Computers can only do a few very simple operations consisting of flipping electrical switches on and off. You can represent numbers in patterns of the on-off states of sequences of switches. By flipping switches on and off in particular patterns, you can perform simple mathematical operations on the numbers. You can do more complex mathematical operations by stringing simpler operations together.
How can you give an effective talk on a depressing topic without depressing your audience?
Here’s what works for me.
- Focus on solutions. What immediate steps can people take right now? What are bigger steps that governments and corporations need to take, and what can we do to push them in the right direction?
- Don’t judge. Assigning blame is gratifying but counterproductive; it heightens tensions and closes minds. Instead, take a the thousand-mile-distant Buddhist perspective. In the longest time scales, nothing matters; the sun will explode and destroy the earth in five billion years one way or the other. Meanwhile, we’re in this situation, it’s not good, but it’s no one’s fault (or everyone’s fault, same thing.) Now what’s the most practical way out?
- Be funny. You can take the subject matter seriously without taking yourself seriously. Gallows humor is the best kind. See: Stewart and Colbert, South Park, hip-hop lyrics and Mark Twain for inspiration.
Humans are adaptive and full of surprises. We do stupid, self-destructive, narrow-minded and short-sighted things, but we’re also capable of imagination, optimism, compassion and even self-sacrifice. Which feelings do you want to stir in your audience?
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing
Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton.
The word “swing,” like the word “blues,” has multiple meanings, depending on context. Swing is both a genre and a technical music term describing a certain rhythm. The two are related, but the rhythm has long outlived the genre.
Continue reading “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”
What does “ye-yeah” and “baby” mean in the context of pop songs?
“Ye-yeah” and “baby” are open-ended expressions of love, enthusiasm and general positive energy. They might be specifically directed at a loved one, but usually they’re directed at everyone and no one and have no particular meaning at all.
Pop lyrics aren’t about conveying specific information. They’re about sound for the sake of sound. The voice in pop is an instrument, a color, a way to convey feeling. Pop music is for social dancing, so it’s about rhythm first and foremost. Everything else is just decoration for the beat. Lyrics that are too specific in their meaning can get in the way. Songs with “intelligent” lyrics are meant to be listened to alone, seated, with full concentration. If you want to dance and socialize, the music should only occupy three-quarters of your focus at most. If you’re in your room listening intently on headphones, the simplicity and generality of, say, KC and the Sunshine Band will be annoying. On the other hand, if you’re at a party and everyone’s dancing, an intricate Leonard Cohen song will be a total buzzkill.
Continue reading “What does “ye-yeah” and “baby” mean in the context of pop songs?”
What are all the genres of Western music and their typical characteristics?
To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in each genre and listen to as many of their songs as you can. Once you’ve listened to a wide variety of songs in a given genre, you’ll get a sense of their defining musical characteristics, and you’ll be able to make judgments of your own.
There’s a bigger question behind this one, though. What does a musical genre really mean? Continue reading “What are all the genres of Western music and their typical characteristics?”
Is the album dead?
I’m mostly glad to see the album go the way of the buggy whip. It’s rare that a band can get two or three decent songs together, much less eleven or twelve sequenced in a thoughtful way. Not everything that gets released is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I’m relieved to be able to cherry-pick. Continue reading “Is the album dead?”
Why is so much music written in 4-4?
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, or half of a bar of eight. You can further subdivide your bars into quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes. You can group your bars of four or eight into four or eight or sixteen-bar phrases. Here’s a visual representation of this kind of powers-of-two recursion:
Why is music so important in our lives?
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There’s a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. Read about it here:
Humans’ success as a species is due entirely to our social organization, and music is a crucial tool for group building and bonding, more than we give it credit for in the western world. We think of music as a form of entertainment, mostly divorced from its most basic purposes. But taking the macro-scale historical view, music isn’t recordings of specialists making pleasant background noise. It’s all the emotional-laden patterned vocalization, percussion and gestures we perform, consciously and not. For example, all parents use music to comfort babies. Sometimes it’s in the form of overt singing and dancing with them, but even routine speaking to very young children is mostly musical in content. There’s the singsong cadence, the repetition, and the warmly modulated tone. This “motherese” is universal among human cultures and is probably very ancient.
Harmonica guide
I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession with the Grateful Dead was at its high water mark. The Dead’s first frontman, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a more than respectable blues harmonica player. Through the Dead, I got exposed to all the blues and country greats. I forget exactly how and why I started playing harmonica myself, but it’s probably because it was inexpensive and looked easy. I started with Country And Blues Harmonica For The Musically Hopeless by Jon Gindick, which I enthusiastically recommend.
Continue reading “Harmonica guide”
The major scale and the circle of fifths
I studied music theory for a good long time before it dawned on me that you can read the major scale right off the circle of fifths. Here’s the C major scale on the circle. The white notes are the ones in the scale and the black ones are the ones outside the scale. The white notes correspond to the white keys on the piano, and the black notes to the black keys.
The circle of fifths trick works for all the major scales, not just C. Pick any note on the circle and think of it as the root. The note immediately counterclockwise from the root will be the fourth of the key. The five notes going clockwise from the root are the fifth, second, sixth, third and seventh of the key respectively. The other five notes will be the ones you omit — the “black keys.”