piano
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Studio Observations: Listening To Improvisation
(Detail from Judith Leyster, Merry Company, c. 1629) A friend of mine, who isn’t a musician, enjoys my piano music. So occasionally I’ll email him an mp3 of something I’ve done to get feedback. Music inspires him to ask thought-provoking questions. One day he texted, Do you play music with your heart or your body? Uhh,… Continue reading
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Aftertouch
Johannes Vermeer, A Young Woman seated at a Virginal (c. 1670-72) In MIDI parlance, aftertouch refers to MIDI data that’s transmitted when a key or pad on an electronic controller is held down after the initial attack to control parameters such as volume, vibrato depth, or filter brightness. One of the first synthesizers to incorporate… Continue reading
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Problems of Connection
(Detail from Leonard da Vinci’s Portrait of a Musician, c. 1483-1487) Something I encounter almost daily in the omnimusical realm of music production is the problem of connecting with my instruments, by which I mean DAW software, virtual synthesizers and samplers, and keyboard controllers. I depend on these technologies to make some kinds of music,… 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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