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If you live in the U.S., statistics show that you like the above picture.
I had way too many statistics classes in graduate school; 24 semester hours! Along the way I learned something about the destructive force quantitative statistical methods could wield if they fell into the wrong hands.
Some musical “artists” actually sought to materialize the best and worst of our musical tastes.
The most unwanted music?, –if you dare!!
Download The most unwanted music?
The most wanted music?
Download Most wanted music?
This is a visual example of the damage statisticians can do when they survey the general public to determine what people like.
Slate Magazine’s William Weir made some good points with Tuesday’s Music Box column: Read the rest of this entry »
For beginners, watching your hands is crucial; –remember learning your first G chord on guitar? But some of us never get over this habit of visual finger/hand placement. It’s really hard for beginning keyboardists; they’ve got as many as 88 different locations to memorize (or more, if they’re on a Bosendorfer). I do use my peripheral vision for extreme things (jumps of 2 octaves or more) , but for everyday playing, I don’t need to place my hands using my eyesight. In fact, just give me dark sunglasses and let me find the groove. I’m speaking to drummers, too. You don’t need to look at everything you hit.
Beyond the break there are 2 videos that prove my point. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m honored to be the guest blogger today at www.guitarflame.com! So stop by and check it out; it’s a cool place to hang out!
Van Canto = Hero-metal a cappella (not counting the drummer)!
Power chords are interval distances taken from a triad (the backbone of tonal music); –i.e. the root and the fifth. I always think of bagpipes when I think of power chords, although the highland bagpipe’s drones are tuned to octave A’s, not a perfect fifth (octaves and perfect fifths are a specific musical distance apart).
There’s true energy in the interval; energy enough to hear and judge the temper of the intervals (temper = how equal the step sizes are). The piano tuner I apprenticed with during my college years taught me to tune a tempered octave by equalizing the beating you can hear between a P4 and P5(perfect 4th and perfect 5th). It’s quite easy to hear if the P4 beats are much slower or faster than the p5 (but you should mute 2 of the 3 string of a piano’s notes before trying this, else you could get too much interference to tell if motion is present).
So what’s this got to do with choirs? Hang on–…I’m getting to that.
Plainsong was originally sung in unison, but by the middle of the 9th century, music historians tell us that it was common for people to sing songs in parallel P4ths, P5ths, and P8ths. Power Chord harmony!
It wasn’t until the 1300s that folks got tired of power chords and started to phase it out.
Imagine that! Folks in the Dark Ages got tired of power chords…funny stuff!
Actually, power chords in vocal music never really died. And this style of voicing is re-emerging and becoming fashionable.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704683,00.html
(thanks ypulse via Listenerd)
And there’s a new movie,too (which I just ordered for my classes.).
You can check it out here:
Power chords for choirs.
Rock on!
3 observations from the net:
1. Sound Quality is down.
Listenerd posted a great article link from RollingStone about MP3 sound quality the other day and I heartily recommend it:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity
2. Compression is up.
After you’ve read the article, check out Turn Me Up! (dot) org for more info on the subject of loudness wars.
3. People aren’t really listening to the music anyway!
Finish off your adventure with Collision Detection’s observation on “Why Audiophiles are Dying Off” (thanks Listenerd).
Hypebot found this video somewhere and it makes me want to post a Zappa quote…
From another blog, check out this Radiohead promotion summary post here:
The public no longer respects the duty and role musicians and other artists fulfill in society. They don’t see the need to pay us for our work, just like the industry didn’t when it started ripping us off decades ago.
And that is why out of all Radiohead’s fans, only 38% didn’t steal from the band, and just because they offered the choice doesn’t make it right.
Then I remembered a Jonathan Savage post that you probably missed and thought it would be appropriate here:
Creativity - in the form of the arts, music and thinking more imaginatively about subjects - are an important part of an all-round education, says the select committee report. But there have been fears that schools, under pressure to focus on academic standards, could be neglecting such areas. And the report by MPs concludes that more should be done to protect these areas of creativity.’
A full report of their deliberations can be downloaded here.
Creativity gets no respect unless its marketed; if we continue to give it away, we devalue it. Conversely, if it is in short supply, there will be high demand. This is generally described as “law” in the field of economics. Remember when people give away things at grand openings? Radiohead is a marketing experiment. At least I hope that’s all it is.
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