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Mapping Music

Here's an interesting article about Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, who has string theory mathematics to represent the relationship of musical chords to one another in a graphic form.

His paper has been published in Science, the first music theory article ever published in that journal. We've known about the close relationship of music to math for centuries, what makes Tymoczko's theory significant?

"Composers have been exploring the geometrical structure of these maps since the beginning of Western music without really knowing what they were doing," Said Tymoczko…

Come On, Skinny Love

Like John Marks and my uncle Omar, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it&#151neeeeeeed it. So what? Music is great. It is unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.

That's what I did yesterday, after hearing a couple of tracks off of Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever…

Biggest Music Industry Screw-Ups Ever?

Blender has just posted its nominations for greatest record industry screw-ups. I have a few quibbles, but as a whole, Blender tells a tale of monumental stupidity,from Decca passing on the Beatles because Dick Rowe was irritated that too many frantic teens were attempting to get into the Cavern Club to shutting down Napster without having a legitimate channel to replace it.

Terry Pratchett Health Update

Donates $1 million to early-onset Alzheimer's research . Tells Alzheimer's Research Trust conference, "Personally, I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance."

Second favorite quote: "The writing continues, although the typing doesn't."

The MP3 Talk

Back around Christmastime, when everyone around me seemed to be receiving iPods and gift certificates to the iTunes store, I thought I should give my loved ones The MP3 Talk. Now, John Atkinson, has prepared another version of The MP3 Talk&#151live and in color with all sorts of cool graphs and stuff!

JA sweated over this one. He'd walk up and down the long hall from his office to mine, come in and show me some graphs, point out a few things, laugh, scratch, curse a little bit, walk back to his office, work some more. It went on this way for a couple of days. "Look at this…

Fourteen Words

Out of habit now more than anything else, I keep my cell phone on the floor beneath my bed while I sleep at night. In the morning, when I wake, I still check my cell phone for any messages.

This morning, I found a text message from Omar:

"Dude," it began, "I have 14 words for you...."

Only fourteen?

"Hurry up and get your turntable so you can listen to Paul Simon's Graceland!"

Fourteen words. I counted just to be sure.

"That's a lot of words, dude," I wrote back.

"Sometimes it takes a lot of words," he replied.

A Better Personal Listening Experience

They're opening a Starbucks and a Duane Reade directly across from the Grove Street PATH station, where I catch the train to work each morning. This will certainly bring more people to my growing neighborhood. This morning, the train was so crowded that I couldn't read my book, Murakami's colorful Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. So, instead, I did what I always do when there's no room to read:

I counted the number of people listening to personal digital players. From where I stood in the middle of the car, my hand grasping a stainless steel pole along with ten other morning hands…

Places Shape Lives

The sun is almost all gone now and the streetlamps along Newark Avenue are just beginning to take on a sort of greenish glow. The sky has become a shadowy mess. We're trying to postpone something. Who would want the day to end like this?

"Do you want to get some fancy beers?" I ask Omar.

A shrug of shoulders.

"Sure," he replies.

We make a left at the corner of Newark and Jersey and look into the windows at Ox, the expensive new restaurant with the great sandwich board. With its exposed-brick and weathered-steel exterior, Ox is strangely out of place…

SXSW Part I

Although the brain pall caused by four solid days and nights of music has yet to lift entirely, I will attempt to begin to dissect South by Southwest 2008.

For starters, let me take on those pathetic souls who would rather wallow in dissension and what's wrong with SXSW. For all the hating, blogosphere jerk-off's who whine and cry and condemn all SXSW's shortcomings—I refuse to mention them because publicity is what these Me! Me! Me! publicity hounds live for—it remains the vital once–a–year coming together of the tribes. If there's one thing the music world could use more of, it's any…

Ornette!

Heads up. Ornette Coleman’s group is playing at the Town Hall in New York City on March 28. If you have any interest in modern jazz (or modern music, period), you should buy a ticket now before they sell out.

Coleman is not merely among the last survivors of the post-Parker revolution in musical affairs (along with Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Haden, himself the last surviving cohort of Ornette’s breakthrough quartet of 1958-60). He was also, along with John Coltrane, the progenitor of that revolution. And yet his music sounds as fresh as…