• 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

• A piece about the reason why a group of metronomes will eventually synchronize with one another. “This process, known as phase synchronization, was first observed in pendulum clocks in 1657 by Christian Huygens. It has since been found in systems ranging from thermoacoustic engines in the lab to the rhythmic blinking of fireflies in nature.” • An article about a… Continue reading

• An article that proposes “Composed Music” to describe classical music. “Composed Music’s primary virtue is its blunt veracity. It is what it says it is: works by a singular mind, fixed and promulgated in written form. When you think about it, that is probably the one and only thing that unites all eras and… Continue reading

1. An article that considers the significance of the recent critical attention paid by (serious) music journalism towards (serious?) pop music. Case in point: the New York Times’ article and video documentary on the making of Justin Bieber’s “Where R  Ü Now.” “The New York Times’ pieces challenge us as to how seriously we are prepared to… Continue reading