QWERTYBeats is a proposed accessible, beginner-friendly rhythm performance tool with a basic built-in sampler. By simply holding down different combinations of keys on a standard computer keyboard, users can play complex syncopations and polyrhythms. If the app is synced to the tempo of a DAW or other music playback system, the user can easily perform good-sounding …
Tag Archives: PhD
Artistic citizenship in the age of Trump
Public-facing note taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott This week I’m reading about the social and ethical responsibilities of artists generally, and musicians and music educators in particular. That topic is especially relevant at the moment. Before we get to the moral philosophy aspect, let’s talk about this performance. Why is it so good? Movies …
High school masculinity
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.
Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This was a tougher read than Discipline and Punish. To get our morale up, let’s enjoy some Salt-N-Pepa first. Also, we should let Kanye West set up the other big theme of the book:
Music Matters chapter seven
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving …
Foucault – Discipline and Punish
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading is Discipline and Punish, by noted ray of sunshine Michel Foucault. The book begins with a memorably graphic torture scene that pretty well sets the tone for what follows. This video gave me some helpful biographical context.
Music in a capitalist culture
Midterm paper for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg Max Weber locates the roots of capitalism in vestigial puritanical Protestantism. Émile Durkheim, in turn, gives a theory of how that Protestantism arose in the first place. In this paper, I ask two questions. First: can Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of religion be extended to explain culture …
Marx and Althusser
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg Unlike most social theorists of his era and since, Marx can actually write. His prose has a rhythm and urgency that feels more like a sermon than a scholarly text. Of course, he has the advantage that he’s writing a manifesto, so he isn’t bogged down by nuance, …
Music Matters chapter six
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. It seems obvious that the point of music education is to foster musical understanding. But what is musical understanding, exactly? Where and how do we learn and teach it? On an emotional level, people seem to understand music just fine …
Bourdieu and Swidler – Structures and the Habitus
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading was the second chapter of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Outline Of A Theory Of Practice, on Structures and the Habitus. Bourdieu writes the worst, most opaque prose of any social theorist. The second paragraph of this chapter includes the phrase “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” Later: “the habitus, which at every …
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