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Keywords: Get The Volume Right
(Photo: Speaker array for Janet Cardiff’s “Forty-Part Motet”) Getting the volume right is adjusting your monitors or headphones so the music sounds lifelike, realistically filling the room or headspace in which you’re working. Dialing in this sound level suspends your disbelief about the virtual nature of your musical tools and loudspeakers’ mediations. Not too loud, Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon” (1993/2023) and “Perfect Wave” (2017)
“If images don’t do anything in this culture, if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything Continue reading
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Distillation: On Composing Process
Attend to the random, the serendipitous, and the happy accidents; use the sounds at hand; commit to what’s working right now; mix on the fly; always improvise; bloom other parts from the chords; drum non-obvious rhythms; embrace the synthetic but evoke the acoustic (or vice versa); change one line and keep another the same; contrast Continue reading
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Database: Nils Frahm On Creating Complexity Without Having To Force It
“Since a lot of my gear is analog and all elements correspond with each other, all of the effects I want to apply to the music can quickly be implemented manually. Every piece of equipment influences every other one in some form. And that’s something I could never get done with plug-ins. If I put Continue reading
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Keywords: Grid Musical Thinking
Sol LeWitt, “Color Grids” (1980) Novation Launchpad Pro (2024) The 64-pad matrix grid MIDI controller is contemporary electronic music’s preeminent symbol. The grid represents square 4/4 time, quantized notes, auto-tuned pitch, 4-bar drum loops, and the triggered clips method of recombinant/modular composing. For a hundred years, grid forms were an emblem of modernist visual art, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nate Silver’s “On The Edge” (2024) and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Nexus” (2024)
“The thing is our physiology is really smart. I mean, it’s just really smart. It’s very hard to trick your physiology. We live in a 3D world, we move in a 3D world. So if we make mistakes in our movement, we die. So we have much higher standards in our physiology than we do Continue reading
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Database: James Leyland Kirby On Musical Technologies, Creating Errors, Finding New Sound Worlds, And Risk-Taking
“I love what technology affords me. Although some of my work can seem nostalgic, believe me I work in the now. I have no desire to set up a studio with a ton of old modular gear, that game is like a fruit machine: loads of people putting money into an expensive setup with flashing Continue reading
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