Auld Lang Syne 2020 — on the Kite Guitar

All this year, I've had a note on my task list to write about how I've been continuing lessons with video chat (so far sticking to the free/libre/open tool Jitsi Meet instead of Zoom or other proprietary options). I have a lot I could (and will later) say about this whole situation. It's been working out surprisingly well, continuing with most of my students and adding new students who are local, out of state, and even overseas.

Of the many reasons I haven't gotten around to writing articles about video lessons, one issue is the time and energy I've been putting into the Kite Guitar! This new system of guitar fretting and tuning fulfills a dream I've had for 20 years to be able to play more harmonious chords and expressive melodies in a flexible-enough, practical way. I will be publishing much more about that soon.

In honor of the New Year (and played extra slowly so that astute listeners might notice the special qualities of the tuning):

I'm resisting the urge to go on about the guitar, the tuning, the arrangement, my process of updated video production (using all free/libre/open software), and more. It will all come in due time. Looking forward to a productive and prosperous 2021, and sending my love and well-wishes to everyone in the world! Happy New Year!

I Finally Wrote Another Song

Summer 2018. A couple years into fatherhood. Still holding onto all sorts of creative dreams but making little progress. I was juggling compulsions, goals, responsibilities, thoughts, worries…

I was getting into mindfulness meditation. I dabbled in meditation since childhood, but I had not previously made it a routine practice. Meditation now is among a slew of efforts toward getting my routines and life in better order.

One day in August (2018), I took a break from some chores. I put on some random music. I heard some singer-songwriter stuff I liked well enough. I felt inspired (and perhaps also looking for an outlet to procrastinate and push away some stress).

I picked up my guitar, and a new song came out. It was just a bunch of thoughts that had been on my mind. Thoughts about my relationships, my compulsions, my procrastination. I recorded a better take a couple days later. Now, in early 2020, I'm finally posting it:

Featured on the Now&Xen podcast playing the Kite Guitar

I was featured on the Now&Xen podcast! Full link: https://nowandxen.libsyn.com/29268-cents-kite-giedraitis-aaron-wolf-spencer-hargraves-jacob-collier

Here's an embedded player:

The "xen" in the podcast name refers to the prefix that means "strange" or "foreign" (so xenophobia is fear of foreign people or things, xenophilia is love of them). In this case, it refers to xenharmonic, a term for musical tunings that feel foreign.

In the podcast, I'm playing on and discussing the amazing Kite Guitar, named for my friend Kite Giedraitis who discovered the tuning and invented a practical language around it.

My Tribute to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

Fred Rogers photo by Robert Lerner

In this article, I describe my recently renewed appreciation of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In particular, the artistic intentions and the marvelous music.

Raising kids in today's media reality

I wish for everyone in the world to know and embrace love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and so on. Of course, it takes regular investment to maintain and strengthen such things in my own life. And as one person, I only have so much influence and only so much capacity to support others. I do what I can with my students. And as a father, I bring these concerns to raising my now two-year-old son.
An enormous threat to these values happens to dominate today's media: manipulative advertising. For perspectives, see my older post: I hate advertising, and check out the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Putting ads themselves aside (ideally blocked by a good adblocker), our ad-driven economy creates a race-to-the-bottom toward whatever spectacles or addictive designs get the most attention. It brings us enormous quantities of unhealthy, annoying, hyper, and dumbed down works. In the worst cases, we get the deeply traumatizing perils of YouTube's "kids" videos…

My new Strum & Sing group class

Over my career, I've taught a variety of group classes covering a range of topics from general blues-rock/jam to classical ensembles to music-theory-and-cognition. Most of my students were school-age kids.

Now, I'm starting a new adult-focused (but younger students welcome too) beginning Strum & Sing class. Here's the flyer:

A new, more flexible approach to beginning guitar

The focus of the class will be students keeping a good rhythm while playing simple chord progressions and singing songs. Depending on each student's preference, any option that works will be fine including power chords, single-note bass-lines, small bits of chords, open-tuned bar or slide chords, various strummable instruments, or even muted percussion strumming. This addresses one of the biggest challenges of a group class: how to work with both absolute beginners and more experienced students playing together.

Unlike the way most teachers do this, I'm going to focus on the flexibility of some basic music theory contexts. We'll learn songs using common letter counting such as 1, 4, 5 which could be A, D, E or C, F, G, and so on.

The main emphasis: that there's no one right way to play any song. We can adapt and adjust to fit what works for our level and context. So, we'll explore multiple approaches so that each student can find a comfortable way to fit with the group and learn to be flexible musicians going forward.

For those in Portland, contact me if interested in joining the class. For consideration of the pros and cons of classes versus private lessons (versus other learning approaches like watching online videos etc.), see my old article on comparing learning options.

The rest of this article gets into some initial thoughts about the folk-song / pop-song focus of this new class…

The 6 Parts of a Balanced Music Practice

Over my couple decades of teaching, I evolved a framework for balanced music practice. Recently, I've moved toward also modeling this balance within my lessons. It has six parts:

1. Set up
2. Warm up
3. Repertoire
4. New pieces
5. Creativity
6. Listening & Studying

Cooperation in Everything

In all areas of my life — as a self-employed music teacher and musician, social entrepreneur, scholar, activist, parent, and more —  the most defining element is the issue of how my individual actions fit into larger social context. This relates to everything from my embrace of participative music to my embrace of free/libre/open culture and technology. The dilemmas around effective cooperation or lack thereof frame nearly every topic.

William "Salt" Hale, the Community Director of my non-profit startup Snowdrift.coop, heard me give a pithy and personal explanation of these things in a lightning talk at SeaGL last year, and he requested a video of it. So, with help from my student, friend, and fellow Snowdrift.coop volunteer Athan Spathas, I recorded that spiel and several others about the ways that cooperation and coordination matter in so many areas of life. Athan prompted me with a range of topics, and I explained how they all connect to these social issues.

I was a guest on Music Manumit podcast

I was honored to be the recent guest for a podcast called Music Manumit, a show focused on Creative Commons music. Check it out: http://www.musicmanumit.com/2015/10/aaron-wolf-151005-music-manumit-podcast.html

I regret that I didn't specifically name the folks I mentioned in passing. My teacher I referenced was Steve "Oz" Osburn. The barbershop songwriter friend I mentioned who used a Creative Commons license is the wonderfully talented Paul Olguin (who I need to help get his own website up sometime!).

I mentioned also my barbershop arrangement of Copying Is Not Theft. More significantly, this podcast prompted me to finally get more of my old recordings posted. I had some up before, but now I'm finally sharing more thoroughly and specifically updating my old music under CC BY-SA license. For a start, I posted my 15-year-old album, Conspiracies & Racketeering on Archive.org along with some of the source files (MIDI tracks). I hope to post more albums and other backlog of music soon…

Launching Snowdrift.coop

This past week, we launched a fund-drive for Snowdrift.coop. We need to cover legal expenses and further development so the site can begin operating. The fund-drive itself is at snowdrift.tilt.com. Update January 2015: The campaign succeeded!

At Snowdrift.coop, you can read dozens of pages of writings explaining the whole concept in depth. Here at wolftune.com, I focus on my music teaching and related topics.

I Hate Advertising!

My formative years were especially influenced by MAD Magazine. I started reading in the late 1980's, but I quickly amassed a large collection of back issues and book collections going back to the magazine's start in the 1950's. In fact, my introduction to many cultural icons was through MAD's satire of them before I'd even experienced the original. MAD was full of ingenious political and pop-culture satire but perhaps the primary target was advertising.

MAD even attacked the subtle details of things like the proportions of cereal boxes. Every manipulative detail of the ad-biz was ridiculed and laid bare.

Most substantially, MAD magazine itself had no third-party ads from 1957 through 2001. This practice went against all business assumptions about the publishing industry. They did everything backwards. Cheaper paper, black-and-white, no ads, and they purchased the rights to submitted artwork outright so they could use and reuse it freely. They savagely satirized all of America's consumer culture, ad-biz, and celebrity obsessions. Their interests were aligned solely with the readership.

Guest on the Unformatted podcast with Ryno the Bearded

This past week, I was a guest on a podcast show called Unformatted. The host, Ryno the Bearded, does podcasts dedicated to Creative Commons music, and Unformatted is the looser chat/interview show.

Check out the podcast at http://rynothebearded.com/2014/09/mere-exposure-effect

The show is a bit over two hours long and covers topics including: copyright, music business, economics, participatory vs performance-based music, philosophy of art, barbershop harmony, software freedom, and more. Overall, it's a good casual summary of my whole personal story of my life and career and how I came to my current understanding and feelings on these topics.

Many Ways to Introduce Guitar (or related instruments)

There's no one right way to start learning the guitar.

Even within the scope of strict classical guitar, teachers debate all sorts of things: Should we start with the plucking-hand alone or including the fretting-hand right away? Start with rest-stroke or free-stroke? Start with only rote listening and following of a teacher or use standard notation? Start with single note melodies or with chords and arpeggios?

Break out of classical assumptions and the options grow exponentially. Start finger-style or with a pick? Start with standard tuning or open tuning or other alternatives? Learn simple songs or simplified versions of more complex songs? Focus on solo guitar or guitar as accompaniment to singing or guitar as in a band context? Use tab or notation? Start with blues, rock, pop, Flamenco, folk-songs, or another style?

Even all those options have cultural assumptions. So, I prefer to start by teaching the basic physics of the guitar (which are truly universal to all styles and approaches). Then, we can explore the options creatively! However, despite my love of open-ended creative exploration, I've found that many students do best with the plain old traditional approaches. It varies from student to student based on personality, interests, and experiences from other studies (both musical and otherwise). With so many different things to learn, even advanced guitarists with decades of experience may remain totally unaware of some of the basics in other directions than the ones they know.

I already posted a lesson video on the rhythmic foundation of guitar. That's one great way to start. Today, I'm sharing a handful of other lesson videos which are still are only a sample of the countless approaches to the instrument.

Rhythm Guitar Lesson

I've been teaching guitar lessons professionally for around 15 years, and certain things keep coming up. I've been wanting for a long time to record the core set of lessons that I teach various students on day one. I can't teach every student everything, but there are a dozen or so ways to get started playing guitar. Each approach has a different focus.

Here's the first of the series:



Of course, there are a lot of details not covered in the video. So here I'm sharing further notes that touch on things I typically cover in the next several lessons (with varying amount of detail, depending on each student).

Homage to Pete Seeger 1919-2014

Today, I reflect on the passing of one of my few great heroes. Pete Seeger was first and foremost known as a musician, but he was much more than that. For Pete,
music was a vehicle. At his core, he was an activist for cross-cultural understanding, civil rights, a healthy environment, love, justice, and inclusion.

In my own essay about my teaching approach, I  quoted from Pete's guitar book which somehow cut right to the core in a way none of the other 400+ guitar books I've read have done. His sense of perspective was just wonderful, and he cared about people more than about music.

I don't need to provide any biographical overview here as Pete has been, thankfully, recognized and honored by millions of people. The Wikipedia page linked from the picture above goes through the details. The simple fact is: the core energy that Pete had was unfortunately unusual. He was a man of deep integrity who lived all his life working for a better world.

Move to Oregon, announcing Snowdrift.coop

Up to now, I've been negligent in updating this site in 2013. Here's the brief explanations and highlights:

After 15 years of teaching in the Ann Arbor, MI area, nearly moving on to various other directions over the years (a time in a touring rock/jazz/jam band that was also a barbershop quartet, an almost move to California for a PhD), I've moved on to a new stage. My wife got a fellowship position through Portland State University and, on unfortunately short notice, we moved 2,300 miles across the country to our new home in Oregon City. We don't know how long-term this is, whether we'll stay in Oregon after this or what.

(UPDATE: We stayed in Oregon! Moved into Portland in August 2014! Future not absolutely certain, but, at this point, we're settling in here.)

I plan to keep teaching and may try video-chat lessons over the internet, although I know that won't be the same and won't work as well for certain sorts of lessons.

Most importantly, this move has allowed me to focus on the major project that has become my main passion over the last year: Snowdrift.coop.

Screencast: scary sounds with Audacity

Today I made my first screencast using my KXStudio GNU/Linux system.

Summary:
In Audacity, use any random sounds (import any recordings or make new ones). Go to Effects - Change Speed and choose a very slow speed. Add echos and reverbs and other effects to taste, the more reverb the better. That's it!

Video editing done in Kdenlive.
Read more about these and other Free/Libre Open Source audio and other software at my Software Recommendations and more page.

Happy Halloween!

A Framework for Studying Human Experience

Intro

I've always felt in-touch with both holistic and analytical ways of seeing the world. Breaking things down into distinct parts can be a valuable way to make sense of reality. But human cognition does not have the capacity to deal with great numbers of broken parts all at once — let alone the capacity to recognize how the parts could fit back together again. Sometimes, we need to step back and try to take in the whole picture. When we then return to analyze separate parts, we may not be able to comprehend all the connections, but we can at least try to keep context in mind while looking at any particular item.

I have always been interested in music, but as a student, I was uncomfortable with the degree to which music study seemed divorced from broader context. In the years since finishing my Bachelor of Music, I've grappled with cross-disciplinary questions that led me to study physics, biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and other fields. I can't claim expertise in these areas, but I've learned a lot. And through my studies, I have gained insights into music which seem more profound and valuable than the things I learned in my music courses.

Recently, I've been considering a return to academia, but I've struggled with choosing the right direction. I now recognize that there are many angles to get at the same questions, and I want to be sure that any program I pursue has a good perspective on how different fields of inquiry fit together.

One of my main concerns is the apparently persistent divide between science and humanities. I appreciate much of what I've seen at conferences and such, but I often feel that the bias for certain angles of study is greater than what would be expected just because people have their particular specialties. Humanities folks (a group which includes the majority of music-related researchers) seem to make everything about culture. Of course, there have been countless debates about universals versus cultural differences, debates about different approaches to scholarly inquiry, debates about nature versus nurture, and so on. There is enough material for scholars to make entire careers out of just studying the history of these debates as a meta-topic. Trying to make sense of all of this, I've developed my own framework to address the different angles of inquiry, and that's what I going to describe here.

My interdisciplinary framework

The deep questions most of us have are basically about understanding the nature of our own experience. We will never be able to know or explain everything, of course. But while our abstract models are imperfect, they may still be useful.

The figure to the right is a diagram of an intellectual framework which I find useful for contextualizing understanding, research, and experience. I don't think any element here is overall more or less important than the others. To reasonably explain any of our experiences, all these levels need to all be acknowledged.
The figure represents a hierarchy of unidirectional restrictions. We live in the inner circle and only experience the outer levels indirectly. We necessarily experience and understand physics through our subjective and culturally-influenced perspectives. Yet while culture influences physicists, culture cannot alter the basic physical laws of the universe. Physical reality imposes absolute restrictions on the possibilities within all the lower levels, not vice versa.

Copying Is Not Theft: Barbershop Arrangement pt2

see part 1 to check out the original song and the context that inspired my version

Announcing my first published barbershop arrangement:

Copying Is Not Theft by Nina Paley

The song is licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (as is my entire website). This means I have full legal right to do anything I want with it as long as I credit Nina and I license my version the same way. Lots of people have already made tons of variations of the song from jazz to punk rock versions.

I made my barbershop arrangement using the free open-source music notation software Musescore. This software not only produces great looking results, but it supports fine tuning of pitch. I adjusted all the pitches to match just intonation tuning to 1-cent accuracy. If you play the file in Musescore, the harmonies are all well tuned to get nice pure barbershop harmonies (though the sound is a saxophone sample). [side note: to play back with swing rhythm in Musescore, go to the menu display>Play Panel]

Download the Musescore file. Or Download a PDF.

I made a quick audio recording by overdubbing my own singing and created fast-paced and slightly slower versions, an old-timey mix with virtual vinyl record crackles and such, and dedicated learning tracks for each part (with select part on one side of stereo and the other three on the other side).

Here's an embedded audio player:

All the files are available to download at the best free, non-profit media sharing website: archive.org/details/CopyingIsNotTheftForBarbershopQuartet

Archive.org automatically creates many file formats, so you can download any format you like of the audio and do whatever you want with it (just include the CC-BY-SA license and credit both me and Nina if you release any modified version).

I really hope some talented animator is up for creating an old-timey cartoon, maybe inspired by Nina's original cartoon but with a quartet singing… And I hope barbershop quartets out there choose to learn the song and perform it and perhaps make new recordings.

Whether for a video version or for live performance, I have some ideas about choreography. The way I arranged the song, the idea is: the lead sings the first phrase alone, but the baritone jumps in and cuts off the lead for the second phrase. Then they copy each other and sing the third phrase together, splitting into harmony at the end, and then the whole quartet joins in.

Overall, the arrangement follows very traditional barbershop harmony, full of all the little embellishments and with a new tag at the end. I added a decent amount of complexity that makes it more advanced than the most basic arrangement might have been, but in the end I stuck with mostly accessible stuff.

So go copy this! Have fun! Change it! Perform it! Whatever! I'd love to be notified when anyone does something with this, but there's no legal requirement to do so.

In harmony,
Aaron

P.S. I added just the "Copying Is Fun" tag to the wonderful barbershop tag collection at barbershoptags.com.

Copying Is Not Theft: Barbershop Arrangement pt1

Over many years, my views on copyright have morphed and evolved in complex ways. At one point, I was a strong advocate for copyright. I registered my own published CDs with the Library of Congress, and I even bought multiple copies of CDs to sell to my friends when I wanted to share music. But the problems with copyright have become so absurd that I cannot defend the status quo any longer.

Over the years, I learned more about the complexities of the music industry, the inconsistencies with what is copyrighted and what isn't, the nature of music styles as almost entirely derived from common cultural heritage, the value of open culture and sharing, and the complexities of 21st century media… I changed my views pretty dramatically, but my ideas are still evolving. I have described the issues and  my philosophical position in an article called A Rational View of Copyright. I've continually updated the article since first writing in 2008, and I plan to reformat it soon, but it covers a wide range of issues.

Recently, I was singing with my casual barbershop quartet and we decided to try an arrangement of Shenandoah, a traditional American folk tune. It would be easy enough to make an arrangement, and the song is public domain, but I decided to order four legal copies of an arrangement from the Barbershop Harmony Society. When I got the sheet music, I was dismayed by obnoxious text printed over the notes stating "COPYING IS ILLEGAL."

First of all, copying is not illegal! The United States copyright law protects fair use. That means that I can legally make a backup copy for myself to archive. I can make a legal copy in order to write notes to myself without marking up the original. And I can legally copy this excerpt and show it here for the sake of this essay.

Secondly,  I paid for a legal copy of this music. Why is my copy defaced with this annoying mark‽ It makes it harder to read! This mark doesn't just discourage copying, it discourages buying and reading the legal copy in the first place!

Unfortunately, the Barbershop Harmony Society is a nice large target for copyright lawyers, so the BHS has taken a particularly strong position on copyright. Ironically, a huge portion of the songs that barbershoppers sing were written before 1923 and so are public domain, including Shenandoah. So barbershop benefits greatly from music being free to share and access. The main activities of barbershop singers include getting together at conventions and singing songs with each other, often teaching people new parts. Like other great participatory music traditions, barbershop embraces sharing and derivation. For this type of rich cultural experience, restrictive copyright is an extreme burden.

I was told by a chorus director recently that his chorus was singing some old song about an apple tree or cherry tree (I forget which). They wanted to switch the words from apple to cherry (or reverse, whichever it was) in order to fit it into the theme of some other songs for their concert. Being so hypersensitive about copyright (thanks to all the admonitions from the society), they contacted the copyright holder. After lots of effort they were denied permission. Despite my belief that the change they wanted is legal fair use, they chose not to go ahead with performing the word change.

Often the bureaucracy of copyright licensing is so bad that it is simply impossible to get anywhere. Read this short article about someone trying to legally license an arrangement of Don Henley's song Desperado.

All this got my thinking about Nina Paley's wonderful song, Copying Is Not Theft.
I decided this deserves a barbershop quartet arrangement, so I made one. Check out my arrangement in part 2.

Book Review: Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus

At 40 years of age, Gary Marcus had no music training and no apparent musical talents, but he loved music. With the excuse of testing the learning capacity of adults, he decided to commit to really giving music a try for the first time. In his 2012 book Guitar Zero, he tells of his experience. More significantly, he somehow managed to condense a vast overview of diverse research in music psychology and the psychology of learning into a fun read for all audiences.

If you assume this to be an instructional book, you will be overwhelmed. To follow the path of Professor Marcus, first become a tenured faculty at a well-funded institution; then get a paid sabbatical. As Marcus clarifies, the lack of dedicated time is the primary obstacle for most adult attempts at learning new skills. So, now that you have time, funding, and professional connections to call on, the next steps are simple: Make arrangements to meet some of the most famous living musicians; go take lessons with several of the very best teachers; and get the top experts in music psychology and theory to personally answer your questions and advise you on what research to read. With these simple steps, you too can become an adequate amateur musician!

Of course, Marcus is not suggesting that others could follow in his steps exactly. Instead, this book is more about the science of music and the science of learning, as told through a quirky personal story. Simply put, there's been no way to test theories about adult learning versus child learning. Children regularly put in persistent commitment over many thousands of hours; and researchers can't find adult beginners able to do the same. So Marcus decided to be subject number one.