I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts. My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of …
Tag Archives: MusEDLab
The aQWERTYon pitch wheels and the future of music theory visualization
Update: we have implemented these changes to the aQWERTYon, try them here Try the scale wheel visualization here The MusEDLab will soon be launching a revamped version of the aQWERTYon with some enhancements to its visual design, including a new scale picker. Beyond our desire to make our stuff look cooler, the scale picker represents a …
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Groove challenges with the Groove Pizza
One of our key design principles at the NYU MusEDLab is not to confront beginners with a blank canvas. We want to introduce people to our tools by giving them specific, real-world music to play around with. That was the motivation behind creating presets for the aQWERTYon, and a similar impulse informs Ableton’s approach to their online music tutorials. …
Learning music from Ableton
Ableton recently launched a delightful web site that teaches the basics of beatmaking, production and music theory using elegant interactives. If you’re interested in music education, creation, or user experience design, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
Research proposal – Hip-Hop Pedagogy
Final paper for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Research questions Jamie Ehrenfeld is a colleague of mine in the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. She graduated from NYU’s music education program, and now teaches music at Eagle Academy in Brownsville. Like many members of the lab, she straddles musical worlds, bringing her training in …
Designing a more welcoming aQWERTYon experience
This post documents my final project for User Experience Design with June Ahn Overview of the problem The aQWERTYon is a web-based music performance and theory learning interface designed by the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. The name is a play on “QWERTY accordion.” The aQWERTYon invites novices to improvise and compose using a variety of …
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A participant ethnography of the Ed Sullivan Fellows program
Note: I refer to mentors by their real names, and to participants by pseudonyms Ed Sullivan Fellows (ESF) is a mentorship and artist development program run by the NYU Steinhardt Music Experience Design Lab. It came about by a combination of happenstances. I had a private music production student named Rob Precht, who had found …
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Design-Based Research
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Barab, S. A. (2014). Design-based research: a methodological toolkit for engineering change. In K. Sawyer (ed.) Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Vol 2, (pp. 233-270), Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Design-based research (DBR) is a subject close to my heart, because it was the basis …
The Groove Pizza now exports MIDI
Since its launch, you’ve been able to export your Groove Pizza beats as WAV files, or continue working on them in Soundtrap. But now, thanks to MusEDLab developer Jordana Bombi, you can also save your beats as MIDI files as well. You can bring these MIDI files into your music production software tool of choice: Ableton Live, Logic, …
Deconstructing the bassline in Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”
See also an analysis of this tune’s amazing drum groove. If you have even a passing interest in funk, you will want to familiarize yourself with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” If you are preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the movement of the hips, then the bassline needs to be a cornerstone of your practice.