• An article about the spread of dancehall music. “Over the past year, however, dancehall has been dutty wining its way back into the worldwide consciousness. Diplo, long in debt to dancehall’s digital rhythms, brought them to an even wider audience as Major Lazer. Last year, Lazer’s track ‘Lean On’ became the most streamed single of… Continue reading

• A brilliant article about the so-called “millennial whoop” in pop music. “It’s a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A… Continue reading

• An article about our experience of the world through digital mediatisation. “It’s a strange notion, this: digitisation has become so comprehensive and penetrating it is now able to express the fundamental categories within which we perceive reality itself–but of course this is merely an image, like any other.” • An article about sound collecting.… Continue reading

• An article on the effects of noise on learning. “A new study finds that toddlers have trouble learning words when there’s too much background noise…’It’s not that everything needs to be in quiet, but that at least some of the day the children should have an opportunity to hear language where there aren’t lots… Continue reading

• An article about teaching electronic music making in schools. “They’re definitely open to learning this way. They seem to show a bit more resilience rather than instantly getting fed up, feeling like they’re not musical or talented. It’s proving that you can teach creativity without requiring the skills of years of piano lessons and… Continue reading

• An article about the lessons of Bach’s music. “What Bach teaches us is the primacy of the musical material, the value of each note and each combination of notes, of each melodic line and each combination of melodic lines. The beauty of Bach inheres as much in the parts as in the whole. Every… Continue reading

• A composer shares his college class notes from a class taught by Alvin Lucier. “Art doesn’t have to please, make you happy or sad.” • An article about the impact of Googling on our ways of thinking. “We’ve adopted the Google ideal of the mind, which is that you have a question that you… Continue reading

• An article about music fandom. “My fandom is obsessive, possessive and largely static. When I am lucky enough to identify with a piece of music, I cling to it like a relic. There’s no use trying to convince me that my artifact is something other than my own personal Dead Sea Scrolls, something to… Continue reading

• An article about time. “Is our experience of time’s flow akin to watching a live play, where things occur in the moment but not before or after, a flickering in and out of existence around the ‘now’? Or, is it like watching a movie, where all eternity is already in the can, and we… Continue reading