• 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

• An article on the case of whether not the chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” are stolen. “While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure. What remains is a subjective assessment of the ‘concept… Continue reading

• An interview with electronic musician Tim Hecker. “It’s a fight to dial into something that has meaning.” • An article about composers doing field research. “With a sense of racing against time, composers are conducting field research with the goal of preserving or celebrating lost tongues in their work.” • An article about the… Continue reading

• An article about the history of policing women’s voices. “There’s a long history of men telling women to avoid rhetorical excess and to use their indoor voices.” • An article on the biological origins of rhythm. “Beat keeping might be rooted in a really old, widely conserved mechanism, which is basically how brains communicate.… Continue reading

• A BBC podcast about the science of acoustic ecology. “We look at beautiful scenery like this, but we rarely listen…Soundscape ecology is looking at the full acoustic environment.” • An article about how noise pollution is impacting our ability to hear the sounds of nature. “This gift that we are born with–to reach out… Continue reading

• An article about Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power.” “It’s easy to make a dope beat, where the kick and snare are keeping the groove together. But Fight the Power doesn’t have that. You can’t tell what the kick and snare are doing. They’re creating a backdrop, but it’s not pronounced, it doesn’t swing. It’s more… Continue reading

• An article about the “tropical” house music of Kygo. “The term is slightly misleading; Kygo does not always rely on the kick-drum pulse that defines house music, and for him ‘tropical’ refers more to a general mood—invariably described as ‘chill’—than to any specific musical tradition, of whatever latitude. But if electronic music seems to… Continue reading

• An article about the challenges of creating a human-sounding computer voice. “Most software designers acknowledge that they are still faced with crossing the “uncanny valley,” in which voices that are almost human-sounding are actually disturbing or jarring. The phrase was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He observed that as graphical… Continue reading