Curating The Week
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Curating The Week: Beauty as Symmetry, Habit and Repetition, AI in Music, Bowedscapes
• The physicist Michio Kaku defines beauty in terms of symmetry and the re-arrangement of components (and provides one of the most compelling explanations of compelling music). The podcast is here. “Beauty to a physicist is symmetry. There’s a symmetry in music. For example, the simplest symmetry is a rubber ball. You rotate the ball Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Attention, Time, Decolonizing Electronic Music Software
• An essay about attention (and time). “The phrase attention economy poses attention as a commodity to be portioned off and sold, usually on the internet. (We also say that attention is something to be ‘paid.’) But maybe attention is more a state of mind, akin to happiness or disgust, than a currency. It’s a feeling, a Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Research, Twitter, Creativity
• A talk by Richard W. Hamming. “If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Vibes, Josquin des Prez, KMRU
• An article on vibes. “The word ‘vibe’ is short for vibration—something that resonates and echoes, suffusing a space. In the early twentieth century, the term became associated with the vibraphone, a cousin of the marimba, which uses motorized fans beneath its bars to achieve a vibier sound. At the time of its invention, in Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Film Music, Clark, Metadata
• A critical reading of film music. “JXL’s score is the kind of orchestral music that is easier to imagine from a synthesizer than an ensemble: one finger on the strings, another on the choral voices, a pinky sliding over to trigger the mournful military brass. The hand of Zimmer always feels present, in the Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Disappearance Of Musical Genre, Musicality In EDM, Wind
• An article about the disappearance of musical genre. “Genre is a reductive, old-fashioned, and inherently problematic idea, and we should all be eager to see it rendered moot, but I remain curious about the contours of a post-genre world—what that might open up for the future, and what might be sacrificed.” • An essay Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Decolonizing Music Software, Max Mathews, Ambience Rooms
• An article about decolonizing electronic music software. “I find Ableton pushes me towards following the beat grid. Everything sounds somehow Western—very mechanical, not organic like the rough tones and raw drums I heard growing up in Nairobi. Even as I try to break away from the loops and the 1-2-3-4 drive of these music Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Drumming, Oral Culture, and Whistling
• DRUMMINGat50, a website about the history, composition, and performance practice of Steve Reich’s Drumming, a seminal piece of 20th- (and 21st-) century acoustic music. I contributed an essay, which is here. • Zenep Tufecki on the psychodynamics of oral culture. “…oral culture is not suited to certain kinds of knowledge accumulation and legibility of Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Algorithms, Emergence, and Minimalism
• An article on art and algorithms. “Human creativity has always been a response to the immense strangeness of reality, and now its subject has evolved, as reality becomes increasingly codeterminate, and intermingled, with computation. If that statement seems extreme, consider the extent to which our fundamental perceptions of reality – from research in the Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Cancel Culture, Solitude, The Brain
• An article on cancel culture. “What cancellations offer instead is a surrogate, warped-mirror version of the judicial process, at once chaotic yet ritualized. It’s a paradox reminiscent of the mayhem in medieval Catholic traditions of carnival and misrule, wherein the church and governing bodies were lampooned and hierarchy upended — all without actually threatening Continue reading
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