I don’t have much to add to what everyone else is saying, except that I really love her music, more than just about anything.
Tag Archives: music theory
This Is America
If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting. Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent …
Chord pizzas
The Groove Pizza uses geometry to help visualize rhythms. The MusEDLab is planning to create a similar tool for visualizing music theory by merging the aQWERTYon with the Scale Wheel. When you put the twelve pitch classes in a circle, you can connect the dots between different notes in a chord or scale to form shapes. My …
New harmony course with Soundfly
My new online music theory class with Soundfly launches in a few weeks. It’s a six-week mentor guided journey through advanced harmonic concepts like extended chords and modal interchange, with examples drawn from contemporary pop, hip-hop and electronica. Soundfly does great work and I’m proud to be working with them.
The happiest chord progression ever
See also: the saddest chord progression ever. And also check out this deep dive into the groove of “I Want You Back.” We customarily think of descending melodies and chord progressions as being sad–they call it the “lament bass” for a reason. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the happiest song of all …
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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Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality
I complain a lot on this blog about traditional approaches to teaching music theory. Fortunately, there are some alternatives out there. One such is Everyday Tonality by Philip Tagg. Don’t be put off by the DIY look of the web site. The book is the single best resource I know of for how harmony works across …
Cranes in the Sky
Solange Knowles is Beyoncé’s artsier younger sister. “Cranes In The Sky” is her biggest hit so far. It manages the rare feat of being both extremely catchy and extremely weird. Solange helpfully explains her songwriting process on the invaluable Song Exploder podcast. https://soundcloud.com/hrishihirway/song-exploder-solange
Teaching myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live
Recently someone posted this performance of the Chaconne from Bach’s violin partita in D minor on an eleven-string guitar by Moran Wasser. My favorite interpretation by an actual violinist is Viktoria Mullova’s. I appreciate her straightforward and unsentimental approach. I also enjoy the version from Morimur, and I’m not alone. It’s one of the most …
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Toward a Methodological Stance
Final paper for Approaches To Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Section 1: Reflections on Received View of Research I was raised by two medical researchers and a former astrophysicist, surrounded by stacks of quantitative journals. I rarely questioned the assumption that quantitative empirical research is the gold standard of truth, and that while subjective accounts …