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An Interview With Percussionist Junior Wedderburn
Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn is a master percussionist who has played drums for over forty years. His music making draws upon the traditional Jamaican ritual styles of Kumina, Pocomania, Tambu, Bruckins, and Nyabinghi. I interviewed Junior in November in New York City about Nyabinghi music as well as a documentary film he… Continue reading
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Your Musical Tastes, Automated
Virginia Heffernan has an article on the popular Internet radio service Pandora in today’s New York Times. Pandora allows users to set up personalized radio stations that generate playlists based on users’ musical preferences. All it takes is an initial song, and Pandora analyzes* (see footnote below) the music based on quantifiable qualities such as instrumentation,… Continue reading
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More Cookery-Music Connections: Texture and Timbre
In a video podcast lecture available on iTunes U, the chef Grant Achatz discusses the creative process involved in arriving at new dishes. In a short video from the lecture Achatz introduces what he calls “flavor bouncing.” He begins with a single ingredient/flavor (white beans) and then maps a list of possible other ingredients/flavors (bacon, beer, almonds…) that could successfully “bounce off”… Continue reading
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Creative Strategies From elBulli’s Cookery
This blog post is not about music or sound per se, but about the creative process of cooking. I am a big fan of books about cookery, and they can be read from a sideways perspective–thinking by analogy about how they may offer insight onto other domains. With that said, every once in a while you… Continue reading
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Brian Eno on Improvisation, Computers and Music
One of the reasons why musician and producer Brian Eno’s words are worth reading is that he often has timely things to say about music and says them in a way that makes sense and makes you pause and think. In a recent Pitchfork interview (my second Pitchfork-related post in a week), Eno discusses strategies for improvisation and the… Continue reading
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The Disguised Musical Voice
Recently I blogged about Auto Tune and its magical pitch-correcting abilities. While the post was ostensibly about a musical technology, its subtext was of course all about the human voice, specifically the delight we take in altering how our voices can sound. Auto Tune is one way to do it, but that’s really just the… Continue reading
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How Music Means So Much
Understanding how music means so much is difficult business, largely because music is a slippery phenomenon. One of its longstanding mysteries is how it can have such deeply felt meanings for us: when we listen to music (or even listen while we make it), it just seems to be a sensuous stream of sound full of emotional resonance. Music… Continue reading
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The Organ Music of Olivier Messiaen
If you’re into long tones, drones and shimmering chords, you might like the organ music of French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). While I was a music student in college I discovered the organ music of Messiaen through a CD of some of his best known works. Messiaen was the organist at La Trinite Church in… Continue reading
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Digital Diets, Attention Spans and The Rhythms Of Learning
Is the Internet and all manner of digital media really doing something substantial to our consciousness, to how we think? Is my attention span not getting worse exactly but maybe becoming fractured? This is the subject of at least a few articles I’ve read lately, including this one in the Times which is part of… Continue reading
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The Sound Of Auto Tune
You know the Auto Tune sound when you hear it: it sounds artificial, electronic, not quite human enough, too perfect. Auto Tune is everywhere today, from TV commercials to hip hop to country music. It’s the Photoshop of the musical world. The technology was conceived by Andy Hildebrand, an engineer for Exxon who developed methods… Continue reading
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