This is very exciting! I’ve been planning this for a while, and here for you is some excellent writing about music. I’ve tried to be inclusive, but this list will definitely be biased towards my tastes and listening habits.

  • Why Music Ownership Matters - The physical act of owning is very important. In the age of streaming, this is something that Spotify and Apple Music etc. must realise. I believe that the reason a lot of people put up posters of bands and artists they really like is because of this need for knowing that one owns the music. Is the possession of a hard drive of music a real possession?

  • Can AI Make Musicians More Creative? - Google’s Magenta Project is staggering in its purview, and its (so-far) success.

Google’s Magenta uses TensorFlow — the same open-source machine-learning software that helps the tech giant reverse-image-search photos, translate languages, and suggest search terms — to make art. Google research scientist Douglas Eck describes a process similar to Cope’s carrot approach called “reinforcement learning,” in which a computer is exposed to a wide range of musical styles. The computer then does its best to replicate the kind of song you want (country-pop tune? ’70s hard-rock jam?), and you tell it how good or bad a job it’s doing.

But is AI going to overpower us completely? Maybe not (I hope so too).

The most interesting results, Eck says, come when his team brings in a human musician to take the wheel. “They can say, ‘This is what I want from my music, I know how to write this with my own rules and feedback,’” Eck says. “It enables artists to directly control the flavor of the output.”

  • For Josh Groban, a Boot Camp for Broadway - Josh Groban is one of my favourite singers. This is a profile of his transformation for a role he undertook as part of a Broadway musical. He had to alter his voice to reflect that his character Pierre was often drunk and agitated. He had to sometimes sing in a growl, which he never would do ordinarily. He also had to learn to play the accordion and get accustomed to Russian folk music. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read!

  • Why Happy Music Makes You Do Bad Things - Interesting perspective. Humans seem to be the only species who resonate so widely with what we call music. Studies have shown that listening to happy music makes one slightly more unreserved and carefree, and more likely to perform ‘bad’ acts.

  • Did a Violin Teacher From Plano, Texas Solve the World’s Greatest Classical Music Mystery? - Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ are told to have a secret ‘message’, of sorts. Elgar in a note wrote that there is a theme that runs through the music but is never played. A violin teacher from Piano has spent many years trying to decode the enigma in Enigma, and he may be close to the right answer. If there is one?

  • A Conversation With Brian Eno About Ambient Music - Brian Eno is a musician who I’ve always been a little shy of, because of his rather disconnected music (at least that’s what I think). However, his ambient albums are very nice for reading or studying. This is a great conversation that delves deep into how Eno’s mind works, and why he does what he does. His reliance on technology and computers is surprising, and the scientific manner of his composition is pretty cool.

If I make something like *Reflection, people know it’s a sort of calculated, dispassionate piece of music. But if I record a song with my voice, people assume, Oh, it’s his voice, therefore it must be carrying something deep. A voice is very exposing, and of course, a voice is always seen as being the voice of the creator, no matter how many times you tell them it isn’t. A lot of singers are really trying out personalities when they sing. It isn’t them. It’s just like somebody writing a play: He isn’t the person in the play, he’s inventing personas and seeing how they interact.*

Like a magic mirror held up to America’s heteronormative postwar culture, its music reflected a dignified, and seductive, vision of gay life. Just below the album’s title read the teaser: “For adult listeners only—sultry stylings by a most unusual vocalist.” For those LGBTQ folks in the know, this record offered a glimpse of the acceptance they’d long been denied, subtly placing gay romance into the standard musical canon. And yet, at a time when even urban LGBTQ communities were mostly invisible, “Love Is a Drag” lacked the publicity needed to really make waves.

In an age of overproduction and digital manipulation, Tiny Desk offers us something honest: performances rife with awkward pauses, untuned guitars, and hiccups. It reassures us that our vulnerabilities are meant to be celebrated, not hidden.

  • Cognitive Science in the Jazz Club -Vijay Iyer is currently the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s artist-in-residence, but earlier he did a PhD in physics. This is an interesting piece about his views on his music and its structure.