Curating The Week: Decolonizing Music Software, Max Mathews, Ambience Rooms

An article about decolonizing electronic music software.

“I find Ableton pushes me towards following the beat grid. Everything sounds somehow Western—very mechanical, not organic like the rough tones and raw drums I heard growing up in Nairobi. Even as I try to break away from the loops and the 1-2-3-4 drive of these music tools, I always end up back there somehow.”

A 1963 article by Max Mathews about computers as musical instruments.

“There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments.”

An article about YouTube ambience rooms

“Ambience videos provide a respite from the ‘hypermediacy‘ of the internet, she said — a break from the constant bombardment of ads and emails and the self-inflicted burden of dozens of open browser tabs. (Hypermediacy can be defined as the act of viewing, consuming or interacting with multiple forms of media at once.)”

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s