How do you isolate samples like Girl Talk?

Girl Talk doesn’t actually isolate sounds; it’s almost impossible to do that. You can use EQ to quiet background sounds to a limited extent, but there’s no way to perfectly isolate sounds from a mixed track. Girl Talk and other mashup artists rely heavily on a capellas (vocal-only mixes) and instrumentals, which are included with DJ versions of most pop, hip-hop and dance tracks. A few isolated stems have also been leaked from the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games, they pop up online here and there. Every so often an artist will release tracks separated into stems officially. Kanye West even gives away stems of “Love Lockdown” for free on his blog.

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Biggie Biggie Smalls Is The Illest

I always enjoy when hip-hop artists sample themselves. It makes the music recursive, and for me, “recursive” is synonymous with “good.” You can hear self-sampling in “Nas Is Like” by Nas, “The Score” by the Fugees and many songs by Eric B and Rakim. The most recent self-sampling track to cross my radar is “Unbelievable” by Biggie Smalls, from his album Ready To Die. Here’s the instrumental.

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Why do people like Girl Talk?

I don’t enjoy Girl Talk’s music all that much — I find it overwhelming, like watching someone flip channels on a TV. But I think he’s really important, and anyone who cares about music, technology, originality and ownership should be paying close attention. Adam Bossy raised an intriguing idea in his answer — describing an unlikely pairing of Black Sabbath and Ludacris, he observes: “It sounds as though each song was originally written with the other in mind.” At his best, Girl Talk finds connections between seemingly distant genres and styles, and shows that maybe the commonalities run deeper than the differences. This is a big idea, and an exciting one.

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Does teaching Intelligent Design in schools really damage science?

You don’t go to high school biology class to learn particular facts; you go to understand the general framework of evolutionary theory. Rather than contradicting any single fact, Intelligent Design undermines the entire intellectual basis of biology.

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What is the relationship between music and math?

Music is richly mathematical, and an understanding of one subject can be a great help in understanding the other.

Geometry and angles

My masters thesis is devoted in part to a method for teaching math concepts using a drum machine organized on a radial grid. Placing rhythms on a circle gives a good multisensory window into ratios and angles.

Wave mechanics

The brain turns out to be adept at decomposing sinusoids into their component frequencies. We can’t necessarily consciously compare the partials of a sound, but we certainly do it unconsciously — that’s how we’re able to distinguish different timbres, and is probably the basis for our sense of consonance and dissonance. If two pitches share a lot of overtones, we tend to hear them as consonant, at least here in the western world. There’s a strong case to be made that overlapping overtone series is the basis of all of western music theory.

The concept of orbitals in quantum mechanics made zero sense to me until I finally found out that they’re just harmonics of the electron field’s vibrations. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Einstein conceptualized wave mechanics in musical terms as well.

Logarithms

Octave equivalency is really just your brain’s ability to detect frequencies related by powers of two. The relationship between absolute pitches and pitch classes is an excellent doorway into logarithms generally. You also need logarithms to understand decibels and loudness perception.

Symmetry

Music is really just a way of applying symmetry to events in time.  See this delightful paper by Vi Hart about symmetry and transformations in the musical plane.

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How is Earth’s gravity generated?

Gravity is the warping of spacetime by mass or energy. A mass like the Earth warps spacetime so that the shortest path, the “path of least resistance,” for inertial movement is towards the Earth’s center.

Using instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s possible to literally see the warping of spacetime by very massive objects like galaxies and huge conglomerations of dark matter. When you’re looking at a very distant object and there’s a large mass along your line of site, it warps spacetime to produce a visual effect known as gravitational lensing. Here’s a schematic diagram showing how it works.

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Is Richard Dawkins helping science through his attacks on religion?

I would wish for Dawkins to use more emotional sensitivity and compassion when dealing with religious people, because his hostile tone gets in the way of his invaluable message. His condescending attitude toward believers, epitomized by calling atheists “brights,” is seriously counterproductive. I’m concerned that he’s unnecessarily confrontational and inflammatory in his TV appearances, op-eds and so on. He’d benefit from taking a page from Jesus and turning the other cheek when religious people attack or misrepresent him.

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My top five SoundCloud tracks

The internet has spoken! These are the tracks of mine that you like the best, in order of listens. It comes as no surprise to me that three of them involve Michael Jackson, and two involve the Beatles.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

Building a better dopamine awareness campaign

I’ve been intrigued by Charles Lyell‘s self-described “dopamine awareness campaign,” trying to show how all of our social behaviors boil down to a desire for gratifying dopamine shots. The campaign doesn’t seem to be going so well; see, for example, the collapsing of his recent answer to Why do people contribute reviews of restaurants/theatres/events etc? what is the human motivation to do this? I voted it back up, but gently satirized him in a comment:

I appreciate your awareness campaign, but it does seem like all of your answers boil down to one word. “Why does anyone do anything?” “DOPAMINE!”

Charles wrote me back:



I’m not trying to annoy or bore people, but part of my awareness campaign is to help spread the word that everything we do we do for dopamine. 

Imagine a world where the fear/power/esteem addicts wreaking havoc and destroying the planet are revealed to be desperate addicts who need treatment for the same brain disease plaguing heroin addicts. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that everything comes down to dopamine appeal and that trying to explain dopamine appeal has zero dopamine appeal. As a result, I’m working a couple of new approaches. 

If you can think of a way to make explaining dopamine appeal more appealing, please let me know.

That’s such a good question that rather than respond in a comment, I thought it merited my first-ever Quora post.

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Why hasn’t the recording industry sued Girl Talk?

Last year, I spoke on a panel about sampling with a few academics and copyright lawyers. One of the panelists was Martin Schwimmer, a partner in a law firm practicing trademark and copyright law. A big part of his job is going after copyright infringers. Schwimmer assured the audience that no one will ever sue Girl Talk, regardless of the legal merits, because in terms of real-world consequences, it’s a lose-lose proposition.

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