affect
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Effects Are All About Affect
“I’ve found that quite a good trick is that if you feel like you’ve put too much reverb on something just add more.” – Clark When I’m composing, I’m playing or drumming on a keyboard controller, but mostly I’m looking at a screen and inhabiting the virtual world of DAW software, listening, trying to finesse whatever Continue reading
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On Spotify On Apple Music Continue reading
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Searches That Brought You Here
• What is the frequency spectrum of a hip hop kick. This search brought you to my 2012 post on bass frequency-heavy Beats By Dre headphones. What I wrote still seems to apply to why people wear them: “How to explain the popularity of the Beats? One explanation is that our bass-heavy musics–hip hop and Continue reading
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On The Musicality Of Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Martin Mull Walking across a recently re-designed section of Times Square last week I had a pleasant sensation that the design was working on me, on us pedestrians, guiding us along certain paths and shaping our sense of space. Sometime last year I read a New Continue reading
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Notes On What Makes A Piece Of Music Work: Boards Of Canada’s “Tomorrow’s Harvest”
“So it was becoming clear to me that texture deserved as great a place as process in the theory of how music involves people and draws you into deep identification, total participation, past the logical contradictions of separation from the Other.” — Charles Keil, Music Grooves, p. 169 *** As I listened to Boards Of Continue reading
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On Modular Grid Structures: Thinking Through Sol LeWitt’s Cubes
I recently saw a striking cube-based structure by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) at the MoMa. When you stand in front of it and take it in, the work works on multiple perceptual levels. Here are few things that I noticed: one large (about 5 by 5 foot) and shallow three-dimensional square; twenty-five smaller (1 by 1 Continue reading
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How Many Words Is A Sound Recording Worth?
“Seeing is believing, but hearing is hearsay” — Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies (2011) Like a lot of people, I’m a fan of Instamatic, a smartphone photo app, because it makes me feel like a skilled photographer. The app is essentially photo editing software that allows you to quickly–really quickly, with the tap of a virtual Continue reading
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On Vocal Frying
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.” – Mark Liberman, linguist, University of Pennsylvania The image is impossible for me to prevent in my mind’s eye: spoken Continue reading
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“Where Are We?”: Situating Wonder Through Music In Apple Siri Commercials
wonder — (1): rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience; (2) : a feeling of doubt or uncertainty Is there anything the Apple iPhone can’t do? And for that matter, is there anything Siri, the phone’s voice activated seer, doesn’t know? Recently I happened to be in Brooklyn early Continue reading
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