So yesterday, a nation full of pimply-faced, weaselly little nerds fell to their knees and thanked Steve Jobs for enabling them to live out their lives as rock and roll superstars. The air quivered with the dull plastic thud-thud-thud of millions of little Rosses noodling away on their new MIDI keyboards, building great cacophonies of Apple Loops, constructing crap New Age symphonies the likes of which the young men who went on to form Rush and Yes only dreamed of.
Yesterday, Apple released GarageBand as a part of its $49 iLife 2004 suite, and the web was soon bombarded with really, really bad music. See, all these newbies fail to realize one thing: music has to build. It’s like a story – you need to create an overarching theme, something that builds and grows and swells through choruses and verses. Music is not a bunch of endless loops mixed together. That’s the kind of stuff that makes the rest of a song work – if you create an original melody and lyrics, you can use all those Apple Loops to fill in the gaps. I, for one, am a saxophone player, and play piano by ear. I am not a drummer, or a guitarist. I’d use GarageBand to first lay down the beginning tracks with a piano, vocal or sax melody and then fill in the gaps, then upload my nightmarishly crappy creations to this here weblog.
Give it time.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
One Comment