Aram Sinnreich

MediaCon Panel with Trevor Pinch & DJ Spooky (audio)

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I. 

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

ExtendingPlay_Keynote_Sinnreich_Pinch_Miller

 

 

Aram on the Sundance Channel's "Love Lust" [video]

A couple weeks ago, I was interviewed pretty extensively for the "social networks" episode of the Sundance Channel's show "Love Lust." As the promo video below shows, it strikes a nice balance between education and entertainment, with a bit of a bias toward the latter.

You can download the full episode from iTunes here: http://bit.ly/aramonsundance

Video of my keynote at World's Fair Use Day 2011

Yesterday, I gave a keynote presentation based on "Mashed Up" at World's Fair Use Day, hosted by Public Knowledge. The video of the talk (introduced by my former NYU student, Katy Tasker, a PK staffer), is now available on UStream, as are the other excellent panels and presentations.

(The slides from the presentation can be accessed online here: http://bit.ly/aramwfud)

Posted at 19:01 in Aesthetic Theory, Appropriation, Art and Technology, Books, Communication Policy, Congitive/Neuropsych, Cultural Studies, DIY, Education, Free Software, Friends, Genre, Style and Taste, Hacking, Intellectual Property, Media Ownership, Music, Music History, Music Industry, Musicology, Network Society, personal, Politricks, Popular Culture, Remix Culture, Resistant Aesthetic Practices, Subcultures, viral video, work | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Five years ago, I taught a class I loved at USC called "Music as Communication." I've substantially revamped the syllabus, and am now teaching "Musical Cultures and Industries" to my Rutgers undergrads this Spring.

Below is a draft of the syllabus. I welcome your comments.

1/18: Introduction

1/25: I Am What I Play: Music and Identity

• Turnbull, C. M. (1968). The Forest People. Chapter 4, pp 73-93.
• Lipsitz, G. (1990). Cruising around the historical bloc: postmodern and popular music in East Los Angeles. In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 29, pp. 371-388

OPTIONAL:

• Mingus, C. (1971). Beneath the Underdog. New York: Vintage. Chapter 31, pp. 283-304.

 2/1: Blinding You With Science: What Makes Music Work?

• Levitin, D. This is Your Brain on Music. Chapters 1 & 3
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 4

2/8: The Song Remains the Same: Where Music Comes From

• D'Olivet, F. (1997). The Secret Lore of Music (J. Godwin, trans.). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Chapter 4.
• Dylan, B. (2004). Chronicles, Volume One. Chapter 5.
• Carter, S. (2010). Jay-Z: Decoded, pp. 22-31; 54-59
• Demers, J. (2006). Steal This Music. Chapter 2

2/15: A Love Supreme: Music and Spirituality

• Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia, Chapters 5-6, pp. 29-44)
• Berendt, J.-E. (1983). The World is Sound: Nada Brahma (Insla Verla, trans.). Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Chapter 11, pp. 173-182
• Shaw, G. B. (1990). “A Messiah for Heathens” in J. Sullivan (ed.), Words on Music. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. pp. 76-79
  
  OPTIONAL:
• d'Olivet, Chapter 6-7, pp. 94-109

2/22: Babylon Burning: Music and Politics

Guest: Vivien Goldman, Veteran Punk Journalist

• Goldman, V. (2006). The Book of Exodus. Chapter 9.
• Scherzinger, M., & Smith, S. (2007). From blatant to latent protest (and back again): on the politics of theatrical spectacle in Madonna's ‘American Life’. Popular Music, 26(2), 211-29.
• Crist, S. A. (2009). Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics. The Journal of Musicology, 26(2), pp. 133-174.

3/1: Music Industry, Side A: 20^th Century Lockdown

• Caves, R. E. (2002) Creative Industries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapters 3 & 9 &18 (music sections thereof), pp. 61-67, 146-160, 286-296
• Dannen, F. (1990). Hit men: power brokers and fast money inside the music business. New York: Times Books. Chapter 1, pp. 3-17.
• Albini, S. (1997). The Problem of Music. In Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.) Commodify your dissent: salvos from the Baffler. New York: Norton. pp. 164-176.

3/8: Music Industry, Side B: 21^st Century Freakout

Guest: [name redacted], VP, VH1

• Sinnreich, A. (2011). Written testimony in Arista Records v. Lime Group.
• Charnas, D. (2010). The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Chapter 8.

SPRING BREAK

3/22: FIELD TRIP: TBA

 Take-home Midterm Due

3/29: Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Music and Race

• Kun, J. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Chapter 2.
• Cateforis, T. Performing the Avant-Garde Groove: Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave. American Music, 22(4), 564-588.
• Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. Chapter 8.

OPTIONAL

• Saul, S. (2003). Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. By Scott Saul. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapter 2, pp. 61-96

4/5: I Wanna Be a Macho Man: Music, Gender and Sexuality

• Frank, G. (2007). Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15(2), pp. 276-306
• Ehrenreich, et al. (1992). Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant Consumer Subculture? In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Peter Watrous (1994). Why Women Remain At the Back of the Bus. New York Times
• Von Bingen, H. (1994). The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (J. L. Baird & R. K. Ehrman, trans.). New York: Oxford. Letter # 23, pp. 76-80.

4/12: Do You Believe in Bed Intruders? Music, Authenticity and Technology

• Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill. Chapter: “The Grain of the Voice,” pp. 179-189
• Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past. Chapter 5.
• Auner, J. (2003). Sing it for me: Posthuman ventriloquism in recent popular music. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128, 98-122.

4/19: Two Turntables and a Microphone: Mixing and Mashing

• Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. University of Massachusetts Press.
• New York Times, 2011. The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up.

4/26: Conclusion: Listening Party

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

There seems to be little question that thought-reading machines -- once the exclusive province of science fiction -- are now becoming a viable technology. Although the concept immediately calls up the worst imaginable dystopian nightmares of ultra-Orwellian, networked global mind surveillance for some of us, the press has mostly covered the technology with a "gee-whiz, what won't they think of next" angle. News stories primarily consist of feel-good tales of paraplegics remotely controlling computer cursors and digital prostheses, and torture-free detention centers where the awful truth is sucked painlessly from the minds of terrorism suspects.

But there's something even more deeply unsettling about the new edge of banality creeping into these fantasies. According to the latest version of the story, these amazing new technologies will allow us to change the volume or channel of our TV sets without us having to exert all of the energy it takes to hit a remote control with our thumbs.

Really? That's it? You create a helmet that reads thoughts, and sell it as a souped up TV-remote-skullcap? What's next, a time machine you can use to find a parking space during street-cleaning hour?

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.

As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.

There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.

I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.

Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.

Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.

I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.

If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.

Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.

According to Typeanalyzer.com, this blog is completely cerebral, unintuitive, non-idealistic and unfeeling. And to think I was worried at seeming too starry-eyed over Obama...

No one who really knows me would ever recognize me in this description (right, guys? right?):

The analysis indicates that the author of
http://aramsinnreich.typepad.com
is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

One of my arguments about configurability is that it exposes cognitive processes that were once private and internal into the harsh (and/or nurturing) light of public scrutiny. Back in ye olden times, a composer would hear a bunch of influences, integrate and assemble those influences inside his skull, and expose us to the results. Now, we can listen live as this process happens, and even watch a DJ drag and drop samples and effects into Ableton Live.

The industrial side of the equation has a similar story arc. Once upon a time, we could buy a CD or vinyl record, and imagine what each of the parts sounded like on their own (apparently, this is part of the reason nonmusicians like to smoke pot and listen to music -- it allows them to hear the parts separately the way musicians do). Nowadays, musicians will often post the isolated component tracks (e.g. vocals, drums, guitar) to the internet, and invite fans to remix them (as Radiohead did recently).

Well, my crazy composer friend Scott Pinkmountain has taken things to the proverbial next level. He's a music analyst over at Pandora, and he's just produced a fascinating podcast episode for the site where he narrates his compositional decisions while he pulls the tracks of a song apart and reassembles them.

It's really entertaining stuff. Give it a listen.

New Syllabus: Musical Cultures & Industries

Five years ago, I taught a class I loved at USC called "Music as Communication." I've substantially revamped the syllabus, and am now teaching "Musical Cultures and Industries" to my Rutgers undergrads this Spring.

Below is a draft of the syllabus. I welcome your comments.

1/18: Introduction

1/25: I Am What I Play: Music and Identity

• Turnbull, C. M. (1968). The Forest People. Chapter 4, pp 73-93.
• Lipsitz, G. (1990). Cruising around the historical bloc: postmodern and popular music in East Los Angeles. In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 29, pp. 371-388

OPTIONAL:

• Mingus, C. (1971). Beneath the Underdog. New York: Vintage. Chapter 31, pp. 283-304.

 2/1: Blinding You With Science: What Makes Music Work?

• Levitin, D. This is Your Brain on Music. Chapters 1 & 3
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 4

2/8: The Song Remains the Same: Where Music Comes From

• D'Olivet, F. (1997). The Secret Lore of Music (J. Godwin, trans.). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Chapter 4.
• Dylan, B. (2004). Chronicles, Volume One. Chapter 5.
• Carter, S. (2010). Jay-Z: Decoded, pp. 22-31; 54-59
• Demers, J. (2006). Steal This Music. Chapter 2

2/15: A Love Supreme: Music and Spirituality

• Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia, Chapters 5-6, pp. 29-44)
• Berendt, J.-E. (1983). The World is Sound: Nada Brahma (Insla Verla, trans.). Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Chapter 11, pp. 173-182
• Shaw, G. B. (1990). “A Messiah for Heathens” in J. Sullivan (ed.), Words on Music. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. pp. 76-79
  
  OPTIONAL:
• d'Olivet, Chapter 6-7, pp. 94-109

2/22: Babylon Burning: Music and Politics

Guest: Vivien Goldman, Veteran Punk Journalist

• Goldman, V. (2006). The Book of Exodus. Chapter 9.
• Scherzinger, M., & Smith, S. (2007). From blatant to latent protest (and back again): on the politics of theatrical spectacle in Madonna's ‘American Life’. Popular Music, 26(2), 211-29.
• Crist, S. A. (2009). Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics. The Journal of Musicology, 26(2), pp. 133-174.

3/1: Music Industry, Side A: 20^th Century Lockdown

• Caves, R. E. (2002) Creative Industries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapters 3 & 9 &18 (music sections thereof), pp. 61-67, 146-160, 286-296
• Dannen, F. (1990). Hit men: power brokers and fast money inside the music business. New York: Times Books. Chapter 1, pp. 3-17.
• Albini, S. (1997). The Problem of Music. In Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.) Commodify your dissent: salvos from the Baffler. New York: Norton. pp. 164-176.

3/8: Music Industry, Side B: 21^st Century Freakout

Guest: [name redacted], VP, VH1

• Sinnreich, A. (2011). Written testimony in Arista Records v. Lime Group.
• Charnas, D. (2010). The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Chapter 8.

SPRING BREAK

3/22: FIELD TRIP: TBA

 Take-home Midterm Due

3/29: Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Music and Race

• Kun, J. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Chapter 2.
• Cateforis, T. Performing the Avant-Garde Groove: Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave. American Music, 22(4), 564-588.
• Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. Chapter 8.

OPTIONAL

• Saul, S. (2003). Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. By Scott Saul. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapter 2, pp. 61-96

4/5: I Wanna Be a Macho Man: Music, Gender and Sexuality

• Frank, G. (2007). Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15(2), pp. 276-306
• Ehrenreich, et al. (1992). Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant Consumer Subculture? In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Peter Watrous (1994). Why Women Remain At the Back of the Bus. New York Times
• Von Bingen, H. (1994). The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (J. L. Baird & R. K. Ehrman, trans.). New York: Oxford. Letter # 23, pp. 76-80.

4/12: Do You Believe in Bed Intruders? Music, Authenticity and Technology

• Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill. Chapter: “The Grain of the Voice,” pp. 179-189
• Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past. Chapter 5.
• Auner, J. (2003). Sing it for me: Posthuman ventriloquism in recent popular music. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128, 98-122.

4/19: Two Turntables and a Microphone: Mixing and Mashing

• Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. University of Massachusetts Press.
• New York Times, 2011. The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up.

4/26: Conclusion: Listening Party

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

Mechanized telekinesis strikes again -- this time, as a souped-up TV remote

There seems to be little question that thought-reading machines -- once the exclusive province of science fiction -- are now becoming a viable technology. Although the concept immediately calls up the worst imaginable dystopian nightmares of ultra-Orwellian, networked global mind surveillance for some of us, the press has mostly covered the technology with a "gee-whiz, what won't they think of next" angle. News stories primarily consist of feel-good tales of paraplegics remotely controlling computer cursors and digital prostheses, and torture-free detention centers where the awful truth is sucked painlessly from the minds of terrorism suspects.

But there's something even more deeply unsettling about the new edge of banality creeping into these fantasies. According to the latest version of the story, these amazing new technologies will allow us to change the volume or channel of our TV sets without us having to exert all of the energy it takes to hit a remote control with our thumbs.

Really? That's it? You create a helmet that reads thoughts, and sell it as a souped up TV-remote-skullcap? What's next, a time machine you can use to find a parking space during street-cleaning hour?

New research: Playing music synchs your brainwaves

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.

As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.

There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.

Broken industries, fractured lives

I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.

Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.

Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.

I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.

If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.

Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.

Robot calls me an unfeeling, pointy-headed jerk

According to Typeanalyzer.com, this blog is completely cerebral, unintuitive, non-idealistic and unfeeling. And to think I was worried at seeming too starry-eyed over Obama...

No one who really knows me would ever recognize me in this description (right, guys? right?):

The analysis indicates that the author of
http://aramsinnreich.typepad.com
is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Getting inside a composer's brain

One of my arguments about configurability is that it exposes cognitive processes that were once private and internal into the harsh (and/or nurturing) light of public scrutiny. Back in ye olden times, a composer would hear a bunch of influences, integrate and assemble those influences inside his skull, and expose us to the results. Now, we can listen live as this process happens, and even watch a DJ drag and drop samples and effects into Ableton Live.

The industrial side of the equation has a similar story arc. Once upon a time, we could buy a CD or vinyl record, and imagine what each of the parts sounded like on their own (apparently, this is part of the reason nonmusicians like to smoke pot and listen to music -- it allows them to hear the parts separately the way musicians do). Nowadays, musicians will often post the isolated component tracks (e.g. vocals, drums, guitar) to the internet, and invite fans to remix them (as Radiohead did recently).

Well, my crazy composer friend Scott Pinkmountain has taken things to the proverbial next level. He's a music analyst over at Pandora, and he's just produced a fascinating podcast episode for the site where he narrates his compositional decisions while he pulls the tracks of a song apart and reassembles them.

It's really entertaining stuff. Give it a listen.