Musings on Music (mostly)

Visual Feedback Loops

2012-01-10T21:51:00.002-06:00

Digital art has yet to earn bonafides in the art world, although I see more and more of it at big international art shows. But working digitally, at some part of the creative process, is tremendously useful for generating ideas, even if the final work is not digital. I'm really interested in running things in and out of other domains to transform the work. I like to think of this process as a '

On Working Incrementally

2011-11-20T21:21:00.000-06:00

I am often asked how I can do so many things, and include some type of a sleep cycle. Everything we do is incremental in some way. Activities that involve making something are almost always reliant on a series of linear or non-linear action chains, sometimes taking place in a period of weeks, months or years. The work of artist Chuck Close is a prime example of an incremental process. In fact

Rough Grooved Surface

2011-10-06T22:21:00.000-05:00

Artwork From the Album Rhythm By Addition (hover over the image to launch player) Release Date: October 14, 2011 There are 3 parallel meters used: 3/4, 12/8 and 6/8+3/4. A common characteristic in African music is a 12/8 meter that can be related to on various levels. In Western music meter gets divided or simplified into a basic meter and syncopation is used for rhythmic complexity

When Ideas Die With Their Creators

2011-09-27T22:31:00.000-05:00

It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to? Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or 'Best Practices' of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders. After Beethoven died his music endured, and the supporting theories continue to be used

Light Cathedrals

2011-09-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

They say cities are not about the buildings, but the people. As regards religion, cathedrals can have the effect of reversing that equation: you may not care for the dogma, but the product of what we do as humans soars above the human condition. Some may argue that the communal experience of all believing and acting on the same ideas makes cathedrals possible.

On Cover Art

2011-08-21T11:04:00.006-05:00

The old saw that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover seems strange now with e-books because they don't have a cover, per se. Digital music is also bereft of its packaging, which was at one time so central to the music experience: You could see photos of the band, read the lyrics, liner notes. We can still easily access this content on the net, albeit without the cachet that comes with having

Where's that confounded bridge!

2011-07-30T11:08:00.000-05:00

At the theoretical level, song hooks are imbued with clever twists like harmonic modulations, chord 'borrowing' and turnarounds. Now these devices have devolved from the songwriter's toolkit in much the same way Cole Porter Moon-June rhyming schemes became obsolete by the 1960s in favor of new compositional devices that made them frumpy and old hat. The classic bridge is now in this category.

Why musicians are joined at the hip with technology

2011-07-02T11:41:00.002-05:00

In the late 1950s computer engineer Max Mathews commissioned the first piece of music to be written and performed on an I.B.M. mainframe titled 'The Silver Scale'. His idea was that computers would allow people to be more creative, not necessarily to just be more productive. The tools we invent initially have practical uses, but can also be used to discover novel ways of making new

Are QR Codes the Next Meme?

2011-06-25T12:44:00.002-05:00

The QR code is the quintessential meme. Like the Hula Hoop, it is not the object itself, but the power of the idea to spread virally. Memes immediately seem cool, then proceed to hijack our sense for critical thinking. While codes have many creative uses, not all of them are interesting or useful. QR codes are essentially icons for shortcuts to websites. Ideally these

Emily 2.0: Possible applications for AI in music

2011-06-12T09:44:00.001-05:00

The Singularity is already here as some believe, or is otherwise insidiously affecting our lives in sneaky ways. Can you imagine that music created with AI can sound or have the visceral impact of something like this? Making music has become more and more electronic, or reliant on electronics to produce it. In this sense, the Singularity in music might have happened long ago. Use of AI in

The Audiowork Explosion

2011-05-22T09:11:00.004-05:00

Interesting that this film was scored by Raymond Scott, the composer and inventor that did the scoring under Looney Tunes, and developed technologies as the Orchestra Machine (Orchestrion), the Clavivox, and the Electronium (one of them apparently in the possession of Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo) It is amusingly ironic that from a composer scoring what is essentially a

Vivian Girl

2011-04-18T21:25:00.004-05:00

The posthumous discovery of a trove of photographs by Vivian Maier speaks volumes about the importance of maintaining archives. Maier was self-effacing and modest about her abilities as a photographer. Celebrity was of less importance during her lifetime, and perhaps suppressed by the fact that the medium was still analog, and was not influenced by the Internet celebrity mill. She was

Information and Exformation in Music

2011-04-16T11:31:00.009-05:00

In James Gleick's recent book on Information The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, he gives us a exhaustive overview of the meaning of Information. But once one has all the information on Information, ultimately what matters is the essence of information that is useful and relevant, sometimes referred to as exformation. Exformation is a term coined by author Tor Nørretranders in his

Beat Artifacts: Clyde Stubblefield and the Pillage of Roman Art

2011-04-13T22:57:00.000-05:00

In the 18th century, the Bourbons raided the ancient city of Herculaneum, entombed in the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Their intention was not archaeological, but rather a ruthless pursuit or Roman art. In recent excavations, evidence was found of hacked frescoes: art not taken for examination for historical and cultural context, but for the loot. This is an interesting analog to music

Music and Text-to-Speech

2011-03-13T22:45:00.003-05:00

It is amazing how sophisticated text-to-speech has become. While still in the uncanny valley between the human voice and synthesized speech, it has become more naturally musical, albeit amusing to hear how robots try to speak English. Graham the English gentleman is my favorite. When Graham stumbles upon a word or phrase he doesn't know, he has a tendency to put the emphasis on the second

Hearing loss

2011-01-30T12:29:00.000-06:00

Interesting: word frequency of 'hearing loss' actually started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. There is a curious dip in about 1990. (Source: Google Ngram Viewer)

On headphones/earbuds and sound memory

2011-01-30T11:17:00.002-06:00

Earbuds (especially those that allow ambient leakage) are particularly interesting when listening to ambient music in outdoor environments. The density of indeterminate pitch elements or slightly pitched elements in urban environments (car horns, car brakes, etc.) often blend in with ambient music in surprising ways--and can be listened to at equal volume as what is coming through the earbuds.

Cross-disciplinary methods: righteous or irreverent?

2011-01-09T20:12:00.002-06:00

The most interesting thing about the camera is its ability to automatically re-contextualize time and space within the edges of a frame. In the early days of photography, the camera was seen as a way to make art by eliminating the use of paint on a canvas, and to recreate the experience of viewing a painting as a kind of “shortcut.” The process of cropping an image, or the act of framing a shot

On Christmas and Technology

2010-12-26T10:27:00.002-06:00

Christmas has always been a time where lots of people get certain types of objects as gifts and adds momentum to technological and cultural trends. This year will be the gust of wind behind e-readers and tablet computing. With it will go old notions of reading and writing. Reading will be more social and transparent. Words used to reside on pieces of paper hidden between two hard covers. Now

What Makes a Song Sad?: Minor Seconds

2010-12-19T17:05:00.000-06:00

What makes a song sad? Sometimes it's the usual suspects: minor thirds or minor keys. The recent Atlantic article What Makes a Song Sad nicely debunks this mythology. But let's not forget about the minor second or the diminished fifth for their saturnine effect. Metal bands have a fondness for minor seconds (or even quarter tones) decidedly for their sinister quality. Minor seconds and

November 30, 2000

2010-11-30T06:49:00.004-06:00

Smashing Pumpkins' final concert at United Center. Pumpkins stuff all over the media, interesting interviews with Corgan. It's nice to see him mature...

Roots of Musical Influence

2010-11-27T10:15:00.014-06:00

In an article in MIT Technology Review titled Who Cares What Everyone Else Thinks?, they found that we develop preferences based largely on social cues. While it might be true by current standards, this is not how preferences are ultimately formed. As people age, preferences tend to be recalcitrant and less malleable. Social cues suggest that we like things because of peer pressure, not because

Music Made of Plastic

2010-10-31T17:35:00.001-05:00

If you study language at the micro level, you can see what culture has valued and devalued, winnowed to word frequencies. As asserted in the article America and the ‘Fun’ Generation, in the last 200 years, the word "achievement" trumped “excellence” and “fun” trumped “pleasure” by a factor of four. This is a perfect example of the shift in American culture to engage in activities for fun and

Emulation is the best learning device

2010-10-24T00:19:00.123-05:00

Any guitarists that may be struggling learning their favorite riffs will surely decamp to the couch in defeat after seeing this. If you didn't know it was 9 year old Japanese boy, and had closed your eyes, you would have envisioned someone 20-ish playing this. In an interesting lecture on electronic media at the National Gallery of Art, "Are Books Making Us Illiterate?...", Virginia

On Writing (Literally)

2010-10-17T09:51:00.004-05:00

There is an intimate connection with a writing implement, the surface and the resultant ideas. I find that if I want to create sequences in my interaction designs, I use index cards or post-it notes, which I can more easily organize manually rather then force them into the constraints imposed by the computer screen. It is an important part of the process that sometimes gets bogged down with