

Theory for Producers: The Black Keys

The course makes the abstractions of music theory concrete by presenting them in the form of actual songs you’re likely to already know. You can play and improvise along with the examples right in the web browser using the aQWERTYon, which turns your computer keyboard into an easily playable instrument. You can also bring the examples into programs like Ableton Live or Logic for further hands-on experimentation. We’ve spiced up the content with videos and animations, along with some entertaining digressions into the Stone Age and the auditory processing abilities of frogs.

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Music education at the grownups’ table

I was asked by Alison Armstrong to comment on this Time magazine op-ed by Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Before I do, let me give some context: Todd Stoll is a friend and colleague of Wynton Marsalis, and he shares some of Wynton’s beliefs about music.

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis advocates for  jazz as “America’s classical music,” the highest achievement of our culture, and the sonic embodiment of our best democratic ideals. The man himself is a brilliant practitioner of the art form. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him play live several times, and he’s always a riveting improvisor. However, Wynton’s definition of the word “jazz” is a narrow one. He thinks that jazz history ended in about 1965, right before Herbie Hancock traded in his grand piano for a Fender Rhodes. All the developments after that–the introduction of funk, rock, pop, electronic music, and hip-hop– have bastardizations of the music.

Wynton Marsalis’ public stature has given his philosophy enormous weight. His effect on jazz culture has thus been profound, but problematic. On the one hand, he’s been a key force in getting jazz the institutional recognition that it was denied for too many years. On the other hand, the form of jazz that Wynton advocates for is a museum piece, a time capsule of the middle part of the twentieth century. When jazz gained the legitimacy of “classical music,” it also got burdened with classical music’s stuffiness, pedantry, and disconnection from the broader culture. As the more innovative jazz artists try to keep pace with the rest of the culture, they can find themselves more hindered by Wynton than helped.

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What should we call classical music?

Everyone can agree that the term “classical music” is silly, unless we’re specifically talking about European music of the Classical period.

The Mozart family played actual Classical music

It’s incorrect to call Baroque or Romantic or modernist music “classical,” even though we all colloquially do, to the annoyance of the classical tribe. It makes even less sense to call the music of Steve Reich or Julia Wolfe “classical.” So what should we call it?

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