like the moon
And on we go! Having conducted a few more sessions of Technomusicology this past spring and summer — about which, more below — I’m happy to report that I’ll be offering the class again next semester, Spring 2018, at the Harvard Extension School. As always, anyone is welcome to join us if you have the […]
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Do you like sound? Do you like art? How about music and media, and their aesthetics and histories? Would you enjoy telling some stories about music and media through sound art? If you’re tired of dancing about architecture and ready to do some musicking about music — and you’ve got the time and means — […]
Read More →I’m offering another semester of technomusicology this spring via the Harvard Extension School (Harvard’s open-enrollment option), beginning January 29. The class meets Thursday evenings from 5:30-7:30pm, but the course will also be available online for anyone who cares to join us from a distance (including realtime participation in classes, if you can make it). […]
Read More →The fifth etude in our summer session required students to cook up short DJ mixes that follow a particular musical thread across time and space. As readers will know, I’ve made a few of these over the years, and I’m obviously enamored of such an audible form of storytelling about music culture in the age […]
Read More →The Summer of Love is way behind us, as is the Second Summer of Love, & perhaps the Third and Fourth. The Summer of Technomusicology, however, will soon be here! I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be offering my favorite class to teach in the world right now, as premiered last year at Harvard U, […]
Read More →Ableton Smashups Mashups and mega-mixes, mainly for classes but also for fun. Mixes You can also stream many of these via Mixcloud or Soundcloud. “Wave Count” :: notes | vimeo | mixcloud | mp3 “Louis Dembow Gottschalk” :: notes | soundcloud | mp3 “Raggamuffin Hip-hop Mix” :: notes | soundcloud | mp3 “Picó Picante May […]
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It all started when I tried to learn to play Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano. I never really got past the first couple of bars. Instead, I just found myself banging out this particular rhythm with my right hand. Loving such collections of 3s and 2s, I started counting along: 1-2, 1-2-3, […]
Read More →This page hosts audio & visual media to accompany my June 2020 article, “Ragtime Country: Rhythmically Recovering Country’s Black Heritage.” The essay and mega-mix are my contribution to “Uncharted Country,” a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies that seeks to respond to this remarkable moment of flux and play in the world of […]
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This is a repost of an article originally published at the now defunct Cluster Mag back in December 2011. I’m grateful to Max Pearl for the platform, to metaLAB for commissioning the project initially, and to the Internet Archive for keeping it online since the mag went down. I’ve been revisiting the mix/project over the […]
Read More →As you may know, I think the mini-mega-montage is the method, and I’ve been asking students to make them for a few years. One of my biggest inspirations for assigning students to make YouTube-sourced montages is the fact that musical supercuts are already an ordinary practice, whether we’re talking about the best Nae Nae Vines […]
Read More →My students have been hard at work in this spring’s session of Technomusicology at the Harvard Extension School (which I’ve just realized marks 10 years since I first started teaching there!), and I’m eager to share some standout projects. We recently turned to the mashup as a media form to grapple with, thinking about the […]
Read More →For their 4th etude of our summer adventures in technomusicology, my students produced their own YouTube montages (as I’ve discussed here and there), and, as usual, I’m smitten by the results. I even shed a few YouTubeTears in class as we screened them together. I’ve rounded them up in playlist form, but allow me to […]
Read More →It’s been *crickets* here on the blog for a while, and the main reason is that I’ve been spending more time behind a tractor and less in front of a laptop. And loving it. I don’t spend very much time on the tractor, actually, because the work I do at Belmont Acres, a 5 acre […]
Read More →Over at Complex, David Drake offers up a supercut that “trac[es] the lineage of the Migos flow” — that is, the 8th note triplets that underpin “Versace” and have been making waves across the rap world. For Drake, the recent, remarkable spread of the so-called “Migos flow” offers compelling evidence that, even as it may […]
Read More →an utterly awesome eight-year-old diva, via YouTube This past week I’ve whipped up another couple YouTube montages in the vein of Gasodoble, Bump con Choque, and my students’ projects in last year’s technomusicology class. Unlike my previous efforts, which not too surprisingly involve reggaeton, these new mega-montages engage repertories that I don’t generally mess with: […]
Read More →Wow, this is quite an amazing piece of work. Stephen Malinowski collaborated with Jay Bacal to make an animated graphical score of Stravinsky’s controversial classic. I love tracking music this way, far more interesting than a static and graphically impoverished waveform. Now that’s what I call technomusicology! Malinowski and Bacal have carefully pegged shapes and […]
Read More →Here is the syllabus for a new course I’m teaching this spring at the Big H. It’s the culmination of a few years of piqued curiosity about “public” as term and concept, noun and adjective. As happy as teaching technomusicology made me, this sort of course — an intense, focused series of readings on a […]
Read More →Hard to believe the fall semester is already coming to a close, but we’re going out with a bang in Technomusicology (see & hear some of our projects here and there): Thursday’s final class session will feature a visit from none other than Jace Clayton, aka DJ /Rupture, globe-trotting artist, writer, label honcho, three-turntable magician, […]
Read More →Last week the students in my technomusicology class submitted their video études. The assignment was relatively straightforward: make a montage of YouTube-sourced videos interlinked by some (musical) subject, theme, or tune. One additional challenge, if made far easier by Ableton’s video capacity, was to attempt to bring the various performances into a kind of musical […]
Read More →I’m very pleased to report that I’ll be teaching full-time in the Music Department at Harvard this year, filling the big shoes of two ethnomusicolleagues on leave, Ingrid Monson & Richard Wolf. This is an honor and a pleasure, and even as a one-year non-renewable gig, it sure beats the adjunct beat I was walking […]
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