Ethan Hein - Groove Pizza
Ethan Hein is an adjunct professor of Music Tech at NYU. He’s a prolific blogger, academic, public thinker and also happens to be the inventor of the Groove Pizza - a new musical interface for creating and making sense of rhythm.
Ethan is passionate about reforming music education - and especially about making music tech accessible to young people so that everyone gets a chance to express themselves through music creation. He discusses the technologies that make that possible.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
music, people, nyu, education, started, fl studio, technology, ableton, musician, teaching, uk, kids, academic, programme, hein, opportunity, techno, world, sound, years
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Ethan Hein
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And this is the MTF podcast. Ethan Hein is a music tech educator, blogger, academic public thinker, and the inventor of the groove pizza. He’s an adjunct professor at NYU music tech programme. And I met up with him in New York earlier this year to chat about his favourite music tech. The problem with music education, what’s so great about Sweden, how the US understands or misunderstands UK dance music, and vice versa. And the benefits of posting on the internet about the things that occur to you about the things that you’re interested in. From a relatively but not totally quiet spot in Manhattan. Here’s my conversation with Ethan hein. I’m sitting on a rooftop bar in Bowery in New York, with adjunct professor, I believe, Ethan Hein, and you’re teaching NYU, but also a prolific blogger on music and tech. Tell me a little bit about where that started. Cuz you’ve been doing it for a long time.
Ethan Hein
Yeah, my academic life actually kind of emerged out of my blogging life. I was like freelance music, teaching and producing and working in like digital marketing, and just had a blog for like, really self promotion purposes. And then was also like, no, but it’s like a nice outlet. And, you know, a lot of thoughts and opinions that my wife is sick of hearing can go like on the blog. And yeah, it just sort of took on a life of its own. And then when I went to grad school, it turned out to be like, anybody who wants to go into academia, just like start the blog now. Because then you know, stuff that was on the blog, you can turn into journal articles, something gets rejected from like a publication, you can just stick it on the blog, you don’t have to feel bad about yourself. Like, yeah, it really has turned out to be this kind of rich synergy.
Andrew Dubber
Because so many people start the other way around. I think, you know, if I’m an academic, then I have an opinion that has weight and value, and then I can start putting that out into the world.
Ethan Hein
Yeah. Well, and for sure, I mean, if you’re already an academic adds, like a nice way to communicate with the public. But yeah, for me, it was the opposite.
Andrew Dubber
So where do you come into music tech from because it’s such a broad and diverse thing? What’s your background? Um,
Ethan Hein
so I come from like, rock, I’m a guitar player. And I played rock and country and some jazz for many years, and started producing on the computer, just as like a practical, you know, recording on tape stopped being attractive at a certain point in the 90s. Right, and, you know, making your own beats, just as a practical matter, and, you know, and then I started to get into that as like an art form unto itself, not just as a way to like capture live performances. And then, you know, Time passed and guitar playing opportunities dried up and producing stuff on the computer opportunities kept multiplying. And, you know, finally, when I wanted to go back to school, and you know, do music more seriously, because I was sick of digital marketing, that the music technology programme at NYU, which I would recommend to anyone who is a disaffected pop musician who wants to find a way into academia.
Andrew Dubber
Yes, is the most natural home wouldn’t wouldn’t you say? It’s music tech course. Is it a production
Ethan Hein
course, specifically, music tech at NYU, it’s like a, like the field itself. It’s like a pretty broad umbrella. I mean, you have people in there who are studying like traditional audio engineering, you have people in there who are writing software, like doing like music, information retrieval. You’ve got people who are like doing film scoring and game sound and 3d audio, and it’s a really diverse collection of things.
Andrew Dubber
Is it sort of divided up into scientists over there artists over here?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, people can kind of specialise into their tracks. And everybody has to, you know, everybody has to do some music theory. And everybody has to do like some digital signal theory. So you at least have to have kind of a grounding in both sides. But then you have people specialise. And I went there with the intention of like writing software and discovered I have no business writing software. But the the education side of technology really became appealing.
Andrew Dubber
So from when you say, the education side, do you mean actually standing in front of a classroom and talking to people about technologies or working on research projects or have that with you.
Ethan Hein
So a combination of things, when I got my master’s thesis project at MIT was this thing called the groove pizza, which is a web based drum machine that is arranged in a circle like a clock face. If you go to musedlab.org slash groove pizza, or just google groove pizza, there it is. And the idea being that if you sequence your rhythms on a kind of a clock face, there are all these geometries that emerge out of it that help you make sense of like, why do you put your snares on two and four? Right? Why does some clubbing sounds so good, like when it’s laid out from left to right in the usual, you know, MIDI piano roll or whatever, it seems kind of arcane. But then when you see it on the circle, you’re like, oh, the basic like funk backbeat, it just forms like a cross and like song club aid form. A Pentagon. And if you rotate the Pentagon around, you get all the different copy patterns, you know, so it’s this way to use technology to make a kind of previously inaccessible thing a lot more accessible and like discovery just through like playful experimentation.
Andrew Dubber
When you say accessible. Do you mean accessible to non musicians?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, I’m somebody who just, you know, I taught myself drum programming by trial and error. And it took me, you know, many, many years of just frustrated clicking around. So I was really motivated by wanting to save other people, a lot of people trial and error.
Andrew Dubber
What’s your blog about?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, it started as being about music technology, but it has very quickly evolved into being about music education, and specifically the politics of music education. Because when we talk about music technology, that’s usually just like a euphemism for, like pop music, right? That’s usually just you just mean like techno hip hop, all the platforms that derive from those things, right. And especially in the US, once you’re talking about that music, then you’re talking about, like black music. And in the academy, you know, the Academy has had a sort of slow evolution with pop music, right? I mean, they didn’t start teaching jazz and colleges in the US until the 80s, in any large scale way. And rock is starting to make some inroads now, but like, dance music, forget it. Right. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is some kind of leftover institutional racism at work in the slowness with which, you know, they’re willing to embrace these things. Which is frustrating for me, because for me, like, I like a lot of different music. And the thing that all of it has in common is like a beat at a backbeat, right, like rock country, reggae, Techno, jazz, dubstep, whatever. It’s all, you know, beat driven music that you’re supposed to dance to, or at least, it’s descended from something that somebody at one point was dancing to. And in the academy, okay, like, literally, I got asked by the lady who runs NYU, his laptop ensemble, which is super avant garde, she’s like, you know, hey, I’d love it. If you wrote something for us, like, Oh, that’s awesome. I’ve never written something for laptop ensemble, she’s like, Yeah, do whatever you want just no beats. I’m like, Oh, that’s like, Okay.
Andrew Dubber
Because something like quantize comes up in our conversations quite a lot. I was speaking with Jan Bang at Music Tech Fest in Stockholm in September. And one of his things was this idea of the breath in electronic music and a criticism that he heard of electronic music doesn’t breathe. And one of the potential ways to address that is to just strip contracts out to them.
Ethan Hein
Yeah, and there’s like that whole J Dilla. Like an quantized kind of thing. But like, you know, whether it’s quantized or not, there’s still like a pulse. Right? You know, and I feel like the main thing that separates like, quote, art, music, unquote, from quote, dance music, unquote, at this point is just one of them has a beat and the other doesn’t otherwise. Everybody’s using Ableton like.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. So in terms of the tools that you use, is there any in in NYU? Is there any development of new kinds of musical interfaces, all those other things?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, that’s what the groove pizza was for. And there’s a bunch of people working on the similar kinds of, like accessible types of interfaces. Like in the world of like iOS apps, there’s a lot of amazing things. Because like, for, like beginners, the standard thing is like, GarageBand, right? Or like, FL Studio, but like, those things are not beginner level tools. Like those things are 80% of the way to like full professional. I mean, FL Studio, my God, you know, half the stuff on the radio is done in FL. So yeah, for me, and, you know, people I’ve worked with, it’s like, how do we fill this gap between like, ground zero and the complexity of like a GarageBand? Because what these things it’s not like, the software is that hard to use, but like, you know, music is complicated, right? Like, so the analogy I always use is, like Microsoft Word, right? Like, Microsoft Word is not that hard. But like writing is hard. Yeah, yeah. So anybody can learn Microsoft Word, but then you got to learn how to write. I’m like, yeah, you can learn FL Studio, but like, you’re gonna need some help on like the music side, you know? And so can the software instead of just giving you like a blank slate, when you load it? Can it give you some guidance as to like what might actually sound good? Like, you know, this app figure done, I really love figure it’s made by propellerheads, who also make reason and it only makes like 248 bar loops. That’s all it does. And you get one drum machine, one lead synth and one bass, but it constrains you to like even subdivisions of the bar. So you just hold your thumb down on the square, and it just plays the sins but it triggers it every quarter note, eighth note, but then you can also divide up the bar like into five or into seven like into odd chunks. And so everything sounds good. You can’t do something unmusical with it. And like, you know, I’ve used it with like really little kids, I use it with my kids who are really small, you know, with old people, people with developmental disabilities. I mean, it’s very empowering. Just open this thing. And then about 10 seconds be like, oh, wow, span a minute, man, man. Oh, really cool.
Andrew Dubber
Does this sort of fit into the politics side of it, you’re talking about this idea of democratisation, or removing barriers to access to participation? Those sorts of things?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, somebody who’s like a professional producer is going to kind of bump up against the limitations of figure pretty quickly. But, yeah, for somebody who, you know, if you just sit them down in front of like FL Studio, or Ableton or GarageBand, you know, they’re just going to be terrified. But if you give them one of these apps, it’s not a blank slate. Like, there’s some patterns. Oh, yeah, when you load up figure, it just randomly chooses, like, instruments, rhythms. So you just hit play and stuff is coming out, rather than it’s just blank, right. And that’s a really smart design choice.
Andrew Dubber
I was told once that the the kind of the end game for music technology interface design, is to create something that nobody can be bad at, but which you could still become a virtuoso on. We’re getting close to anybody coming up with anything like that.
Ethan Hein
Um, I mean, right, now, you have to sort of make this trade off between, like, accessible and like robust, right. So like, the more choices you give people, the more complex your interface, and that’s it necessarily has to be. So like, you know, serum, right? If you see around, there’s like, 10 billion parameters. And so if you’re like, really, in a sense, and you know, how they work, it’s awesome. But if you’re not really in the sense, it’s like, totally overwhelming. And so like, you know, the animoog app, where it’s like, there’s four knobs, and then there’s this x, y thing, you drag your finger around. That is much more nice to you.
Andrew Dubber
So what’s the impact of what you I mean, I know you say you’re interested in the political side of things, what’s the actual sort of on the ground application of that interest? What’s the impact of that?
Ethan Hein
Well, yeah, so now what I’m trying to figure out is like, how do you like get this stuff into classrooms? Because I mean, I know in the UK, they’re doing a little better on this. But in the US, like music, education and public schools has not changed appreciably. And I’m, like, 100 years. It’s remarkable the degree to which it like does not change over time. And you can sort of see, okay, I can’t see why 50 years ago, they weren’t teaching like audio production in school, because it would have been too expensive and too hard. But like, now, it’s so easy. Why are they doing it? And yeah, there’s some of it is, we don’t have the money, we don’t have the equipment. But at this point, it mostly is just like, do we want the kids to be expressing themselves before they learn what they’re doing? You know, I come from rock and roll. It’s like, here’s a guitar, here’s two chords, go write a song. But you know, in like, classical music and jazz now, you’re supposed to climb up the whole mountain before you’re allowed to kind of express yourself, you know. And so the idea that music class could be like an art class, where you just draw your pictures, no matter how terrible they are. That is very alien to the kind of culture of music education. And yeah, I thought it was a technology optical and it is not. It’s a cultural article.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. So many things. Right? Are you one of these people that believes that not just if you get better at music, then your life is richer, and has music and so on. But if you get better at music, or you teach music to kids in school, that everything gets better?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, there’s all this malarkey about how it like makes you better at math and stuff. I mean, I don’t think it hurts your ability to do math, but that’s sort of an unfortunate advocacy angle. Better to just say, like, yeah, it’s actually the best advocacy angle I’ve heard is this guy, Steve Dillon was an Australian music educator, who said it’s a public health measure, you know, it’s more effective than antidepressants and has fewer side effects. You know, especially for kids who are, you know, they’re having trouble at home or, you know, they’re struggling for whatever reason. I mean, music might be like, the one thing in their day where they feel kind of validated as a person, you know,
Andrew Dubber
and also social. I mean, one of the main contributors to mental illness is loneliness. Yeah, absolutely. And so people not just making music, but making music together, I guess is something
Ethan Hein
right. And so whether you’re in like the wind band, or you’re in a punk band, or you’re, you know, producing hip hop tracks with your buddy in your bedroom, yeah, absolutely a way to like get past the isolation.
Andrew Dubber
What are some cool projects that you’ve seen coming out of particularly NYU,
Ethan Hein
a thing at NYU that I’m really proud of is we got a gift from Ed Sullivan’s grandson to start this kind of music mentorship club. It was originally called The Ed Sullivan fellows programme and it’s called core music. And the idea was, you know, Emily has all these awesome studios and facilities aren’t really used on the weekend. So on the weekend, we have these young kids, these rappers and producers coming in from like, you know, eastern parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. And they just like, set up in the studios and in classrooms and conference rooms and record tracks, and we thought we were going to be doing like all this formal education, it turns out, the kids don’t need it, they just need a place to do their thing. And, you know, for me, like, I love hip hop, but I’m a real outsider to it. And it’s really been an education for me just getting to hang out with them and see how they work. You know, and I know for them, some of their lives are really hard, you know, and it’s just nice for them to get to go into like a fancy recording studio and be, you know, feel like they’re an artist, not just some kid. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
Do you have any sense of a kind of a difference in the context of the US, as opposed to say, Europe in the UK?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, so I know, you know, the UK, is, has been trying to do this kind of pop music pedagogy for many decades. And I know it sort of proceeded in fits and starts, but Lucy Greene, who’s kind of the leading voice of pop music pedagogy. You know, she, she’s based in the UK, and she’s been writing about this stuff since the 80s. And in Scandinavia, they’re doing amazing things. You know, every school in Sweden has like a rock band in it. And like, half the pop music producers in America are Swedish, I assume, because of this awesome schooling that they get. You know, and like, Finland is doing awesome things with this. As with so many things in education, you know, like, teachers in the US are like looking at Finland and Sweden being like, oh, man, we are so far behind.
Andrew Dubber
And yet everybody wants to come here. Once you know, the indicator of success is we made it in America.
Ethan Hein
Yeah, no, because I mean, Americans, music culture is awesome. Like, our institutional culture is a nightmare. But, I mean, we have all the African Americans, and that’s where all the ideas come from. So yeah, that makes sense.
Andrew Dubber
And also the sheer size of the potential audience, I guess, as part of that, but but I mean, there are there are three, I was having this conversation last night, there are three net exporters of music in the world as the US the UK and Sweden, everybody else brings in more music than they send out. Economically speaking, this is true. But so to get basically, to get into the US means you get into the world. Yeah, I guess it’s kind of the way you see that. But do you do the people here see that as an advantage? We’re in America now. So we’re already sort of halfway to made it.
Ethan Hein
Um, I mean, it’s weird. Like, the formal music education world is so disconnected from like, America’s music culture, and like always has been right. Like, they, they started appreciating jazz in Europe at kind of in the sort of highbrow setting, decades before they did here. Right. And you think about rock, like, you know, here, it was a sort of low class music, you know, for like, black kids and juvenile delinquents, and then the Beatles, and the stones were like, Oh, no, hey, like, everybody could enjoy this. And then techno right, like, it comes out of these black clubs in Chicago and New York. And then it’s really like the Germans and the Brits were like, hollywood guys, kind of what’s reflect your own stuff back at you. So yeah, I definitely think a lot of this stuff is appreciated in Europe, much more than it’s appreciate. I mean, we financially support it, right? Like, but yeah, we definitely don’t
Andrew Dubber
give it a lot of love. Yeah, I got a DM, for instance, just come to mean something specific here that it didn’t mean, when it kind of, you know, was sort of a tiny club in the UK, so that the cultural interpretation of what a particular type of music is about I think, is really interesting, for sure. But in terms of the interface, it’s just to get back to the political dimension of that, is there do you think a political dimension to the way in which interfaces are designed that, that reflect that we know that actually have an impact on you know, who can make music? And,
Ethan Hein
yeah, I mean, you know, I know like software developers tend to not think of these terms, but I’ve befriended a lot of people at Ableton. And I love Ableton, like I’m not on their payroll, but like, I just think it’s like one of the coolest things that ever existed. And they, you know, they taught me a lot about music, because the whole premise of the thing is that you’re using existing recordings as like raw material for new music, like you’re literally just playing these loops as an instrument. And I suppose you could do that 100% with like, royalty free loops, but that’s not what we use it for. Right? Is it for like manipulating copyrighted samples? That’s like a pretty strong statement about like, who owns all this material, right. And what is it for?
Andrew Dubber
Do you think there’s a place for academia to have a voice in that debate about, you know, things like, for instance, copyright reform and ownership and all the rest of it? Is there an advocacy role for the academic was a purely critic.
Ethan Hein
I mean, I wish like Yeah, you know, again, there’s not a lot of hip hop and not a lot of techno in the academy at the moment. And a lot of the hip hop scholarship comes out of like English departments, or like ethnomusicology, or history or African American Studies, like, the musicians are not embracing it yet. Now, hopefully that’ll change.
Andrew Dubber
Is there something in music education? I mean, I think of somebody like Berklee, for instance, which is about teaching musicians to be musicians. Yes. Is there any of that sort of finding its way into the kind of the the ethos of you know, not just how to be a musician, but why to be a musician?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, the wind is blowing in that direction. So I teach at NYU, and I also teach at Montclair State University, which is like the biggest state school in New Jersey, the only one in New Jersey, and you know, their music school is excellent, but it’s a super traditional Conservatory. However, in the past few years, they started requiring everybody to take intro to music tech, so performance majors, education majors, the composition majors, everybody has to take it. And I mean, I use that class as an opportunity to say like, Hey, guys, it’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the past 50 years wouldn’t, you know? Yeah, you really have an opportunity to rethink like, what musical creativity even is, and sure you can go back to being a flute performance manager after this class is over and do what you want. But at least you have an opportunity to say, oh, wow, but I could also like make beats with my phone. Hmm.
Andrew Dubber
That you mentioned when you when we started, and we were talking about your blog as you started this as a kind of, I guess, personal brand, in other words you use but it’s kind of that’s how it came across. And the extension of that was to get into academia. What’s the endgame? How do you know when you want?
Ethan Hein
So I’m working on a PhD right now should be done in a year or two. And then hopefully, we’ll just have like, more of a platform. This is sad, but like, you get a lot more your emails returned when you’re like, behind Professor of Music, rather than I’m some guy with a lot of opinions. So yeah, I mean, definitely having a credential opens a lot of institutional doors and just gets people listening to you who wouldn’t otherwise
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, but why, like, what what are you trying to get out of it as a result?
Ethan Hein
Oh, I mean, I just, like my music education when I was a kid was a bummer. Like, it was really not good. It was all classical music. And it not only did it bore me, but it convinced me that I wasn’t even musical. And it took me years of like, self directed effort to like find my way back in through like the backdoor rock’n’roll. I know, way too many people who have that same experience. And so yeah, I would just like it if kids were getting to be creative at school, you know, I’m very idealistic that way. Like, I would like it if school music was like, more empowering for more kids. So that ultimately the book Yeah, totally, for sure. Um, I’ve, you know, I’ve had an opportunity now to start doing some like teacher training, some like, you know, professional development, and to get to teach some like music education students, some, like future teachers. And that’s like, the work that’s really exciting to me, you know, because I feel like that, like, that’s like a force multiplier. You get the future teachers and then they go in the world, and they’re doing the work to you know, do
Andrew Dubber
you get to also be the musician as part of this?
Ethan Hein
Yeah, I mean, I’m an old guy with kids now. So I’m definitely not like out in the clubs, but I am constantly like busting out tracks and putting them on SoundCloud. And I like to remix student projects. It’s like a really good way to critique them. Instead of verbally, like, hey, this would sound better with like a heavier kick drum just like stick it in Ableton and put heavier kick drum under it.
Andrew Dubber
So people get to hear what they work with sound like it was better. Exactly. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I can empathise with that. Absolutely. Ethan, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Cheers. That’s Ethan Hein. And that’s the MTF podcast, the last one for 2019. In fact, I’m going to be back in the new year with more interesting people who have fascinating insights into the world of music, technology, innovation, ai narrative ethics, songwriting, handmade crafts, rights policy and all the other stuff we talked about here. And hopefully, if you haven’t heard all 60 episodes yet, here’s your chance to catch up. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your year. Have a fantastic holiday season, whatever holidays you happen to enjoy wherever you happen to enjoy them. And I’ll catch you back here in the new year. Cheers.
