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Musical Decision-Making Under Conditions Of Opacity and Serendipity
I begin composing by improvising, and there are three elements that make up this process: opacity, decision-making, and serendipity. First, some definitions: something that is opaque lacks transparency; decision-making is reaching a resolution after consideration; and serendipity is the occurrence of events by chance in a beneficial way. These ideas capture the flow of the… Continue reading
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Heavy Metal Tee
The lady walks the dog wearing a Metallica shirt a fact once noticed complicates my assumptions about what I thought I knew –is the shirt ironic or fan fashion?– because the music you like says so much about what it feels to be you. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ole Thorstensen’s “Making Things Right” (2015)
“That the idea or conception of something is adjudged superior to its concrete implementation is a natural consequence of a society in which theory has become increasingly important. The execution is dirty and imprecise, while the idea is pure and unsullied. Theory is always flawless, until you try to apply it in practice and get… Continue reading
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Music Production Mindsets: Letting Something Help You Decide
When I first began dabbling in electronic music production around 2000 or so, I had a big Yamaha synthesizer hooked up to my computer. The keyboard had its own built-in sound presets, and I managed to configure its various MIDI channels to the DAW software (Logic) so I could select a different sound for each… Continue reading
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Wind Music
Occasionally this time of year, when the evenings are warm and breezy and I’m walking the dog down a quiet neighborhood street late at night, I notice the sound of wind in the trees and stop to look and listen. If you look up, you see the wind’s twisting upwards path upon the oscillating tree… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: David Sumpter’s “Outnumbered” (2018)
“Spotify’s genre system places all songs as a point in 13 dimensions, grouping together those close-by points as genres. The dimensions include objective musical properties such as ‘loudness’ and ‘beats per minute’, as well as more subjective emotional properties, such as ‘energy’, ‘valance’ (sadness) and ‘danceability’. These latter, subjective measurements are established through listening sessions,… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: Autechre’s “32a_reflected”
(In “32a_reflected” tones hover, suspended, frequencies piercing at high altitudes, a swarm and hum drone growing into an almost tonal form that keeps resolving without identifiable chords. The tones feel like an ending but we don’t know when that ending will happen. The end will be without cadence, without melody, yet an idea can coalesce—a… Continue reading
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