Anna posed this question, and I think it’s an excellent one: What is up with “Let It Go” and little girls? Why is this song such a blockbuster among the pre-K set? How did it jump the gap from presentational to participatory music? Is it the movie, or the song itself? In case you never …
Tag Archives: pop
Announcing the Peter Gabriel edition of Play With Your Music
You may have noticed a lot of writing about Peter Gabriel on the blog lately. This is because I’ve been hard at work with Alex Ruthmann, the NYU MusEDLab, and the crack team at Peer To Peer University on a brand new online class that uses some of Peter’s eighties classics to teach audio production. …
Continue reading “Announcing the Peter Gabriel edition of Play With Your Music”
Marc Weidenbaum on remixes
There’s an interview on the Creative Commons blog with Disquiet Junto instigator and Aphex Twin historian Marc Weidenbaum. It’s full of his usual keen insight. Here are some key quotes.
Recording Peter Gabriel’s Security
This post was originally written for the Play With Your Music blog. Also be sure to check out our interview with engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta. Peter Gabriel’s songwriting and recording process in the early 1980s was unusual for its technological sophistication, playfulness and reliance on improvisation. While Peter was considered avant-garde back …
Everyone can and should be making music
I have a strongly held belief about musical talent: there is no such thing. Every neurotypical human is born with the ability to learn music, the same way the vast majority of us are born with the ability to learn to walk and talk. We still have to do the learning, though; otherwise the capacity …
The Red Hot Chili Peppers unplugged
In case you don’t pay attention to such things, there’s a miniature scandal swirling around the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8OAq3eQU9w Close examination of the footage reveals that the bass and guitar weren’t plugged in. Flea, the Peppers’ bassist, came forward and admitted that they used a pre-recorded …
Analyzing the musical structure of “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel
We’re asking participants in Play With Your Music to create musical structure graphs of their favorite songs. These are diagrams showing the different sections of the song and where its component sounds enter and exit. In order to create these graphs, you have to listen to the song deeply and analytically, probably many times. It’s …
Continue reading “Analyzing the musical structure of “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel”
Teaching mixing in a MOOC
This is the third in a series of posts documenting the development of Play With Your Music, a music production MOOC jointly presented by P2PU, NYU and MIT. See also the first and second posts. So, you’ve learned how to listen closely and analytically. The next step is to get your hands on some multitrack …
Miley vs Sinéad
I don’t know whether you’ve been following the feud between Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor, and if you haven’t, congratulations on using your free time more constructively than I use mine. But so anyway, the most infamous pop star of the moment (Miley) publically cited a well-respected elder stateswoman (Sinéad) as an influence. In response, …
The Nirvana effect
I’m currently working on a book chapter about the use of video games in music education. While doing my research, I came across a paper by Kylie Peppler, Michael Downton, Eric Lindsay, and Kenneth Hay, “The Nirvana Effect: Tapping Video Games to Mediate Music Learning and Interest.” It’s a study of the effectiveness of Rock Band …