Frank Ocean’s Real Love

Frank Ocean is the R&B singer of the moment. Does he merit all they hype? There’s no doubt but that the man can sing. I first heard him in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s tremendous “No Church In The Wild,” which owes a lot of its intensity to Ocean’s vocals. He’s been releasing some good mixtapes too. Some of his sudden fame is also due to his implicit coming-out moment, a remarkable Tumblr post talking openly about his feelings for another man. In a world where Jay-Z’s voicing ambiguous support for gay marriage is headline news, Ocean’s open love letter is bold indeed.

The online Frank Ocean buzz reached such a pitch that I finally took the plunge on his first major-label release, Channel Orange. It’s the first full album of new music I’ve bought since The Archandroid by Janelle Monáe. Does it merit the hype? I don’t know yet. I think so. It’s strange and idiosyncratic. Some of it is boilerplate R&B, some of it is wildly experimental. Most falls somewhere in between. One song that jumps out at me is “Super Rich Kids,” featuring the utterly affectless rapping of Earl Sweatshirt.

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Visualizing song structures

How do you write out a pop, rock or dance song? There’s no single standard method. Some musicians use standard Western notation. Some use lyric sheets and do everything else by ear. Many of us use methods that fall somewhere in between. One such compromise system in widespread use is the lead sheet:

Other systems for song documentation include chord charts and the Nashville numbering system. But plenty of musicians are unfamiliar with these systems, and may not have any method for writing down songs at all. This leads to a lot of confusion during rehearsals and recording sessions. Any given section of a rock or pop song is likely to be simple, a few chords in a particular pattern, but the difficulty comes in figuring out and remembering the bigger structure: whether the guitar solo comes after the second verse or the chorus, how many bars long the bridge is, what beat the ending falls on.

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My NPR debut

On Tuesday, July 17, I appeared on the Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public Radio to talk about my pet topic, remixes and mashups. The great DJ Earworm was on the show too, which I was totally geeked out about. You can stream or download the show here. Or listen to my remix of it:
http://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/npr-mashup-show-mashup
My friend Jesse had a lot to say about the discussion on the program. Read his response (and my response to his response.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanhein/7591250314/in/photostream
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Dreaming of a masters thesis

Update: see a more formal draft of my thesis proposal.

For my NYU masters thesis in Music Technology, I’m designing a beginner-oriented music learning app for the iPad and similar devices. It will approach music the way I wish I had been taught it, and the way I’ve been teaching it to my private students.

I’m motivated in this project by a few axiomatic beliefs:

  • Everyone is born with the capacity to learn music. That capacity just needs to be activated in the right way.
  • Anyone can and should participate in music actively. Like cooking or sports, music need not be totally mastered to benefit the participant, and it should definitely not be the exclusive province of specialists.
  • Beginners should study music they’re familiar with, and that they like.
  • Music teaching for beginners should follow an Afrocentric paradigm that relates to pop, rock and hip-hop. That means starting with rhythm, and treating melodic instruments as percussion.

So here’s what this means for music teaching.

  • Beginners should learn pentatonics first, then mixolydian. Music education customarily begins with the major scale, but pentatonics and mixolydian are closer to pop, rock, hip-hop and dance common practice.
  • Beginners should work modally for a long time. Being constrained to a certain unvarying group of notes frees up mental bandwidth to think melodically and rhythmically. The best mode to work in is the ambiguous major/minor tonality of the blues. Again, this reflects the majority of the American mainstream.
  • Only after becoming familiar with blues should students embark on the major scale and diatonic harmony. Traditional music theory pedagogy is based on rules laid down in the eighteenth century. While these rules are of historical interest, their conflict with current music makes them tedious and alienating.

The app will start with drum programming, giving you templates for basic dance styles (hip-hop, techno, rock) and letting you customize them. Once you have some mastery of loop programming and rhythms, the app takes you into basic MIDI sequencing, first with single-note basslines, then simple pentatonics, and on to chords. For the visual aesthetic, I plan to avoid skeuomorphism entirely. The interface will consist entirely of geometric shapes in flat colors and large text. Here’s a concept image:

Minimalist sequencer

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User interface case study: iOS Garageband

Apple has long made a practice of giving away cool software with their computers. One of the coolest such freebies is Garageband. It’s a stripped down version of Logic aimed at beginners, and it’s a surprisingly robust tool. The software instruments and loops sound terrific, the interface is approachable, and it’s generally a great scratchpad. However, Garageband isn’t a good way to learn about music. It gives you a lot of nice sounds, but offers no indication whatsoever as to what you’re supposed to do with them. To get a decent-sounding track, you need to come pre-equipped with a fair bit of musical knowledge.

A young guitar student of mine is a good example. After only his third lesson, he jumped on Garageband and tried writing a song, mostly by throwing loops together. I admire his initiative, but the result was jagged and disjointed, lacking any kind of structural logic. It’s natural that a first effort would be a mess, but I felt a missed opportunity. At no point did the program ever suggest that the kid’s loops would sound best in groups of two, four, eight or sixteen. It didn’t suggest he organize his track into sections with symmetrical lengths. And it didn’t suggest any connection between one chord and another. Seeing enough other beginners struggle with Garageband makes me think that it isn’t really for novices after all. It seems to be pitched more toward dads in cover bands, who have some half-remembered knowledge of chord progressions and song forms and who just need a minimum of prodding to start putting together tracks on the computer.

The iPad version of Garageband is a much better experiential learning tool. Its new touch-specific interfaces encourage the playful exploration at the heart of music-making. The program isn’t trying to be particularly pedagogical, but its presets and defaults nevertheless implicitly give valuable guidance to the budding producer or songwrter. And while it’s quite a bit more limited than the desktop version, those limitations are strengths for beginner purposes.

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User interface case study: Propellerheads Figure

As I contemplate my masters thesis, I’m looking for good examples of beginner-centric musical user interface design. Propellerhead’s new Figure app has been a source of inspiration for me. It’s mostly wonderful, and even its design flaws are instructive.

Figure drum programming interface

I have a long history with Propellerhead’s software, beginning with Rebirth in 1998. I’ve made a lot of good music with their stuff, but have also experienced a lot of frustration, mostly due to their insistence on slathering everything with unhelpfully “realistic” design.

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Graceland

I recently saw Under African Skies, the documentary about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and it was spellbinding. The music is so beautiful, the politics are so agonizing.

I watched it with my mom and sister, which is appropriate since Graceland was in heavy rotation through my childhood. Mom isn’t a big pop scholar and knew next to nothing about the album beyond the fact that she likes it. My sister had some dim awareness of the politics, but not much more. I’ve studied the music closely but only had a vague grasp of the human story. So the film was quite a revelation for all of us, a whole new dimension to an artifact that’s both utterly familiar and mysterious. I think it hits the art houses in a few weeks. Do not miss it.

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Who cares if you listen?

I pride myself on having big ears, on listening to everything I can and trying to find the beauty in it. I’ve learned to enjoy some aspect of just about every kind of music. Every kind except one: high modernist twentieth century classical music. I just can not deal with it, at all. But I’m in music school now, and am having to confront modernism, listen to it, write about it, and produce it. So I’m trying to figure out whether I’m missing something, or whether the whole musical academic elite is out of its collective mind. Spoiler alert: I lean toward the latter.

The title of this post refers to an infamous essay by Milton Babbitt. He says that modern classical will never have an audience beyond its practitioners, and that it shouldn’t even bother to try.

I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music.

I do not like the terms “serious” and “advanced” when self-applied by classical composers.

The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in [the contemporary composer’s] music. The majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ‘professionals’. At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.

My question is this. Are we all missing out on something important because we’re unwilling to do the work? Or are we rightly shunning the music because it’s unbearable?

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My first foray into iOS music

I’ve toyed around with several iPhone and iPad music apps. Many are intriguing and fun, but few have inspired me into making “real” music. In preparation for the next Disquiet Junto project, I downloaded Nodebeat and tried some improvisation.

The app combines randomness and control in an intriguing way. I also like the fine microtonal control it gives you. You can also use it as a MIDI controller for other software, though I haven’t given that a try yet. If you want to try it for yourself and you don’t have an iOS or Android device, you can snag the desktop version, for free no less.

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