Ethan Hein's blog - Latest Comments

Re: Inside Morton Subotnick’s studio

aunt_dracula — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:19:15 -0000

Wow! I have been a Morton Subotnick fan since being introduced to the Nonesuch guide to electronic music and digging up some of his records. Cool to see into his studio and this video is rad!

Re: Inside Morton Subotnick’s studio

Lux_seeker — Tue, 08 May 2012 06:34:02 -0000

I have been a Morton Subotnick fan since I started getting interested in electronic music in high school and a record store employee recommended "Sidewinder". Love the inside look at the studio and Subotnick. Interesting that he plays classical music and uses Max 4 Live and of course the incomparable 200e.

Re: Björk thought she could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of her

Me — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:46:57 -0000

The whole 'only major artist who understands that rocknroll is over' thing is pretty fucking deep. XXXXXXXXXX

Re: What is the appeal of atonality and serialism in music?

ethanhein — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:50:49 -0000

I guess I should have specified that *Western* listeners are always looking for a tonal center. I don't really know what goes on in the minds of people in other cultures.

I know Serialism has a rule system, but it's not a good one. Rule systems like diatonic harmony and the blues form emerged over time because they were reliable tools for causing people pleasure. Serialism is a rule system for its own sake, designed to make a political point about equality, not for its musical results. I have yet to meet anyone who actually enjoys that stuff, though I know plenty of academics who feel obliged to pretend to.

Re: What is the appeal of atonality and serialism in music?

Friedmonkey2003 — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:55:19 -0000

I entirely disagree with your description of not only Serial music, but of the nature of human perceptual faculties in general. The mind is not constantly working to find tonal centers because the notion of tonality is not something which is in-born in any person. Different cultures have entirely different systems of music, many of which don't even employ anything which could be called tonality (or even tones at all). Although any blanket statement about any musical genre is always going to be inadequate in some way, Serialism is simply a different system of music which "works" by other rules than tonality. And by this I don't mean the composition is being "governed" by a row (which it may be), but that the way that one perceives and conceives of the music operates on a totally different level. It's like reading Japanese vs. English: both use vocal sounds to communicate things, but the use of those sounds and the way that they are ordered and parsed is entirely different.

Re: Encoding emotion

Adam Adolfo Nakhla-Thometz — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:37:27 -0000

I understand your skepticism but we have to start somewhere, right? Starting with the full on complexity would be WAY too difficult. It's better to take these things one baby step at a time.

Re: Visualizing music

ethanhein — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:08:55 -0000

Good point. I think the convergence between interface and visualization is exciting. Glad you're enjoying the blog.

Re: Visualizing music

Jp — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 04:32:04 -0000

Hello!
Great article. What about recent iPad/Android apps which in a way are both visualization and interfaces? Some examples: Nodebeat, Reactable, Orphion... there are surely others.

Also, great blog!
Thanks!

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

ethanhein — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:32:14 -0000

This is true. If anyone reading is a Max for Live expert, would you care to weigh in on the state of the field?

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

Alex McLean — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:00:31 -0000

This paper was published in 2005, Max for Live was released four years later in 2009, that explains why it wasn't mentioned. :)

Much has happened in the past seven years, I gave up performing with Perl a while ago, now I work with terse domain specific languages embedded in Haskell. There are now a lot of other languages made for live coding, for example:

http://impromptu.moso.com.au/g...
http://overtone.github.com/
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/
https://vimeo.com/ixi

Lots more info here:
http://toplap.org/

Cheers!

alex

Re: From my SoundCloud stats

Brian Gunthorpe — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:14:42 -0000

That is most excellent Ethan!!!! The branch extends far!

Re: Why do people like Girl Talk?

Mattfivethirtynine — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:09:37 -0000

My biggest problem with girl talk is that he only uses the most sexist racist homophobic crude ignorent rappers and uses them as shock value when mixed with tender spirital White people music. But I think that it's because he's using pop music and that's the way pop music and the record companies like black men portrayed

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

ethanhein — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:20:30 -0000

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

VinceChen3 — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 02:47:38 -0000

Apache is really something different. I never knew he was such an influential character to hip-hop music.

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

mchuge — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:22:56 -0000

You may be interested in the work of Dr. Dan Lloyd who is mapping brain waves to music. http://www.kickstarter.com/pro... (that project has received its initial funding)

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

Jneilnyc — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:08:40 -0000

Intro to Max4Live
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

MaxForLiveInC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Max For Live Melodic Step Sequencer (and controller interface)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Using Max4Live to modulate parameters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

CSound4Live Grainulator under OSC control
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

Jneilnyc — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:45:58 -0000

I don't play out with Live so I can't speak to that, but I would assume the answer is yes. The beauty of the whole arrangement is that you can embed Max patchers and csound scores just as you would any other clips, and trigger them as part of Live's timeline or on-the fly. Going back to the programming metaphor, it's like taking advantage of the ease-of-use of Perl, while still being able to have subroutines in java or C, or even to shell out to system calls. And with Max4Live (which is the glue that enables all three to work together) you can go much deeper than that and have patchers that access and modify the Live environment itself in response to algorithms or user actions.

I love being able to stick "randomizing" elements into mixes without having to code the whole thing in Max, and while I've only just begun to play with CSound4Live, it's appealing to have access to csound instrument creation without having to do an entire score in code.

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

ethanhein — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:33:26 -0000

Absolutely right. I thought about bringing this up, but the authors were treating Live and Max/MSP as separate entities, so I figured I'd follow their lead. Also, I don't know enough about Max For Live to be able to talk intelligently about it. Do people live code with it the way they improvise with regular Ableton? Is there some Youtube video I can check out?

Re: Programming languages as musical instruments

Jneilnyc — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:24:19 -0000

Ableton Live is hardly "(comparatively) inflexible", given that one can use Max4Live and CSound4Live to embed the graphical programming of Max/MSP and the textual programming of csound into a single composition/performance.

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Bilbaena — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 02:36:16 -0000

Some good info on here. Apache is funkiest!

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Colton Graves — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:28:45 -0000

Apache has definitely had a HUGE impact on hip-hop, a lot bigger than I had originally thought. It's nice to see the connections made here!

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Hannah — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 23:41:59 -0000

I didn't realize how much influence Apache had on the hip hop genre, very interesting to see all the songs it influenced.

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Henry — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:03:54 -0000

Great blog. Learned a lot.

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Conner — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:48:43 -0000

Awesome blog. I had no clue how much influence Apache has had. Nas is legit.

Re: Apache makes you go hmmm

Merran Pearson — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:23:17 -0000

I had never heard the song "Things That Make You Go Hmmm.." Was nice to see a great song using Apache.