We are kicking off my Musical Borrowing class at the New School with a discussion of artificial intelligence in music. I decided to start here because 1) we are covering concepts in reverse chronological order; 2) the students are going to want to talk about it anyway; and 3) this is the least interesting topic of the course for me personally, so I’d prefer to get it out of the way. To get everybody oriented, I assigned this mostly optimistic take on AI music from Ableton’s web site. Then we did some in-class listening and discussion. First we needed to get clear on what “AI music” even is. M ..read more

This fall, I am teaching Technology in Music Education at Western Illinois University. The students are in-service music teachers who are working toward masters degrees. Here’s my syllabus. I have left out administrative details and university boilerplate. Feel free to use any of this as you see fit, but if you do, please tell me, I’m always interested to hear. Overview Each week I will present a piece of technology or an idea for using it, and you will do a project: make a piece of music, do a short piece of writing, that kind of thing. Each module has a Discussions forum where you will post ..read more

EQ (equalization) plugins are volume controls for specific parts of the frequency spectrum. You can cut or boost the low end, the midrange and the high end independently of each other. Every DAW, mixing board and guitar amp has EQ controls, and they can radically transform your sounds. But while EQ is an essential part of audio engineering, it is also a source of confusion for beginners. In this post, I lay out some key vocabulary. To understand how EQ works, you first need to learn what a frequency is. If you are a musician, this will be easy, because frequency is just another name for pitch ..read more

A music tech student asked me what the difference is between analog and digital recording and mixing. I came up with a nice concise answer, and I thought I would share it here. All microphones are analog. They convert pressure waves in the air into electricity, by having the air shake a little piece of metal, thereby generating a fluctuating electrical current. Mics differ in the specific ways that they do this. In dynamic mics, the air vibrates a magnet that is wrapped in wire, producing a current. In condenser mics, the air vibrates a metal plate that’s part of a capacitor, which changes it ..read more

Last week in music tech class, we talked about audio recording, and how the placement of microphones relative to the voices or instruments can shape the sound of a recording. Mics don’t just pick up the sound of the voice or instrument itself. They also pick up the sound of the voice or instrument bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling. Depending on where the mic is relative to the sound source, it might pick up more direct sound or more indirect sound. The specific blend tells the listener a lot about the environment that the sound was recorded in, and carries information about style and ..read more

In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself. The image below shows an audio clip containing the Amen break. The warp markers are the little yellow arrows across the top. Each one corresponds to the onset of a drum hit. Think of an audio clip as a rubber band. At its original tempo ..read more

I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live. In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project. Live’s MIDI effects have some potentially profound implications for the teaching of music theory. Live’s Scale device allows you to easily play in any scale or mode. If you set the device to, say, F-sharp Lydian dominant mode, then any note you play on the keyboard will be map ..read more

There is no required text for this class; all of the readings are online. However, if you are a music education major or you plan to teach music technology, I recommend buying Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity by Will Kuhn and myself. Getting Started Blog and music hosting setup The internet is the most important piece of technology in the music world. For that reason, you will be posting all of your work for the class on a public-facing blog. If you do not have a blog, set one up on the platform of your choice. I recommend WordPress, Tumblr, or G ..read more

In this fascinating video, Nahre Sol composes accompaniment for an isolated Billie Eilish vocal in the styles of various canonical composers. The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due to the fact that Billie Eilish is a microphone singer, not a concert hall singer. It’s strange to hear microphone singing over classical-style accompaniment! Classical voice comes from the time before microphones. Singers had to be heard and unders ..read more

Does the harmony of the blues come from the natural overtone series? Is it a just intonation system that later got shoehorned into Western twelve-tone equal temperament? Whether the blues comes from just intonation, or just intonation happens to sound like the blues, this is a rich and promising avenue of inquiry, both for understanding the blues and for creating new music inspired by it. In this post, I use MTS-ESP, Oddsound’s amazing microtonal tuning plugin, to visualize the possible harmonic basis of the blues. The circle below represents one octave, which both starts and ends at the 12 o ..read more