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...
View ArticleRemixing Is A Curious Thing
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” – Igor Stravinsky To a composer used to putting together notes on a page (or notes on the...
View ArticleOn Marcus Boon’s In Praise Of Copying
Marcus Boon’s recent book, In Praise Of Copying (Harvard University Press, 2010), is a timely argument in favor of our freedom to freely copy one another in the name of healthy creativity. Boon, a...
View Article(Im)Perfect Congruence: On Dancing To Music
There’s a funny and almost disturbing video on YouTube that shows a couple apparently dancing to the angular beats of Autechre. The video is funny and strangely compelling because of its unlikely...
View ArticleOn The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics III: Acousmatic...
“All cultural change is essentially technology-driven.” – William Gibson This year’s Grammy Awards featured the first ever performances of live electronic dance music, showcasing the DJs David Guetta...
View ArticleContent, Form, And Versioning A Song Everybody Knows: Gotye’s “Somebody I...
Sometime not overly long ago, Gotye’s song “Somebody I Used To Know” went very viral–becoming a song meme that was (and still is) hard to escape, whose video on YouTube has been viewed an astonishing...
View ArticleOn Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer’s Re: ECM
The record label ECM has long interested me, ever since I used to buy second-hand jazz LPs as a teenager. (And I wrote earlier ECM-related blog posts here and here.) The brainchild of German producer...
View ArticleOn Four Tet Remixing “Thriller” In Ten Minutes
I recently watched and re-watched a wonderful video in which Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) remixes Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the “Beat This” series. The challenge is to make a remix in ten...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....