I’ve been producing a bunch of new videos for future iterations of Play With Your Music, with the help of the good people at the NYU Blended Learning Lab. So far, we’ve done two sets. There’s a series of tutorials on producing samples, beats and melodies using the in-browser digital audio workstation Soundation:
Milo is walking
The Red Hot Chili Peppers unplugged
In case you don’t pay attention to such things, there’s a miniature scandal swirling around the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8OAq3eQU9w
Close examination of the footage reveals that the bass and guitar weren’t plugged in.
Flea, the Peppers’ bassist, came forward and admitted that they used a pre-recorded track, and offered various excuses and explanations. I’m surprised to find myself writing about this, since if there’s anything I care about less than the Super Bowl, it’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But I was struck by Flea’s prevaricating; the whole thing points up the strangeness of live music in the age of technology.
Fractal music
Continuing my series of posts on the ways that science might explain why we like the music we like. See also my posts on the science of rock harmony, harmony generally, and Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Quora user Marc Ettlinger recently sent me a paper by Sherri Novis-Livengood, Richard White, and Patrick CM Wong entitled Fractal complexity (1/f power law) determines the stability of music perception, emotion, and memory in a repeated exposure paradigm. (The paper isn’t on the open web, but here’s a poster-length version.) The authors think that fractals explain our music preferences. Specifically, they find that note durations, pitch intervals, phrase lengths and other quantifiable musical parameters tend to follow a power law distribution. Power-law distributions have the nifty property of scale invariance, meaning that patterns in such entities resemble themselves at different scales. Music is full of fractals, and the more fractal-filled it is, the more we like it.
Animated gifs and electronic music
I was looking at a collection of perfectly looped gifs on Buzzfeed and thinking about how they remind me of sample-based electronic music. In both cases, you’re taking a piece of a linear recording and making it cyclical. Do it wrong and it’s extremely irritating. Do it right and it’s mesmerizing. I’ve given a lot of thought to how looping a segment of audio changes its meaning, but am only just starting to think about the visual equivalent.
Why is son clave so awesome?
One of the best discoveries I made while researching the Groove Pizza is the mathematician Godfried Toussaint. While the bookshelves groan with mathematical analyses of Western harmony, Toussaint is the rare scholar who uses the same tools to understand Afro-Cuban rhythms. He’s especially interested in the rhythm known to Latin musicians as 3-2 son clave, to Ghanaians as the kpanlogo bell pattern, and to rock musicians as the Bo Diddley beat. Toussaint calls it “The Rhythm that Conquered the World” in his paper of the same name. Here it is as programmed by me on a drum machine:
The image behind the SoundCloud player is my preferred circular notation for son clave. Here are eight more conventional representations as rendered by Toussaint:
The Groove Pizza
Update: this post is out of date. See the current Groove Pizza here.
Walking to the subway this morning, I had a bright idea for how to make the Drum Loop more kid-friendly by representing the radial grid as a pizza. Here’s a very quick concept sketch:
To really make this work, I wouldn’t just plop a JPEG of a pizza under the existing UI. I’d want a cartoon pizza rendered in a flat-color style. Instead of colored wedge cells, drum hits would be represented by stylized pepperoni, sausage, anchovies, olives, mushrooms and so on. I’ll throw it on the ever-expanding “future work” pile.
Usually I like to make everything on this blog freely available to whoever wants to use it, but The Groove Pizza is ⓒ Ethan Hein 2013, all rights reserved.
Reflections on the MOOC
This week marks the conclusion of the first iteration of Play With Your Music, the music production MOOC I’ve been contributing to this past semester.
Creating and running the MOOC has been a learning experience for everybody involved. It certainly has been for me. I do most of my music teaching one on one, and it’s been weird creating materials for a couple of thousand students I never see at all. (Though I guess that’s sort of what I’m doing on this blog.) My colleagues have been keeping close tabs on the community of participants, but my personal interaction has been limited by the course’s coinciding with crunch time for my thesis. So this post will be less about the students, and more about the teachers.
Thesis presentation
Here’s the presentation I’ll be giving of my masters thesis next week, enjoy.
My masters thesis is done
You can read it here on the blog or as a PDF.