aesthetics
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On Soundscape Listening And Moshing
Last weekend I was in Montreal for the IASPM Canada (International Association For The Study Of Popular Music, Canada) meeting at McGill University where I gave a paper on an iPhone soundscape app called Ambiance. My research explores how Ambiance users listen to ambient nature sounds for therapeutic purposes–to relax, to relieve stress, to sleep, etc. Over forty years after R. Murray Continue reading
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On The Allure Of The Worn
If you’re a smartphone user, you may have noticed the plethora of apps for your phone that allow you to process the photos you take on it. Among the most popular apps are FX PhotoStudio and Hipstamatic. For the average user (that would be most of us), the appeal of these apps is their ability to Continue reading
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On The Musical Metaphors Heavy And Deep
I might be generalizing, but when I’ve overheard musicians talking about a musician they really admire and respect, they don’t usually say “He’s an amazing musician” or “She’s really a wonderful musician.” For some reason, what I hear over and over again are the words “heavy” and “deep”–as in: “She’s such a heavy musician” or “His playing is Continue reading
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Music In Wallace Stevens’ Poetry
Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses — As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon — Rationalists would wear sombreros. – Wallace Stevens, Six Significant Landscapes, VI (1916) The great modernist Continue reading
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On The Digital Versus The Physical In Music
In a recent interview on Tom Ashbrook’s On Point radio program, sci-fi novelist William Gibson began his discussion of his book Zero History by pointing out that in so many ways today, “the digital has colonized the physical.” I want to interrogate this interesting idea with regards to musical life as it can be observed Continue reading
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On Fidelity And Presence in Music
In his Marketplace Of Ideas podcast interview with Greg Miller, author of the book Perfecting Sound Forever, Colin Marshall asks: “There seems to be this divide between [sonic] fidelity and presence. Between trying to replicate the experience of hearing a live-produced sound and making the recording its own experience?” In other words, is a recording Continue reading
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W.S. Merwin On The Music Of Poetry
Years ago I stumbled upon a poem somewhere among W.S. Merwin’s many volumes that articulated perfectly the connection between musical sound as a space for housing memories. (I can’t remember the poem, but will search for it and let you know.) I remembered how much I enjoyed Merwin’s work when I spotted a recent interview with Continue reading
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On The Prospect Of Acoustic Lies
In his Harper’s (April 2011) essay “Seeing Through Lies”, the English art critic John Berger (author of the classic 1972 book Ways Of Seeing, an exploration of how we look at and experience visual art) discusses the revelatory quality of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork, specifically its ability to cut through the noise of our Continue reading
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On The (In)significance Of Musical Experience
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast interview with a writer talking about information theory, or art history and design aesthetics, or the philosophy of work, or the politics of technology, I find myself thinking about the purpose and relative (in)significance of music. Musicologists have long studied the formal properties of Continue reading
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On Becoming A Virtuoso Of Knobs, Buttons, and Sliders
In the course of preparing for a paper on laptop music making as creative practice I’m giving this summer at Cambridge University, I’ve been thinking about how exactly one goes about performing music with/on a laptop: What are the decision-making and problem-solving processes musicians use in performance and in preparing for performance? I’m approaching topic as Continue reading
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