With this post, I begin some public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. The goal here is to explain the book to myself, but if this is helpful to you in some way, good.
What is the point of music education? For Elliott and Silverman, the goal is to develop each student as a person. Music engages and emerges from every aspect of your personhood, and so does music education. To talk about music education, then, you first have to define what a person is.
We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see fit. I’ve also included Noteflight transcriptions of the beats.
This simple pattern is the basis of just about all rock and roll: kicks on beats one and three (north and south), and snares on beats two and four (east and west.) It’s boring, but it’s a solid foundation that you can build more musical-sounding grooves on top of.
This Billy Squier classic is on WhoSampled’s list of most-sampled breakbeats for good reason. There are only two embellishments to the backbeat cross: the snare drum hit to the east is anticipated by a kick a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and the kick drum to the south is anticipated by a kick an eighth note (two slices) earlier. It isn’t much, but together with some light swing, it’s enough to make for a compelling rhythm. The groove is interestingly close to being symmetrical on the right side of the circle, and there’s an antisymmetry with the kick-free left side. That balance between symmetry and asymmetry is what makes for satisfying music. Continue reading “Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza”
I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a beginner-level class using any DAW–my beginners use GarageBand. The last two projects are more advanced and require a DAW with sophisticated editing tools and effects, like Ableton Live. If you’re a teacher, feel free to use these (and let me know if you do). Same goes for all you bedroom producers and self-teachers.
The projects are agnostic as to musical content, style or genre. However, the computer is best suited to making electronic music, and most of these projects work best in the pop/hip-hop/techno sphere. Experimental, ambient or film music approaches also work well. Many of them draw on the Disquiet Junto. Enjoy.
I’m currently working with the Ed Sullivan Fellows program, an initiative of the NYU MusEDLab where we mentor up and coming rappers and producers. Many of them are working with beats they got from YouTube or SoundCloud. That’s fine for working out ideas, but to get to the next level, the Fellows need to be making their own beats. Partially this is for intellectual property reasons, and partially it’s because the quality of mp3s you get from YouTube is not so good. Here’s a collection of resources and ideas I collected for them, and that you might find useful too.
The Groove Pizza is a playful tool for creating grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles, and patterns. Here’s a beat I made just now. Try it yourself!
We’re putting together the segment of Theory For Producers that deals with the minor modes. We needed an iconic example of natural minor, and we ideally wanted it to be by a woman. After many rejected alternatives, we settled on one of the high water marks of contemporary R&B, “Family Affair” by Mary J Blige.
I didn’t know until I looked it up just now that this was produced by Dr Dre. I’m not surprised, though, because it’s such a banger. Here’s my transcription of the string riff:
I’m pleased to announce the second installment of Theory For Producers, jointly produced by Soundfly and the MusEDLab. The first part discussed the scales you can play on the black keys of the piano. This one talks about three of the scales you get from the white keys. The next segment will deal with four additional white-key scales. Go try it!
If you’re a music educator or theory nerd, and would like to read more about the motivation behind the course design, read on. Continue reading “Theory for Producers: the White Keys”
Väkevä, L. (2010). “Garage band or GarageBand®? Remixing musical futures.” British Journal of Music Education, 27(01), 59.
I believe that music education should engage with the music that’s meaningful to students. The field is coming to agree with me. School music programs have been gradually embracing rock, for example via Modern Band. Which is great! Unfortunately, rock stopped being the driver of our musical culture sometime in the early 1990s. The kids currently in school are more about computer-generated dance music: hip-hop, techno, and their various pop derivatives. We live in an Afrofuturist world.
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.
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”
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:
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.
