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Keywords: Serendipity
(Photo: Jonathan Greenaway) Serendipity is fortune’s role in artistic and scientific practice via accidental discoveries and discerning their value. The term was coined by writer Horace Walpole in 1754 with reference to an old Persian fairy tale (“The Three Princes Of Serendip”) in which three perceptive princes notice clues to insightfully describe a lost camel… Continue reading
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Keywords: Use Your Ears
Something in the track doesn’t sound right: a rhythm is off, it’s boring, there’s timbres clashing, too many sounds, a cliché chord, a predictable structure, the intro isn’t long enough, the mix is murky, and the fade out should be the only part. When something doesn’t sound right we know it. Our knowing is not… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alan Douglas’s “Electronic Music Production” (1974)
“…we are able to vastly increase the power and pitch range; obtain crescendos and diminuendos impossible with conventional instruments; divide the scaling into an infinite number of parts; obtain any degree of glissando or sliding scale; form completely new tone colors; supply echo or reverberation to any required extent and vary this at any instant… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Clark, “Pleen 1930s.” Clark (Chris Clark) is a prolific and inventive producer-composer who makes shape-shifting music in which no two moments—not to mention no two pieces—ever sound similar. He’s sort of a chameleon whose signature sound is that his tracks never sound like anyone else and they do unconventional things that are beautifully surprising. “Pleen… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Giorgio Parisi’s “In A Flight Of Starlings: The Wonders Of Complex Systems” (2023)
“I want to talk instead about what has been called ‘microcreativity,’ those small everyday ideas that are crucial to making any progress in a scientific context. For me an idea is an unexpected thought–one that is surprising and by no means banal” (98). “Formulating thoughts through words is extremely important; words are powerful–they link together… Continue reading
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Database: Loraine James On Ignoring The Metronome
“Sometimes I don’t like thinking, this part has to be exactly four bars, and so forth. Sometimes I’ll hit the record button and just go, ignoring the metronome and just doing whatever. I’ll improvise for five minutes and condense that into a song.” Loraine James database. Continue reading
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Keywords: Influence
(Photo: Elijah Macleod) Your musical influences are spirit architects whose works form an invisible blueprint for your own. Influence is both a gift given and its acceptance–a call and response. It’s your echoing, recalling, and imitation of what you love in your forebears and colleagues as you try to ventriloquize them, imagining what they would… Continue reading
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