Create the Four on the Floor Pattern in the Kick Row Again

In a previous mail service, I used the Groove Pizza to visualize some classic hip-hop beats. Just the kids are all well-nigh trap beats right now, which work differently from the funk-based blast-bap of my era.

From the dawn of jazz until about 1960, African-American popular music was based on an eighth annotation pulse. The advent of funk brought with information technology a shift to the sixteenth note pulse. At present nosotros're undergoing another shift, as Southern hip-hop is moving the residuum of popular music over to a 32nd annotation pulse. The tempos have been slowing downwardly as the beat subdivisions go effectively. This may all seem like meaningless brainchild, but the consequences become real if you lot want to program beats of your own.

Back in the 90s, the template for a hip-hop trounce looked like a planet of 16th notes orbited by kicks and snares. Click the image beneath to hear a simple "planet funk" design in the Groove Pizza. Each slice of the pizza is a sixteenth note, and the whole pizza is one bar long.

(Music readers can also view it in Noteflight.)

You tin can hear the sixteenth note hi-hat pulse clearly in "And so Fresh So Make clean" by OutKast.

View in Noteflight

Trap beats take the same basic skeleton as older hip-hop styles: a boot on crush one, snares on beats two and four, and hi-hats on some or all of the beats making up the underlying pulse. However, in trap, that pulse is twice as fast as in 90s hip-hop, 32nd notes rather than sixteenths. This poses an immediate practical trouble: a lot of drum machines don't support such a fine filigree resolution. For instance, the interface of the ubiquitous TR-808 is xvi buttons, 1 for each sixteenth note. On the computer, it'south less of an outcome because you can set the filigree resolution to be whatsoever you desire, but even so, 32nd notes are a hassle. So what do you do?

The trap producer'due south workaround is to double the song tempo, thereby turning sixteenths into effective 32nds. To become a trap beat at 70 beats per infinitesimal, y'all set the tempo to 140. Your 808 grid becomes half a bar of 32nd notes, rather than a full bar of sixteenths. And instead of putting your snares on beats ii and four, you put them on beat three.

Hither'south a generic trap beat I made. Each pizza slice is a 32nd notation, and the whole pizza is half a bar.

View in Noteflight

Trap beats don't use swing. Instead, they create rhythmic interest through syncopation, accenting unexpected weak beats. On the Groove Pizza, the weak beats are the ones in betwixt the northward, south, east and west. Afro-Cuban music is a skillful source of syncopated patterns. The snare pattern in the last quarter of my beat is a rotation of son clave, and the kick pattern is somewhat clave-like as well.

Now let's take a look at 2 existent-life trap beats. First, there'due south the inescapable "Trap Queen" by Fetty Wap.

Hither's a simplified version of the vanquish. ("Trap Queen" uses a few 64th notes on the hi-lid, which yous can't yet do on the Groove Pizza.)

View in Noteflight

The vanquish has an appealing symmetry. In each half bar, both the kick and snare each play a strong shell and a weak beat out. The hi-chapeau design is more often than not sixteenth notes, with just a few xxx-second notes as embellishments. The location of those embellishments changes from 1 half-bar to the side by side. Information technology's a simple technique, and information technology'southward constructive.

My other real-earth case is "Panda" past Desiigner.

Here's the shell on the GP, once again simplified a scrap.

View in Noteflight

Dissimilar my generic trap beat, "Panda" doesn't have any hullo-hats on the 32nd notes at all. It feels more like an old-school sixteenth note pulse at a very irksome tempo. The really "trappy" part comes at the very end, with a quick pair of kick drums on the last two 32nd notes. While the backyard-sprinkler effect of doubletime hi-hats has become a cliche, doubletime kick rolls are all the same startlingly fresh (at least to my ears.)

To make accurate trap beats, you'll need a more full-featured tool than the Groove Pizza. For one thing, yous demand 64th notes and triplets. As well, trap isn't but about the placement of the drum hits, information technology'south nearly specific sounds. In add-on to closed hullo-hats, y'all  need open hello-hats and crash cymbals. You want more than than one snare or handclap, and possibly multiple kicks likewise. And y'all'd want to be able to change the pitch of your drums too. The all-time resource to learn more than, as always, is the music itself.

We created the Groove Pizza to brand it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next pace is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I'll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or modify it every bit you lot see fit. I've likewise included Noteflight transcriptions of the beats.

The Backbeat Cross

View in Noteflight

This simple pattern is the basis of just nigh all rock and curl: kicks on beats i and 3 (north and south), and snares on beats two and four (east and westward.) It's boring, but it's a solid foundation that yous tin build more musical-sounding grooves on acme of.

The Big Beat

View in Noteflight

This Billy Squier classic is Number 9 on WhoSampled's list of Superlative Ten Most Sampled Breakbeats. There are simply 2 embellishments to the backbeat cross: the snare drum hit to the eastward is anticipated by a kick a sixteenth annotation (one slice) before, and the kick pulsate to the south is anticipated by a kick an eighth note (2 slices) earlier. It isn't much, but together with some calorie-free swing, it'south enough to make for a compelling rhythm. The groove is interestingly close to existence symmetrical on the right side of the circle, and at that place's an antisymmetry with the kick-free left side. That residue between symmetry and disproportion is what makes for satisfying music.

Planet Funk (8th notes)

View in Noteflight

This pattern reminds me of Saturn viewed edge-on. The hi-hats are the planet itself, the snares are the rings, and the alone boot pulsate at the top is a moon. To make the simplest funk beats, all you demand to do is add more moons into the kicking drum orbit.

It'south A New Day

View in Noteflight

The Skull Snaps song isn't too well known, just the suspension that kicks it off is number five on the WhoSampled list. The Planet Funk template has some extra kick drums embellishing item beats. The kick on the downbeat (the topmost piece) has a kick anticipating it a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and some other following information technology an 8th note (2 slices) later. The snare drum hit to the west is anticipated by two more kicks. All that activity is counterbalanced past the southeast half of the pizza, which is totally kick-free. Like "The Big Beat," "Information technology's A New Twenty-four hours" is close to being symmetrical, with just enough variation to keep it interesting.

When The Levee Breaks

View in Noteflight

This Led Zeppelin classic embodies the awesome majesty of rock. Rhythmically, though, it has more in common with funk. The crucial difference is beat three, the southernmost point on the pizza. In rock, you unremarkably have a kick there. In funk, you usually don't. The Levee break has a kick a sixteenth note before beat out 3, which is quite a surprise. Effort moving that kicking a piece later, and yous'll hear the groove lose its tension and interest. Like "It'south A New Day," the Levee pause sets up the second snare hit with two kicks. There's another interesting wrinkle, likewise, a boot that immediately follows the start one. The event is some other symmetrically asymmetrical drum design.

Planet Funk (sixteenth notes)

View in Noteflight

If you put a hi-hat on every slice of the pizza, you get a busier version of the basic funk groove. With twice as many hi-hats, you can tiresome the tempo down and still have an energetic feel.

So Fresh, So Clean

View in Noteflight

This OutKast banger has a fascinating drum machine design. The snare and howdy-hat stick to the Planet Funk pattern to a higher place, but against all this predictable symmetry, the kick drum is all over the place. To sympathise what's going on here, you lot need to know something about the concept of strong and weak beats. Stiff beats are where you expect drum hits to fall, and weak beats are where you don't await them. The more times you have to split the circumvolve in one-half to get to a given beat, the weaker information technology is. The weakest beats are the even-numbered pizza slices. In the first bar, pictured in a higher place, every single even-numbered piece has a kick on information technology. This is, to put it mildly, not typical. Normally the base of your beat is stable and anticipated, and the higher-pitched ornaments are more than unpredictable. That'south what makes "So Fresh, So Make clean" so cool.

Nas Is Like

View in Noteflight

While this track is all-time known for its samples, and equitably so, the underlying drum machine rhythm is pretty remarkable too. Like the OutKast song higher up, the snares and hi-hats are mostly stable, with most of the variation in the boot. I won't verbally analyze all iv bars of the blueprint, but if you lot play with it, y'all'll run across the idea of counterbalanced symmetry and disproportion at work.

Amen Break

View in Noteflight

The Amen intermission is the most complex rhythm here, and it's a post unto itself to really explain the whole thing. The important matter is to compare the simplicity of the howdy-hatsadditional sound, an open up hi-hat in the last bar. Displacement!

This mail service explains how and why nosotros designed Groove Pizza.

What it does

The Groove Pizza represents beats as concentric rhythm necklaces. The circumvolve represents one measure. Each slice of the pizza is a sixteenth note. The outermost ring controls the kick drum; the middle one controls the snare; and the innermost ane plays cymbals.

Connecting the dots on a given ring creates shapes, similar the square formed by the snare drum in the pattern below.

The pizza tin play time signatures other than four/4 past changing the number of slices. Here'southward a twelve-slice pizza playing an African bell blueprint.

Y'all tin explore the geometry of musical rhythm by dragging shapes onto the circular grid. Patterns that are visually appealing tend to sound good, and patterns that audio good tend to await cool.

Herbie Hancock did some user testing for united states, and he suggested that nosotros make information technology possible to show the interior angles of the shapes.

Groove Pizza History

The ideas behind the Groove Pizza began in my masters thesis piece of work in 2013 at NYU. For his NYU senior thesis, Adam Nov built web and physical prototypes. In belatedly summer 2015, Adam wrote what would become the Groove Pizza 1.0 (GP1), with a library of drum patterns that he and I curated. The MusEDLab has been user testing this version for the past year, both with kids and with music and math educators in New York City.

In January 2016, the Music Experience Blueprint Lab began developing the Groove Pizza 2.0 (GP2) equally function of the MathScienceMusic initiative.

MathScienceMusic Groove Pizza Credits:

• Original Ideas: Ethan Hein, Adam November & Alex Ruthmann
• Design: Diana Castro
• Software Architect: Kevin Irlen
• Artistic Lawmaking Guru: Matthew Kaney
• Backend Lawmaking Guru: Seth Hillinger
• Play Testing: Marijke Jorritsma, Angela Lau, Harshini Karunaratne, Matt McLean
• Odds & Ends: Asyrique Thevendran, Jamie Ehrenfeld, Jason Sigal

The learning opportunity

The goals of the Groove Pizza are to assistance novice drummers and drum programmers become started; to create a gentler introduction to beatmaking with more complex tools like Logic or Ableton Live; and to use music to open windows into math and geometry. The Groove Pizza is intended to be simple enough to exist learned easily without prior experience or formal training, but it must too have sufficient depth to teach substantial and transferable skills and concepts, including:

• Familiarity with the component instruments in a pulsate beat out and the power to option them individually out of the audio mass.
• A repertoire of standard patterns and rhythmic motifs. Understanding of where to place the boot, snare, how-do-you-do-hats and so on to produce satisfying beats.
• Awareness of dissimilar genres and styles and how they are distinguished by their different degrees of syncopation, customary kicking drum patterns and claves, tempo ranges and so on.
• An intuitive understanding of the divergence between potent and weak beats and the emotional effect of syncopation.
• Acquaintance with the concept of hemiola and other more complex rhythmic devices.

Marshall (2010) recommends "folding musical analysis into musical experience." Programming drums in pop and dance idioms makes the rhythmic abstractions concrete.

Visualizing rhythm

Western music notation is fairly intuitive on the pitch axis, where height on the staff corresponds clearly to pitch top. On the time axis, however, Western notation is less easily parsed—horizontal space demand non have whatever bearing at all on time values. A popular culling is the "time-unit box system," a kind of rhythm tablature used by ethnomusicologists. In a fourth dimension-unit box system, each pulse is represented by a square. Rhythmic onsets are shown as filled boxes.

Nearly all electronic music production interfaces use the time-unit box system scheme, including grid sequencers and the MIDI piano roll.

A row of time-unit boxes can also be wrapped in a circle to grade a rhythm necklace. The Groove Pizza is but a set of rhythm necklaces bundled concentrically.

Round rhythm visualization offers a pregnant reward over linear notation: information technology more clearly shows metrical function. Nosotros can define meter every bit "the group of perceived beats or pulses into equivalence classes" (Along, Wiggin & McLean, 2010, 521). Linear musical concepts like small-scale-scale melodies depend mostly on relationships between adjacent events, or at least closely spaced events. But periodicity and meter depend on relationships between nonadjacent events. Linear representations of music do not testify meter directly. Simply by looking at the page, there is no indication that the first and third beats of a measure of 4/iv time are functionally related, equally are the 2nd and fourth beats.

However, when we wrap the musical timeline into a circle, meter becomes much easier to parse. Pairs of metrically related beats are directly contrary one another on the circle. Rotational and reflectional symmetries give strong clues to metrical function generally. For example, this illustration of 2-3 son clave adjusted from Barth (2011) shows an axis of reflective symmetry between the fourth and twelfth beats of the pattern. This symmetry is considerably less obvious when viewed in more conventional notation.

The Groove Pizza adds a layer of dynamic interaction to circular representation. Users can change fourth dimension signatures during playback past adding or removing slices. In this manner, very complex metrical shifts can be performed past complete novices. Furthermore, each rhythm necklace tin be rotated during playback, enabling a rhythmic modularity feature of the most sophisticated Afro-Latin and jazz rhythms. Exploring rotational rhythmic transformation typically requires very sophisticated music-reading and performance skills to understand and execute, just doing and then is effortlessly accessible to Groove Pizza users.

Visualizing swing

We traditionally associate swing with jazz, simply it is omnipresent in American vernacular music: in rock, country, funk, reggae, hip-hop, EDM, then on. For that reason, swing is a standard characteristic of notation software, MIDI sequencers, and drum machines. Yet, while swing is crucial to rhythmic expressiveness, information technology is rarely visualized in any explicit style, in notation or in software interfaces. Sequencers will sometimes show swing by displacing events on the MIDI pianoforte coil, but the user must place those events starting time. The grid itself mostly does not show swing.

The Groove Pizza uses a novel (and to our noesis unprecedented) graphical representation of swing on the background filigree, non but on the musical events. The slices alternately expand and contract in width according to the amount of swing specified. At 0% swing, the wedges are all of uniform width. At 50% swing, the odd-numbered slice in each pair is twice equally long as the following even-numbered slice. Equally the user adjusts the swing slider, the slices dynamically change their width appropriately.

Our swing visualization organization also addresses the issue of whether swing should exist applied to eighth notes or sixteenths. In the jazz era, swing was understood to employ to eighth notes. However, since the 1960s, swing is more than normally applied to sixteenth notes, reflecting a broader shift from eighth note to sixteenth note pulse in American colloquial music. To hear the difference, compare the swung eighth note pulse of "Rockin' Robin" by Bobby Twenty-four hours (1958) with the sixteenth note pulse of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson Five (1969). Electronic music production tools like Ableton Live and Logic default to sixteenth-note swing. Even so, notation programs similar Sibelius, Finale and Noteflight tin only apply swing to eighth notes.

The Groove Pizza supports both 8th and sixteenth swing simply by irresolute the piece labeling. The default labeling scheme is agnostic, simply numbering the slices sequentially from ane. In GP1, users can cull to label a sixteen-piece pizza either as ane measure out of sixteenth notes or 2 measures of 8th notes. The grid looks the aforementioned either way; only the labels change.

Drum kits

With one pulsate sound per ring, the number of sounds available to the user is limited by the number of rings that can reasonably fit on the screen. In my thesis paradigm, we were able to adjust six sounds per "drum kit." GP1 was reduced to five rings, and GP2 has only three rings, prioritizing simplicity over musical versatility.

GP1 offers iii drum kits: Acoustic, Hip-Hop, and Techno. The Acoustic kit uses samples of a real drum kit; the Hip-Hop kit uses samples of the Roland TR-808 drum automobile; and the Techno kit uses samples of the Roland TR-909. GP2 adds two boosted kits: Jazz (an acoustic drum kit played with brushes), and Afro-Latin (congas, bell, and shaker.) Preset patterns automatically load with specific kits selected, but the user is free to alter kits after loading.

In GP1, sounds can exist mixed and matched at wiell, and so the user tin, for example, combine the acoustic kick with the hip-hop snare. In GP2, kits cannot exist customized. A wider diversity of sounds would nowadays a wider variety of sonic choices. However, placing strict limits on the sounds available has its own creative advantage: it eliminates option paralysis and forces users to concentrate on creating interesting patterns, rather than struggling to choose from a long list of sounds.

Information technology became clear in the course of testing that open and closed hello-hats need not operate separate rings, since information technology is non desirable to ever have them sound at the same time. (While drum machines are non jump by the physical limitations of human being drummers, our rhythmic traditions are.) In futurity versions of the GP, we plan to identify closed and open hi-hats together on the same band. Clicking a trounce in the howdy-hat band will place a closed hi-hat; clicking it again volition replace it with an open hi-hat; and a third click will return the beat to silence. We will apply the same mechanic to toggle between high and low cowbells or congas.

Preset patterns

In keeping with the constructivist value of working with accurate cultural materials, the exercises in the Groove Pizza are based on rhythms drawn from actual music. Most of the patterns are breakbeats—drums and percussion sampled from funk, stone and soul recordings that take been widely repurposed in electronic dance and hip-hop music. In that location are likewise generic rock, pop and trip the light fantastic rhythms, as well as an assortment of traditional Afro-Cuban patterns.

The GP1 offers a broad selection of preset patterns. The GP2 uses a smaller subset of these presets.

Breakbeats

• The Winstons, "Amen, Brother" (1969)
• James Brown, "Cold Sweat" (1967)"
• James Brown, "The Funky Drummer" (1970)
• Bobby Byrd, "I Know Yous Got Soul" (1971)
• The Honeydrippers, "Impeach The President" (1973)
• Skull Snaps, "It'south A New Solar day" (1973)
• Joe Tex, "Papa Was Too" (1966)
• Stevie Wonder, "Superstition" (1972)
• Melvin Elation, "Constructed Substitution"(1973)

Afro-Cuban

• Bembé—also known as the "standard bell pattern"
• Rumba clave
• Son clave (3-2)
• Son clave (two-iii)

Pop

• Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean" (1982)
• Boots-northward-cats—a prototypical disco pattern, eastward.m. "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc (1979)
• INXS, "Need Yous This night" (1987)
• Uhnntsss—the standard "iv on the floor" pattern common to disco and electronic dance music

Hip-hop

• Lil Mama, "Lip Gloss" (2008)
• Nas, "Nas Is Similar" (1999)
• Digable Planets, "Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" (1993)
• OutKast, "So Fresh, Then Clean" (2000)
• Audio 2, "Acme Billin'" (1987)

Rock

• Pink Floyd, "Money" (1973)
• Peter Gabriel, "Solisbury Hill" (1977)
• Billy Squier, "The Big Beat out" (1980)
• Aerosmith, "Walk This Way" (1975)
• Queen, "We Will Rock You" (1977)
• Led Zeppelin, "When The Levee Breaks" (1971)

Jazz

• Bossa nova, eastward.g. "The Girl From Ipanima" by Antônio Carlos Jobim (1964)
• Herbie Hancock, "Chameleon" (1973)
• Miles Davis, "It's About That Time" (1969)
• Jazz spang-a-lang—the standard swing ride cymbal pattern
• Jazz waltz—e.g. "My Favorite Things" as performed by John Coltrane (1961)
• Dizzy Gillespie, "Manteca" (1947)
• Horace Silvery, "Song For My Father" (1965)
• Paul Desmond, "Take Five" (1959)
• Herbie Hancock, "Watermelon Homo" (1973)

Mathematical applications

The about substantial new feature of GP2 is "shapes mode." The user can elevate shapes onto the grid and rotate them to create geometric drum patterns: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, and octagon. Placing shapes in this way creates maximally fifty-fifty rhythms that are nearly e'er musically satisfying (Toussaint 2011). For example, on a 16-piece pizza, the pentagon forms rumba or bossa nova clave, while the hexagon creates a tresillo rhythm. As a full general thing, the way that a rhythm "looks" gives insight into the mode it sounds, and vice versa.

Because of the style it uses circumvolve geometry, the Groove Pizza can be used to teach or reinforce the following subjects:

• Fractions
• Ratios and proportional relationships
• Angles
• Polar vs Cartesian coordinates
• Symmetry: rotations, reflections
• Frequency vs elapsing
• Modular arithmetic
• The unit circle in the complex plane

Specific kinds of music can assistance to introduce specific mathematical concepts. For example, Afro-Cuban patterns and other grooves built on hemiola are useful for graphically illustrating the concept of least mutual multiples. When presented with a kick playing every iv slices and a snare playing every iii slices, a student can both see and hear how they will line upward every twelve slices. Bamberger and diSessa (2003) describe the "aha" moment that students have when they grasp this concept in a music context. One student in their study is quoted equally describing the twelve-crush bicycle "pulling" the other ii beats together. Once students grasp least common multiples in a musical context, they have a valuable new inroad into a variety of scientific and mathematical concepts: harmonics in sound analysis, gears, pendulums, tiling patterns, and much else.

In add-on to eighth and sixteenth notes, GP1 users tin as well label the pizza slices as fractions or angles, both Cartesian and polar. Users tin can thereby describe musical concepts in mathematical terms, and vice versa. It is an intriguing coincidence that the polar angle π/sixteen represents a sixteenth annotation. 1 could get even farther with polar mode and utilize it as the unit circumvolve on the complex airplane. From there, lessons could move into powers of e, the relationship betwixt sine and cosine waves, and other more advanced topics. The Groove Pizza could thereby be used to lay the ground work for concepts in electrical engineering, indicate processing, and anything else involving wave mechanics.

Future piece of work

The Groove Pizza does not offering whatever tone controls like duration, pitch, EQ and the like. This choice was due to a combination of expediency and the push to reduce pick paralysis. However, velocity (loudness) control is a loftier-priority time to come characteristic. While nuanced velocity control is non necessary for the artificial aesthetic of electronic dance music, a basic loud/medium/soft toggle would brand the Groove Pizza a more versatile tool.

The next step beyond preset patterns is to offering pulsate programming exercises or challenges. In exercises, users are presented with a blueprint. They may alter this pattern as they see fit by calculation and removing drum hits, and past rotating musical instrument parts inside their respective rings. There are restraints of various kinds, to ensure that the results are appealing and musical-sounding. The restraints are tighter for more basic exercises, and looser for more advanced ones. For example, nosotros might nowadays users with a locked four-on-the-floor kick design, and inquire them to create a satisfying techno beat out using the snares and hi-hats. We also plan to create game-like challenges, where users are given the sound of a beat and must effigy out how to represent it on the circular grid.

The Groove Pizza would be more useful for the purposes of trigonometry and circle geometry if it were presented slightly differently. Presently, the first beat of each design is at twelve o'clock, with playback running clockwise. Nonetheless, angles are unremarkably representing every bit originating at three o'clock and increasing in a counterclockwise direction. To create "math mode," the radial grid would need to be reflected left-to-right and rotated xc degrees.

References

Ankney, Thousand.50. (2012). Alternative representations for musical composition. Visions of Research in Music Educational activity, twenty.

Bamberger, J., & DiSessa, A. (2003). Music As Embodied Mathematics: A Study Of A Mutually Informing Affinity. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, viii(ii), 123–160.

Bamberger, J. (1996). Turning Music Theory On Its Ear. International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, 1: 33-55.

Bamberger, J. (1994). Developing Musical Structures: Going Beyond the Simples. In R. Atlas & M. Cherlin (Eds.), Musical Transformation and Musical Intuition. Ovenbird Press.

Barth, East. (2011). Geometry of Music. In Greenwald, S. and Thomley, J., eds., Essays in Encyclopedia of Mathematics and Social club. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.

Bell, A. (2013). Oblivious Trailblazers: Case Studies of the Role of Recording Applied science in the Music-Making Processes of Apprentice Dwelling house Studio Users. Doctoral dissertation, New York University.

Benadon, F. (2007). A Circular Plot for Rhythm Visualization and Assay. Music Theory Online, Book 13, Issue 3.

Demaine, E.; Gomez-Martin, F.; Meijer, H.; Rappaport, D.; Taslakian, P.; Toussaint, Yard.; Winograd, T.; & Wood, D. (2009). The Altitude Geometry of Music. Computational Geometry 42, 429–454.

Along, J.; Wiggin, K.; & McLean, A. (2010). Unifying Conceptual Spaces: Concept Germination in Musical Artistic Systems. Minds & Machines, twenty:503–532.

Magnusson, T. (2010). Designing Constraints: Composing and Performing with Digital Musical Systems. Computer Music Journal, Volume 34, Number 4, pp. 62 – 73.

Marrington, M. (2011). Experiencing Musical Limerick In The DAW: The Software Interface As Mediator Of The Musical Idea. The Journal on the Art of Tape Production, (5).

Marshall, Due west. (2010). Mashup Poetics as Pedagogical Practice. In Biamonte, N., ed. Pop-Culture Teaching in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube. Lanham, Medico: Scarecrow Printing.

McClary, S. (2004). Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Tardily Twentieth-Century Culture. In Warner, D. ed., Audio Culture. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Monson, I. (1999). Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 43, No. 1, 31-65.

New York Country Learning Standards and Core Curriculum — Mathematics

Ruthmann, A. (2012). Engaging Adolescents with Music and Technology. In Burton, S. (Ed.). Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle Schoolhouse General Music. Lanham, Medico: R&L Education.

Thibeault, Grand. (2011). Wisdom for Music Didactics from the Recording Studio. Full general Music Today, 20 Oct 2011.

Thompson, P. (2012). An Empirical Study Into the Learning Practices and Enculturation of DJs, Turntablists, Hip-Hop and Trip the light fantastic toe Music Producers." Journal of Music, Engineering & Instruction, Volume five, Number ane, 43 – 58.

Toussaint, Thousand. (2013). The Geometry of Musical Rhythm. Cleveland: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

____ (2005). The Euclidean algorithm generates traditional musical rhythms. Proceedings of BRIDGES: Mathematical Connections in Fine art, Music, and Science, Banff, Alberta, Canada, July 31 to August 3, 2005, pp. 47-56.

____ (2004). A comparison of rhythmic similarity measures. Proceedings of ISMIR 2004: 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, October ten-fourteen, 2004, pp. 242-245.

____ (2003). Classification and phylogenetic assay of African ternary rhythm timelines. Proceedings of BRIDGES: Mathematical Connections in Fine art, Music, and Science, University of Granada, Granada, Spain July 23-27, 2003, pp. 25-36.

____ (2002). A mathematical analysis of African, Brazilian, and Cuban clave rhythms. Proceedings of BRIDGES: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science, Townson University, Towson, MD, July 27-29, 2002, pp. 157-168.

Whosampled.com. "The 10 Most Sampled Breakbeats of All Fourth dimension."

Wiggins, J. (2001). Education for musical understanding. Rochester, Michigan: Center for Applied Enquiry in Musical Understanding, Oakland Academy.

Wilkie, M.; Holland, S.; & Mulholland, P. (2010). What Can the Language of Musicians Tell United states of america about Music Interaction Design?" Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, 34-48.

Here'due south what happened in my life as an educator this past semester, and what I have planned for the coming semester.

Montclair Land University Intro To Music Technology

I wonder how much longer "music technology" is going to be as a subject. They don't teach "piano engineering science" or "violin technology." It makes sense to teach specific areas like audio recording or synthesis or signal theory as split up classes. Only "music technology" is such a wide term as to be meaningless. The unspoken assumption is that nosotros're didactics "musical practices involving a computer," but even that is both too big and likewise small to structure a i-semester class around. On the one mitt, every kind of music involves computers now. On the other manus, to focus just on the computer part is like teaching a word processing grade that's somehow separate from learning how to write.

The newness and vagueness of the field of study gives me and my fellow music tech educators wide latitude to define our subject matter. I see my job as providing an introduction to popular production and songwriting. The tools we utilise for the chore at Montclair are mostly GarageBand and Logic, simply I don't spend a lot of time on the mechanics of the software itself. Instead, I teach music: How do you lot express yourself creatively using sample libraries, or MIDI, or field recordings, or pre-existing songs? What kinds of rhythms, harmonies, timbres and structures make sense aesthetically when yous're assembling these materials in the DAW? Where do y'all get ideas? How do you heed to recorded music analytically? Why does Thriller audio so much improve than any other anthology recorded in the eighties? Nosotros cover technical concepts equally they arise in the natural class of producing and listening. My hope is that they'll exist more than relevant and memorable that way.

Having now taught three semesters of Intro to Music Tech at MSU, my format is starting to gel. The students spend most of the semester creating tracks. They do one using but the loops that come with GarageBand, i using only MIDI and software instruments, one that includes a field recording they fabricated with their phones, and so on. I started having them remix each other's tracks this past semester, and it was such a smash hit that I'thousand going to have future classes practice a whole serial of peer remixes.

Montclair is a fairly traditional conservatory. For many students, my class is the only fourth dimension in their higher careers they get to brand music according to their own sensibilities and tastes. It's also normally the only fourth dimension they engage critically with recordings, or electronic dance music, or hip-hop, or popular song forms, or sampling, or mixing and audio processing. I'm glad to exist able to make full these vacuums, merely I wish I had more than one semester to do it in.

Aside from creative music-making, the students do a couple of presentations, one on a song they call back is interesting, and 1 on a topic of their pick. They likewise write blog posts nigh the process of creating their tracks. This final assignment is a persistent obstacle, since no one seems to share my enthusiasm for process documentation. Next semester I'm going to try introducing some of the cooperative/competitive spirit of the peer remixes by having them write reviews of each other's tracks. Perchance that will get them to invest their writing with the aforementioned inventiveness they put into the music assignments.

Montclair State Advanced Estimator Music Limerick

This past autumn I got to teach my kickoff avant-garde grade, and it went amazingly well. Nosotros used Ableton Alive, my DAW of choice, and the guys (it was all guys) banged out tracks at a rapid prune for the entire semester. As with the intro form, I spent most of the time on the creative process, and dealt with Ableton functionality and audio engineering topics as they came upward.

Each assignment came with some kind of tight technical restriction, merely no stylistic restrictions. Every bit with the intro course, the advanced dudes did tracks using only existing loops, only MIDI, and plant sound. They did peer remixing and cocky remixing as well. The two hardest and about interesting assignments were to create a new track using only samples of an existing track, and and so to create a new track using merely a unmarried v-2d Duke Ellington sample. (These assignments were inspired heavily past the Disquiet Junto.) The more tightly I constrained the students, the more than ingenuity they displayed. Listen for yourself:

As with the intro form, I tried to accept the avant-garde dudes document their process with blog posts. Every bit with the intro class, they showed cipher involvement. In the future, I'll have to get more creative with the writing component. Also, I'd like to not have the grade be entirely male person.

NYU Music Instruction Technology Practicum

This class is meant to be a grounding in music tech for hereafter music teachers. I'm even more time-constrained at NYU than at Montclair, and I teach in a regular classroom rather than a reckoner lab. While my class time at Montclair is mostly devoted to music-making, at NYU I'm forced to exercise more lectures, demos and listening sessions. It is very far from ideal. I have no thought how NYU can charge so much money without offering such a basic-seeming amenity as a room with computers in it for the music students. However, NYU does have i reward over Montclair as a teaching environment, which is that I can hold a couple of class sessions in an extremely fancy recording studio.

I mostly have the same approach at NYU equally I do at Montclair, and utilize most of the aforementioned assignments. The major difference is that the NYU kids do a disquisitional listening projection, where they pick a recording and graph out its musical structure and spatial layout. Information technology's a difficult exercise, but an invaluable one. I did it in grad school, and information technology improved my belittling listening abilities significantly. We used to do the same assignment at Montclair, merely the students were really not into it, like to the point of refusing to do information technology, so sadly we had to drib it from the syllabus. I hope we tin can find a way to reinstate it.

This past semester, the majority of my NYU kids were music business organization majors, which was pretty great. They came in with less musical experience than the pedagogy majors–sometimes with none at all–but they had less to unlearn, and they threw themselves confidently into producing tracks. This coming semester I have a bunch more music business concern kids. I'k attracting them because my class is the only i at Steinhardt that does intro-level creative music making in the pop idiom. I'm clearly filling a vacuum, and I'1000 hoping that I'chiliad just the thin edge of the wedge, both for my ain sake and the future music educators of NYU.

Interface designs

The NYU Music Experience Design Lab is baking educational activity into a suite of creative music making and learning tools. Every bit my friend and colleague Adam Bell likes to say, purchasers of a computer are purchasing a music education. We're trying to brand that didactics a better and more than enjoyable i, whether our users are in formal classroom settings or playing around on their ain. Y'all tin read about the lab's various projects here. My own contributions are largely conceptual, though I've also devoted a lot of attending to making useful and inspiring presets.

The Ed Sullivan Fellows Program

This winter, the MusEDLab is launching a brand new initiative, mentoring a group of young people from challenging circumstances in music and technology. I'll be education the music side, doing a custom-tailored version of my intro class syllabus. Sullivan Fellows will also work with my colleagues in the lab on programming and design projects. This summertime, we'll have a showcase consequence as part of the 2016 Bear upon Conference. The goal is to aid the Fellows get launched in careers in music and/or technology. I'll exist writing a lot more about this in the coming weeks.

Online courses with Soundfly

The MusEDLab is working with a music ed startup on some new interactive online courses. The start is called Music Theory For Chamber Producers, and we expect to launch next month. I wrote a lot of the materials, and am appearing in some videos. Soundfly has ace designers, animators and programmers, so expect a rich multimedia experience. More on this equally it gets closer.

Everything else

For the past few years, I've been a teaching artist with NYU's IMPACT workshop. Below, you tin can see some participants making beats on an iPad. The workshop is a crash course non merely in music, merely in theater, dance, video, and the intersection of all of the above. I'm still very much figuring out my role in the whole thing, but so is everyone involved.

I continue to teach private lessons, do freelance product and composition, do some consulting, write for online publications, and generally keep hustling for gigs. If you'd similar to have me do any of these things, be in touch.

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Source: https://wp.nyu.edu/musedlab/tag/groove-pizza/page/2/

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