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On Designing New Musical Controllers
A while back I wrote about MIDI hardware controllers which are used by musicians who want to control their computer software. (You can read the post here.) Why does one need a controller when performing music with say, a laptop? For one thing, it gives you the sense of having physical, tactile control over your… Continue reading
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Give The Drummer Some
In the histories of hip hop and electronic dance music, the creative uses of sampling are much discussed, especially musicians’ taking drum and percussion “breaks” from old R&B and soul records and using them as the basis of new tracks. With samplers, MPC workstations, and computer software, musicians and DJs since the late 1980s have… Continue reading
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W.S. Merwin On The Music Of Poetry
Years ago I stumbled upon a poem somewhere among W.S. Merwin’s many volumes that articulated perfectly the connection between musical sound as a space for housing memories. (I can’t remember the poem, but will search for it and let you know.) I remembered how much I enjoyed Merwin’s work when I spotted a recent interview with… Continue reading
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On The Prospect Of Acoustic Lies
In his Harper’s (April 2011) essay “Seeing Through Lies”, the English art critic John Berger (author of the classic 1972 book Ways Of Seeing, an exploration of how we look at and experience visual art) discusses the revelatory quality of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork, specifically its ability to cut through the noise of our… Continue reading
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On The Pleasures Of (Unmediated) Hearing
There’s a wonderful short satirical piece by Ellis Weiner in this week’s New Yorker (March 28, 2011) on the virtues of going outside and leaving the electronic and virtual world behind. What do we gain by engaging with this “comprehensive experiential mode” of going outside? For one thing, we get a reminder of how finely… Continue reading
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On The Monome Community Earthquake Disaster Emergency Album
The other day I talked about music in terms of its having no specific meanings, and so available for us to project what we want onto its designs. But this doesn’t mean music can’t be made in the service of a worthy cause besides its own pleasures. In the days immediately following the recent huge… Continue reading
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On The (In)significance Of Musical Experience
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast interview with a writer talking about information theory, or art history and design aesthetics, or the philosophy of work, or the politics of technology, I find myself thinking about the purpose and relative (in)significance of music. Musicologists have long studied the formal properties of… Continue reading
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On Irish Traditional Music
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here is a clip of an Irish music session at someone’s home in Ireland a few years ago: Despite my Irish heritage, I don’t know enough about this music to tell you the name of the tune. I can say that it is a traditional reel, which is a… Continue reading
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On The Posthuman Soul of James Blake
For many months now I’ve been hearing about this young English musician/DJ/singer James Blake. The BBC cited him as a musician to watch in 2011 and Blake just released his first full length album, James Blake. This self-titled recording is a striking collection of pared-down songs comprising mostly auto-tuned/processed voice, analog keyboards or piano, and the most… Continue reading
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Xenakis On Intelligibility In Music
Composer, theorist, and architect-engineer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) made substantial contributions to the application of mathematical models to music composition, and is recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. He was also influential on the course of electronic music, and as an architect worked under modernist Le Corbusier and designed the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in… Continue reading
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