kimberlyyeo010198

From the safe distance of a composer with an armchair appreciation for science, I'm something of a fan of the neuroscience of music. It's really exciting stuff and my impression is that we're only beginning to learn about it. Here are some aspects of music that I'd like — as a composer — neuroscience to tell us more about; as music if the temporal art par excellence, it's not surprising that they have everything to do with how we process events in time: 1. The two irreversible arrows of music: in pitch and in time. Inverting a sequence of pitches creates only a weak equivalence, indeed an equivalence which deteriorates as one moves towards extremes. And in time, a reversal of a sequence, last-on-first-out, is also only weakly equivalent. 2. The perceptual "borderlands" between parameters: between pitch and timbre or between form and rhythm or rhythm and pitch, including such phenomena as interference beating*. 3. The "chunking" of musical m...

A nice column by Kevin Drum on the dangers of multi-tasking, here . It's no surprise to learn that most people, when attempting to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, don't perform those tasks very well. This can be an annoyance — I don't enjoy conversing with someone in person who is social-media-ing away at the same time via one or more electronic devices —, or unfortunate — for the student who is expected to know the stuff on the lecture he missed because he was busy checking his email —, or downright dangerous (cell phone, autobahn.) It's too bad that more people haven't picked up on something that musicians have known for a long while: mastery of counterpoint is wonderful, but rare, and most of us spend our entire lives as musicians working at hearing more. The great contrapuntal virtuosi (say Bach, Berlioz, and Ives, to mention three of the best, but stylistically and formally very different composers) form a preciously small company, and as wild as ea...

This study of Shakespeare's linguistic innovations — neologisms, unorthodox syntax, etc. — and the brain is exciting stuff and has, AFAIC, everything to do with compositional innovation and experiment in music. As with Shakespeare, I strongly suspect that every major innovator in music has done things with sounds or their context that make the brain work more than usual and it is precisely that stimulation that keeps this music worth returning to again and again. I also think that many of the methods, often game-like, of the Oulipo in literature, the surrealists in literature and the visual arts, and many composers, particularly experimentalists, are designed as efficient means for getting right into that more-stimulated zone, often enstranging the familiar through even the slightest shifts in the selection or character of materials or their order in time or space.

Tutankhamun's trumpet was lifted from the Cairo Museum and recovered days later in the Cairo Metro. Be sure to listen to the sound sample of the old BBC broadcast.

As the last hardware form of commodified recorded music, that optical medium known as the audio compact disk (forward: "cd"), makes its slow exit from the marketplace, it's probably appropriate to take a moment to consider the fact that this creates a serious hole in the list of reliable gift object. Even a notorious recording skeptic like myself has been known to give and receive — and gladly, always gladly — too many of those little plastic discs in their plastic boxes (or, later, cardboard covers). And said cd does have some real advantages over the traditional alternatives: not everyone wears ties, drinks scotch, appreciates a good wine, cigars are out of style, none of my acquaintances is yet old enough to golf, let alone have a tangible use for golf balls, and let's face it, when uncertain about the recipient's tastes, choosing a piece of music seems less risk-prone than a book. While I have never become particularly adept at rescuing a suffocating cd fr...

Composers, as craftspeople, tend to overemphasize the professional, the formal, the finished, and the perfected. However, a lot of useful and valuable music-making is not professional and not yet formal or finished, let alone perfected, and this emphasis can often be a distraction from opportunities for music-making — indeed most music-making — in situations, environments and on occasions which may well be informal, provisional, and yes, (cheerfully) far-from-perfect. New music, in order to thrive, has got to go wide and deep into our musical culture, an established if dynamic presence, emphasizing not only the most prestigious occasions and institutions and requiring only the most virtuoso musicians. This means music for amateurs, music for children, music for pedagogy, and music for private use as well as civic and institutional functions. Fortunately, we have some very good models of composers writing pieces designed to reach wider sets of players and audiences which are nevert...

From a review of the new television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones : At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone? —and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style.