DJ Earworm is the foremost practitioner of the art of the mashup. I don’t think there’s a more interesting musician in the world right now. I was on public radio with him once! His main claim to fame is the United State of Pop series, where he combines the top 25 US pop songs of …
Tag Archives: music education
What if music theory made sense?
Music theory is hard. But we make it harder by holding on to naming and notational conventions that are hundreds of years old, and that were designed to describe very different music than what we’re playing now. Here are some fantasies for how note naming might be improved. Right now, the “default setting” for western …
Toward a statement of purpose
I’m in the process of applying for a PhD in music education, and I have to come up with a statement of purpose. Here’s my most current draft. I dream of a world where music education serves everyone, not just potential classical virtuosos, with a radically revised curriculum that erases the distinction between “school music” …
My music education
I’m writing a chapter of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education. Here’s a section of what I wrote, about my own music learning experiences. Most of my music education has happened outside of the classroom. It has come about intentionally, through lessons and disciplined practice, and it has come about unintentionally, through …
Remixing Verdi with Ableton Live
Later this week I’m doing a teaching demo for a music technology professor job. The students are classical music types who don’t have a lot of music tech background, and the task is to blow their minds. I’m told that a lot of them are singers working on Verdi’s Requiem. My plan, then, is to …
Repetition defines music
Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine. Here’s the nub of Margulis’ …
Experience designers design experiences
Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Morgan & Claypool. For this week’s reading on experience design for music education, we moved up a level to think about experience design generally. A lot of design theory tends to boil down to “Design things better!” Marc Hassenzahl’s book falls into that trap …
Drum Loop programming lesson concept images
Nearly getting scooped by Loopseque lit a fire under me to get some more concept images for my thesis app together. So here are some examples of the beat programming lessons that form the intellectual heart of my project. The general idea is that you’re given an existing drum pattern, a famous breakbeat or something …
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Listening like a musician
The jazz educator Marc Sabatella, author of the classic Jazz Improvisation Primer, has a nice philosophical approach: all of us are musicians. Some of us are performing musicians, and some are listening musicians. I support this attitude wholeheartedly. I think that musicality is like walking and talking: almost everyone is born capable of learning how …
Making it easier to be musical
Alex Ruthmann, in a blog post discussing music-making with the educational multimedia programming environment Scratch, has this to say: What’s NOT easy in Scratch for most kids is making meaningful music with a series of “play note”, “rest for”, and “play drum” blocks. These blocks provide access to music at the phoneme rather than morpheme …