“The old line about great hi-fi making it feel like the band’s in the room with you isn’t quite right. It doesn’t sound like live music: it sounds better. Clearer, more pure. The weirdest thing is that the music doesn’t appear to be coming out of the speakers: it seems to be happening in a space just in front of you. It feels like it’s in 3D: you could walk around it, you could reach out and touch it. It’s astonishing.”
“The best-known feature is ‘Canadian raising’, which affects two specific diphthongs before voiceless consonants: the first part of the diphthong is higher in ice and out than it is in eyes and loud. The out raising makes the vowel sound more like ‘oot’ to American ears. This feature is present across much but not all of Canada. It may be influenced by Scottish English (many British emigres were Scots), or it may be a relic of Shakespeare-era pronunciation.”
3. The 1990s film about electronic music, Modulations, can now be viewed on Vimeo:
“Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That’s why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man’s version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.”
– James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life:
Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (2015, p. 19)
Four Tet’s “Morning Side” from his Morning/Evening is a 20-minute track that presents a gentle techno beat as a backdrop for a sample of legendary Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar singing “Main Teri Chhoti Behana Hoon” from the 1983 film Souten. The music unfolds gradually with a slow-moving chord progression, chattering hi hats, floaty synthesizer lines, and subtle echo effects on Mangeshkar’s plaintive melodies.
On the one hand, music that is popular (though not necessarily critically respected) has earned the affection and admiration of its fans because they have found a use for it. The uses of musics are many–as numerous as music’s endless styles–including using music to show others that you like the same music they do. On the other hand, music that is respected and praised (though not necessarily popular) has earned the affection and admiration of its critics who have found it in some way(s) smart. The ways in which musics can be smart are many, including pushing, defying, or re-defining conventions of style and idiom, mixing up old elements in novel ways, and more rarely, offering the world a new and distinctive voice.
Whatever the reasons for a music’s earned popularity or critical respect, once afforded a measure of one or the other the music is granted entry into a feedback loop of attention. As we focus on the music–because it’s popular, because it’s significant–it becomes more and more established as something we should continue considering and thinking about. And yet the maker of the music has no control over whether or not anyone likes what they do. They can’t make their music earn anything–certainly not fans or respect. The music is powerless to make any arguments on behalf of itself besides simply being what it already is.
All of this to say that after its liminal moment of creation or performance the trajectory of a music is very much outside the control of its maker.
“The crux, of course, was the invention of sound recording and then of film, in the late nineteenth century. These things did not create stagefright, but they fostered it, by enabling performers to do their work without having to appear in front of an audience.”
2. An article about the fractal qualities of timing and dynamic variations in Jeff Porcaro’s drumming in a song by Michael McDonald. A summary of the article is here. (Thanks to Tristan Marzeski for alerting me to the article.) The original scientific study is here.
“Although drummers often ‘wander’ around the click track intentionally, our example does not resemble such behavior. This finding is in line what has been commented by Grammy Award winning musician, producer, and recording engineer Jay Graydon, who has recorded with Porcaro: ‘When playing with Jeff, better not to use a click since he played inside the cracks and his time float is what made him great.'”
“But even when certain elements of the music have clearly traceable lineages, nothing about the final product sounds quite like anything that has come before. With their jagged rhythms, glassy timbres and resolutely digital aspect, these new tracks couldn’t be confused with the music of earlier decades. At their most extreme, they can convey, at least upon initial listens, the same sort of brain-rearranging rush that accompanied a first encounter with jungle or grime (or, indeed, Aphex Twin). As beats come undone from conventional timekeeping and notes twist in the artificial winds, the brain struggles to catch up; you can practically feel new paths being blazed through your cortex, new neural networks congealing around unfamiliar tropes.”
In 1972 a Miami-based R&B keyboardist and singer-songwriter named Timmy Thomas had a hit song with “Why Can’t We Live Together” which topped the charts and sold several million copies. Two notable things about Thomas’s song are its instrumentation and structure. Alongside Sly and The Family Stone’s “Family Affair”, “Why Can’t We Live Together” was one of the first pop hits from the 1970s to feature a drum machine. Thomas used an early machine (possibly a Korg, Rhythm Ace, or one of their numerous imitators) to provide a generic percolating bossa nova beat to accompany his funky Lowrey organ playing and singing about racial injustice. On this song the instrumentation shaped its structure because there are only two instruments sounding–no bass line, no guitars, no strings or background vocal harmonies. In a way, “Why Can’t We Live Together” is austere and ultra-minimalist and in saying more with less it was pathbreaking–years ahead of hip hop and EDM–in showing how a rigid yet hypnotic electronic groove could power a whole song. Here it is:
In 2015, the Canadian rapper and R&B singer Drake used a very sizable sample of Thomas’s hit as the basis for his “Hotline Bling.” Drake’s song opens with Thomas’s bossa beat, albeit considerably sped up, and wastes no time adding the requisite modern hip hop touches in the form of overlaying a snaky sub bassline, double time hi hats, and hand claps on two and four. The structure of Drake’s piece is guided by Thomas’s, even including his predecessor’s original chord progression twist that marks the choruses/ends of phrases.
To my ear, Drake’s appropriation of the 43-year-old song is pretty straightforward in our age of seamless software sampling. Depending on your perspective on such practices, it’s pretty savvy too—in the same wheelhouse as Puff daddy’s wholesale taking of Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” for his unoriginal “I’ll Be Missing You.” Similarly, the feel of Drake’s piece depends almost entirely on the wistful, minimalist mood of Thomas’s original. But it works. We could listen to Drake rap-singing about choosing ice cream or deliberating over his choices on a restaurant menu and he’d keep us interested in the subtleties of his ever-changing emotional state. The guy is sensitive.
It also struck me while listening to both songs how far their lyrics are from one another. Back in the day Thomas was making a plea for us to all get along, bringing himself and his listeners together in a collective “we” in the same of a shared social cause:
“No more wars, no more wars, no more war
Umm, just a little peace in this world
No more wars, no more war
All we want is some peace in this world.”
Drake, on the other hand, situates us right inside his personal world. He’s confessing to us and in this song we the listeners become the (presumably female) individual he’s addressing in his lyrics. Fitting the times we live in, Drake tells us how he feels:
“You used to call me on my, you used to, you used to
You used to call me on my cell phone
Late night when you need my love
Call me on my cell phone
Late night when you need my love
I know when that hotline bling
That can only mean one thing
I know when that hotline bling
That can only mean one thing.”
We arrived somewhat late into D’Angelo’s set at the Forest Hills Tennis club on a warm early evening in June, but we could hear the bass frequencies from several blocks away. Emerging from the stairwell into section six of what used to be a tennis court felt like entering a party with everyone facing a giant boombox; the music was pleasantly loud—loud enough that you could feel the drum hits vibrating your body. Our seats were in the very last row, with a view downwards. It was hard to see the performers as anything more than stick figures hundreds of yards away and our distance from the stage created a disconnect between seeing and hearing: the band’s gestures were always a half second ahead of their sounds, making their playing look like an out of sync karaoke performance.
But everything about this show was live and D’Angelo’s vocal performance was excellent. His voice does all the things a great R&B voice should, and he has a masterly sense of pacing, building a song without you realizing what’s happening. For a while it just sounds like repetition but then suddenly—kapoww!!—there’s a tutti stop and start, a hit on the downbeat a few times, a reset, and you realize how complete is his control of your sense of time unfolding. No doubt the band rehearsed these too numerous to count stops and starts and shifts of texture, but still they sounded spontaneous—like an endless stream of micro-variation. In D’Angelo’s hands, a four-minute song easily becomes double that which is remarkable because you wouldn’t think that a few chords and 4/4 backbeat could sustain this kind of development, but they can. It’s all about the variations.
Looking around me during the performance, I was struck by how useful D’Angelo’s music was to so many different people, how everyone was adopting it for their own ends, maybe even how people were remembering when they first heard it. Over there, couples swaying to the music together. Over here, three women multitasking—taking selfies together while singing along. In front of the stage I saw what looked like audience members having emotional meltdowns from being within ten feet of the famed singer. No matter where they were sitting or standing, everyone here was a fan and knew the big hits like “Brown Sugar” (even me), turning some songs into massive sing-along choral pieces.
I was particularly struck by the funky virtuosity of D’Angelo’s drummer, Chris Dave. On one song he did something with his hi hat playing—playing off-beat hits that appeared to move further and further off the downbeats by degrees of a sixteenth note which had the effect of making his snare hits on 2 and 4 sound increasingly unlikely to happen at the right time, yet somehow he kept it together. It was a kind of aural illusion as Dave played with the audience’s sense of the downbeat’s inevitability; the effect deepened the groove and made it all that more funky by inserting chaos into the rhythmic flow. You never knew how would get back to beat one, but he always did.
As Dave played what sounded to me like patterns that traveled further and further out from the constraints of the 4/4 R&B beat, I realized that after D’Angelo’s voice, funky grooves were the most important aspect of this concert. It was the grooves that made D’Angelo’s songs pop and so on our way home after the show I thought about all the good things good grooves do:
groove is what the musicians make together;
groove is what sets the parameters for the musicians to go off of and return to;
groove is what the audience responds to and interacts with—
what they sway and dance to;
groove gives the audience a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the music
(not once did the groove drag or rush; it was in complete control of itself, taking us along for its surprising ride)
groove is what suggests other things outside of music;
groove is what makes this music what it is.
“Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is a free game that improves your rhythm by challenging you to play Steve Reich’s ground-breaking work–a piece of music performed entirely by clapping. Tap in time with the constantly shifting pattern, and progress through all of the variations.”
“I always ask myself: How can I use what I see? How does that fit in with what I’m doing? And then when I like something, I immediately start to analyze it: Why do I like it? What parts did I like most? Is it something that I do better or do they do it better? Is it something they do that I don’t do at all, but should? On the rare occasion that I happen to go out, I’m constantly processing these kinds of questions.”
3. A song sung in different acoustic environments to show how landscape shapes the sound of music:
brettworks 
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