The Milli-Vanilli of the Olympics?

The New York Times has an account from the post-performance world of music education: at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a central moment featured a young girl singing (who, it turns out, wasn’t actually singing. A good read, with this great quote:
By Tuesday, the Chinese media had already pounced on the story, instigating a [...]

Sasha Frere-Jones on Auto-Tune

A great article that gets at Auto-Tune and some larger issues around recording and the artificial/real world that recording gives us. The closing paragraphs are, as often with Frere-Jones, magnificent:
Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup [...]

Nine Inch Nails

Yet another story that looks at the possible futures for music in a digital age. Link below this quote:
Mr. Reznor has no global solution for how to sustain a long-term career as a recording musician, much less start one, when listeners take free digital music for granted. “It’s all out there,” he added. “I don’t [...]

The $42,000 piano

Technology writer and former Broadway musician David Pogue has a review of a rather extravagant gadget:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html?ex=1366084800&en=ae4d2bbe8a2fa005&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Savin’ it!

A great article regarding the new problem of saving, archiving, and organizing digital data. Incredibly, the amount of digital information in the world is expected to increase 10-fold in the time you’re here as a student. Here’s my favorite quote regarding some of the complexity:
“There might be 100 versions of a report on a company’s [...]

Technologies of composition

While we are working with technologies that allow composing (Audacity, GarageBand, notation software) the industry is also working on new technologies that allow and support composing.
Microsoft has a new technology, “My Song” which appears to be in a demo/beta phase. The program will create plausible chords to a melody sung by the user. Enjoy the [...]

Politics on the web

I hope you all voted today!
Henry Jenkins, in his book Convergence Culture (which we may read some of later this semester) talks about how democratic politics is changing in the modern, digital world.
A great project with students could be looking at political ads on the web and talking about, analyzing, and critiquing the music. Most [...]

Copyright followup: Stanford and Berkeley

Here’s an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how Stanford and UC Berkeley are penalizing students who share copywritten content without permission (Stanford will disconnect your internet connection and fine you up to $1000). One of the reasons for the program is that they want something that will be noticed by students who don’t [...]

NYTimes on Rick Rubin

The New York Times has a great long feature about the music producer Rick Rubin (co-founder of Def Jam, producer of many known pop artists). The article not only covers Rick Rubin, it also covers some of the upheaval in the record industry, and some of the possible solutions that are being explored (Rubin has [...]

What music courses/subjects/units could we offer to attract all students?

In class, we talked about how the first reading pointed out that only around 12% of students participate in performance-based music programs. Matt raised the question, “What class could we offer that would appeal to all students?”
Please comment. Note: I’m not interested in a course that would merely be popular (e.g. “Let’s all watch MTV”); [...]