This document discusses the changing nature of popular music in the digital age. It notes that digitization is about values rather than just technology. Popular music is defined broadly rather than by specific genres. The boundaries between composition, production, sound design and performance have blurred as digital tools allow new creative possibilities. Musicianship is now about more than just live performance or instrumentation, expanding to include studio production skills. Recordings can create immersive illusions that become reality themselves. Electronic music allows new ways of creating music through technology like drum machines that change patterns. New forms of visualization may further musical understanding.

1. Pop music pedagogy

2. “The digitization of music is essentially a story
of values, not inventions” - Paul Théberge
For example: Jamaica had no
music copyright laws until 1995

3. What is popular music? Is it necessarily
electronic, or dance-oriented, or popular?

4. Song: a musical idea
in conceptual or
notated form
Arrangement: a
realization of a song in
full instrumentation,
on paper or in
performance
Track: a realization of
a song/arrangement
as a recording

5. Listening like
a producer:
hearing the
potential for a
track within a
song, or
helping a
song emerge
from a
collection of
recorded
tracks

6. Music has
entered a “post-
performance age”
- Matt Thibeault
The Beatles’
decision to stop
touring was a
turning point,
since their
albums no longer
had to be
performable

7. Digital music creativities collapse the boundaries between
the formerly distinct disciplines of composition, production,
sound design, and performance - Leah Kardos
We should broaden our concept of musicianship
from instrumental virtuosity to include “playing
the studio” - Brian Eno

8. “The idea of creating an illusion of reality
on recordings was joined, and to some
extent supplanted by, the reality of the
illusions themselves” - Virgil Moorefield

9. “In electronic music, there’s a lot of ways to create something
that runs… Take a drum computer: you turn it on and it plays
a pattern… the action of the person who is playing the drum
computer is changing the pattern” - Robert Henke

10. What-
er,
ev-
let's
just
have
fun.
It's
hip-
hop,
man,
This
hip-
hop
is
New visualization schemes can change
and expand our musical understanding

11. Thanks for listening!
ethanhein.com
@ethanhein