I'm working through Wallace Berry's Structural Functions in Music, which has become a staple of the hapless graduate student's reading list—at least judging by the $5 price for one of several used copies floating around Amazon's marketplace.  The prose is purple (Wallace Berry), and at times incomprehensible; the man loves listing synonymous adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs to extend, prolong, embellish, and expand his prose... if you know what I mean.

His summary of thoughts on tonality on pages 169-183 is among the most condensed and lucid thinking I've encountered in the book.  In particular, by formulating a theory of tonality which embraces as many different musical surface features as possible, Berry manages to point out some potential uniting features of cross-cultural and trans-historic works.  I suppose it boils down to tension-and-release, but still, not that bad to think about doing some empirical work on.  This sort of trend would sensibly be due to some basic psychological attribute, or at least some biologically-inspired basis.

In the meantime, I'm starting work at Echo Nest tomorrow in Davis Square—very excited!  Also, I use an awful lot of em-dashes, and wordpress ought to implement a LaTeX-like triple hyphen, says I.  Either that, for I have to flip to HTML-only editing, and make mad use of "—".

There comes a point in studies when it stops being useful to read more and more, and begins to be useful to write all the time. A two-year period is about right, as it turns out, to learn enough about a field's many facets to transition from exploration to contribution. It's very important to know when that point has come.

A good literature review ought to be a chance to point to important research that leads to the story you're about to tell in your paper---your inspirations and motivations. It's not a good time to start exploring related but irrelevant work.  The content of the story you tell is the crucial aspect, and I'm seeing now that the best papers need not cite very much up front if their story stands alone.

Writing is a habit, and notes can be taken in paragraph form with inline citations just as easily as they can be bullet points.  The slow train of non-experimental academia proceeds as each individual explores, learns, and consolidates their own particular preoccupations into a new perspective.  There's a major risk that nobody will in fact climb upward---whatever that means---but the hope is that cumulative semi-shoulder standing will raise to greater heights.

But me, I want products and gee-whiz-look-at-thats.  By the way, look at this word and tell me why it's so remarkable:

abacabadabacaba

More on the way!  Right now, packing for Boston and an Echo Nest internship.  Then, taking the Statistics Q1s in September and powering through to a 5-quarter MS Statistics.  Onward!

I think it'd be better for science and the world in general if people would use the word skeptic instead of denier. With all this current discussion of tribalism in American politics, perhaps the lens could be turned on the language we use to describe scientific communities.

I could also point out that proponents of the anthropogenic climate change doomsday scenarios remind me quite a lot of Camping's May 21st Rapture crew. The truth is, "the end is near" has been an odd human fixation for just about as long as anybody can tell.  This merits skepticism.

Regarding the conclusions of the so-called "Supreme Court of Science," as at least one person has described the National Academy---or the IPCC and other organizations---I think it's important to remember that these too are groups of people with enormous stakes in pushing the consensus toward an anthropogenic global warming dialog. However, this is not necessarily for the sake of the world; I don't think anybody actually believes any of their worst-case scenarios will actually come to pass. Rather, they have invested their entire careers and livelihoods on these claims. If they turn out to be false, then these particular scientists and politicians would be disgraced.  While politicians are apt to pivot gracefully out and shift the dialog to their benefit, scientists tend not to take so well if their ideas are discredited.

It seems that climate science---as distinct from meteorology---had never been a particularly interesting field until these sorts of worldwide catastrophe scenarios began to gain traction (correct me if I'm wrong here). Our tools to observe these large-scale changes are relatively new, of course; the problem is, since we've only had the ability to peek into the atmosphere or the ozone for a few decades, the discipline doesn't have centuries of quack claims or false alarms at hand to give the field an even temperament.

Finally, "science" is not at all monolithic---and I don't mean simply that there continue to be folks of different opinions. There are many different ways to gain so-called "scientific" knowledge, and they all generally fall under the umbrella term of empirical methodologies. There are hypothesis-driven studies which are able to directly manipulate experimental conditions, correlative studies which take advantage of previously existing variations, exploratory studies which just start measuring and hypothesizing, and there are modeling studies such as those used in climate science.

Modeling studies by far are the least intrinsically reliable of these, since they excel at showing potentially plausible explanations but operate based on many assumptions and proceed in microchips instead of on a lab bench. There have been innumerable takes on scientific philosophy as well. Perhaps you're familiar with Popper's case for the necessity of falsifiability in a scientific claim. Although this is only one approach to scientific reasoning, it has certainly been particularly fruitful for modern-day consensus building. One major problem of these climate models is that they get revised again and again and again based on new incoming information---parameters are revised, but the models as a whole are never thrown out.

It's an interesting question, and I think that good healthy skepticism is exactly what people need in order to truly advance scientific knowledge. Not name-calling.

For aural skills:

• First, ALWAYS engage in active listening---sing under your breath along with everything you hear, and attempt to place solfege syllables to the music. Especially this applies to basslines; harmonic hearing begins with singing the root of the chord in pop music, and this will be the best training to open your ears and mind to harmonic thinking.
• Second, practice singing the Monte at a piano, and don't be satisfied unless each note is slotted correctly. Real music modulates, and being able to do the modulation yourself, in your head, will make you supremely powerful.
• Third, do transcriptions and arrangements of music to sing/play/perform with friends! This is the essence of musicianship.

For music theory:

• First, make a REAL effort to get into classical music!  Music is a language, and music theory describes the grammar.  But most important is to learn to speak it fluently, and just like with languages, immersion is the key.  Make a playlist of Bach inventions, Haydn symphonies, Mozart string quartets, Beethoven sonatas, Schubert lieder, or Chopin Nocturnes!  The beauty of this music is timeless, and the melodic and harmonic games you'll find are sublime.  This is the single most important thing you can do as a musician.
• Second, learn to play some piano---the visual map of the keyboard will help worlds in thinking intuitively about music theory.  Plus it's good for parties.
• Third, write music.  Grab a guitar and sing, write a trumpet impromptu, or even a classical-form minuet.  And remember that your first really good composition will probably be at least your tenth, so there's no pressure to be instantly amazing.

Now this is something I was not at all aware of until last night.  Music has always recycled, recombined, and meme-morphed.  But I had no idea that the iconic Thriller bass riff was pulled from Rick James!  This makes me certainly want to look up more Rick James.  In fact, I think there might well be an industry in tracking down the original samples, and popularizing original recordings.

For more in the same vein, here is a thorough run-down of the tracks Mark Ronson used in Lily Allen's breakout album.

O Academic Music Theory at times it seems the stakes are so high only because your pie is so small.

I've been playing with this idea of position finding with tritones, and beginning to apply it to music that is not strictly diatonic. In particular, it seems as though it should be possible to describe scales as conjoint tritones in order to begin thinking in terms of regions of local diatonicity.

The idea goes back (at least) to Richmond Browne's 1981 article, Tonal Implications of the Diatonic Set. It seems that if tritones are so able to point our ears toward the correct tonal landscape, then it might be that the particular species of tritones involved in scale constructions could be helpful ways to theorize the structure of various scale types.  For instance, a diatonic set could be described as the union of an alpha- and a delta-tritone:

For more, here's a brief paper I wrote for David Clampitt's course on scale theory:

Position Finding With Tritones in Nondiatonic Music

It seems that I should go ahead and post these things for people to peruse.  More reorganizations imminent!

Well, the blog has made it, after some futzing with css and things of that sort. The accordions were choking just a bit when I tried to incorporate the blog posts, but after some sleuthing I uncovered a dangling div-tag. Hopefully soon I'll plunge into the css maze and try to cull out the unneeded stuff. For now, I'm working on proofs of prediction intervals out of the Casella & Berger text. Onward and upward!

I'm in the process of wrapping all the old Portamental posts to put here; it's possible though, that Portamental will continue on.

Not sure where this comes from -- but danceability is where it's at!