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On Musical Time and Drummers’ Brains
In a recent article by the always interesting Bikhard Bilger in this week’s The New Yorker (April 25), we learn about David Eagleman’s research on the brain and time perception. Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College, wants to understand how we experience time, an especially interesting question considering how subjective time can feel in those moments when… Continue reading
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On The Most Human Human
In his book The Most Human Human, an engaging account of competing in the annual Turing test, Brian Christian ranges far and wide through the literature of AI (artificial intelligence), linguistics, computer science, philosophy and even poetry to figure out what exactly makes us distinctly human and distinctly different from machines. The Turing test was conceived by Alan Turing,… Continue reading
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Remixing Is A Curious Thing
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” – Igor Stravinsky To a composer used to putting together notes on a page (or notes on the virtual page of a music notation program), the craft of remixing can seem like a curious thing. Its original meaning,… Continue reading
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On David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand
They don’t seem to make books like David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand anymore, but then, Sudnow, who died in 2007, was no ordinary explorer of musical experience. Trained as a sociologist, Sudnow took a turn inward in the late 1970s and wrote Ways Of The Hand (1978/2001), a remarkable insider’s phenomenological account of learning to improvise jazz… Continue reading
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On Information, Musical Memes And Earworms
For James Gleick, author of the recent book The Information, information has a life of its own independent of us. In a recent interview on On Point radio he says:: “We live in a world where information passes from machine to machine. We know that when it’s stored in material forms and when one machine talks to… Continue reading
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On Kinesthetic Sense In Musical Experience
In his engagingly perceptive 2006 article on tennis virtuoso Roger Federer, the late David Foster Wallace discusses the idea of “kinesthetic sense” and its importance in successfully returning a hard hit tennis serve, a situation where one has just a split second to react and do the right thing. For Wallace, kinesthetic sense comprises: “the ability to control the body… Continue reading
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On The Digital Versus The Physical In Music
In a recent interview on Tom Ashbrook’s On Point radio program, sci-fi novelist William Gibson began his discussion of his book Zero History by pointing out that in so many ways today, “the digital has colonized the physical.” I want to interrogate this interesting idea with regards to musical life as it can be observed… Continue reading
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On Fidelity And Presence in Music
In his Marketplace Of Ideas podcast interview with Greg Miller, author of the book Perfecting Sound Forever, Colin Marshall asks: “There seems to be this divide between [sonic] fidelity and presence. Between trying to replicate the experience of hearing a live-produced sound and making the recording its own experience?” In other words, is a recording… Continue reading
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On Musical Pictures Of The World
In an interview on The Marketplace Of Ideas podcast, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses the value of the humanities: “The great task of the humanities is to draw on the rich body of human creativity in literature, the arts, music, film, and so on to help us interpret and live in our world. And a… Continue reading
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On Making Music Tangible
“How physical is music?” asks Clive Bell at the outset of a recent article in Wire magazine on the English musician Richard Skelton. Part of what makes Skelton unique is his approach to trying to make music making a more physical thing than its evanescent sounds might suggest. Thus, the composer-musician embraces a unique recording process: he… Continue reading
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