This Tuesday (May 3rd) is “National Teacher Appreciation Day” in the US.

I know, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about these ‘National <insert your cause here> Week’ proclamations – it can sometimes seem that they’re primarily about safe uncontroversial camera time for the politicians proposing them.  On the other hand, “National Teacher Appreciation Day” has me taking a minute or two to reflect back on two of the best teachers I’ve had: one from my master’s degree studies, one from back in high school.

Here, by way of a belated ‘thank you’, is a little about them…

Navin Chopra, Economics My master’s degree curriculum was made up of equal parts Stern School of Business MBA courses and NYU graduate-level computer science courses.  At NYU, computer science is part the mathematics department, and although math is a  big deal there, the fact remains that computer science has less to do with mathematics than you’d think – so I always had the impression it was given short shrift at NYU.  Not so the Stern MBA courses I was spending the other half of my time in – while I was there, Financial Times had the school ranked 10th worldwide and 3rd worldwide in finance.  So as I sat surrounded by MBA students for Professor Chopra’s first ‘Foundations of Finance’ lecture, I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Foundations of Finance’ was part of the MBA core curriculum, and was viewed at Stern as something akin to ‘economics boot camp’.  The material was challenging, and the course moved quickly: NPV, IRR, PVIFA, yield curves, bond pricing, correlation coefficients…  I’ll be honest, I’ve half-forgotten many of those formulas, and I haven’t touched the scientific calculator I had to buy for the course since minutes after finishing my final exam.  To this day, though, I’m still struck by how rewarding (and enjoyable) Professor Chopra made the experience.  Granted, it was a self-selected, highly motivated room to begin with – but he had most of us wanting to learn this difficult material for its own sake - we were  into it.  And let’s be honest, that’s not often the case in business school (it appears Prof. Chopra has since moved on to Columbia Business School – NYU’s loss).

Given that half my courses met in the Institute of Mathematics building, it’s a little ironic that the math I was exposed to while at NYU happened down the street at the b-school, but that’s what ‘Foundations of Finance’ was – essentially, a math class.  What I particularly appreciated were the fleeting glimpses into the beauty of the math that Prof. Chopra seemed to get a kick out of showing us: more than once, we’d be taken up to a certain point with some new formula or chart, and then with a trace of a dry smile, he’d reveal it as another way of approaching the same concept expressed by an entirely different formula or chart we had covered a month and a half ago.  During those ‘eureka’ moments, I suddenly  understood (for the first time!) how a young person could become fascinated enough with math and/or economics to choose a career based upon it, as Prof. Chopra had clearly done (and as has I had done with music, back in high school).

Which brings me to…

Arthur Simeone Mr. Simeone was one of my high school’s three music teachers (I’m pretty confident that’s not so common anymore).   He taught chorus and music theory, and although chorus was not my thing, I did take his music theory classes – and in that laser-like way teenagers can become fascinated by things, I became fascinated by the harmonic architecture of music.

In addition to his teaching, Mr. Simeone was also a jazz piano player of some local renown.  To have a professional musician in my midst, the first I’d ever met – well, that made a big impression on me.  It wasn’t jazz harmony that he was teaching us, though – Mr. Simeone’s theory classes were based around the study of “figured bass” (“generalbass” in German), a type of chord notation used 350 years ago during the Baroque period.  As it happens, the study of this archaic notation makes for a great introduction to music theory, because it introduces into the relatively ‘vertical’ study of harmony some basic counterpoint (which deals with the relative ‘horizontal’ movement of notes) – but I digress.  The point is, although he was the ‘cool’ teacher with a mysterious and (to me, at least) glamorous musical life outside school, Arthur Simeone’s music theory classes were pretty rigorous.  Baroque music is all about structural and logical soundness, and so working with figured bass involves following some hard and fast rules – the teaching of which he took very seriously.  Like Prof. Chopra, he had great respect for the subject matter, which proved infectious in the classroom.

He also managed to approach the subject matter with a curiosity (and even a playfulness) students could identify with, and that proved infectious too.  Granted, by then I had just resolved to pursue music seriously, had little use for high school other than my music courses, and was about to graduate six months early to study music for a semester at a local state university – maybe it’s not surprising, then, that I was so impressed by a music teacher – maybe it was the subject matter itself.  Alas, for my own sake, I wish that was true: in my undergraduate studies I found it was possible, quite possible, in fact, to have some astoundingly bad music teachers – even at a ‘prestigious’ conservatory.

No, Mr. Simeone would have been a great teacher regardless of the subject.  He also would have had an equally great effect on his students regardless of whether he taught at a local high school or at a major conservatory – and since “National Teacher Appreciation Day” is primarily about the same public school teachers who are being made such political scapegoats of these days (cue Jon Stewart), this a point worth using the bold font for.

What makes a good teacher?  I think you’ve first got to have some innate talent for the simple ‘public speaking’ aspect of it, there’s no way around that (I’ve given just enough workshops to suspect that this might be a talent that, unlike my university professor brother, I might lack).  The more crucial quality, though, is intellectual generosity.  Although one taught at an internationally ranked business school and one taught in a suburban New York high school, both Prof. Chopra and Mr. Simeone both ‘got it’ – they both approached the job of teaching without bringing any ego-related baggage of their own to the table, and maybe that in itself was a lesson.

So, thanks Professor Chopra.

Thanks, Mr. Simeone.

And to our readers, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a teacher as good as either of these guys – happy National Teacher Appreciation Day.

Before getting involved in technology/new media research and analysis, I made a living as a  musician and composer.  Frankly, at times it was more of a living than at others – but suffice it to say, I was active enough to leave a fair amount of online evidence of a musical career still laying around up there in the cloud.

Although my days of releasing CDs (back when they still released CDs, that is) and writing for TV commercials are largely behind me, every now and then I still google myself (who doesn’t occasionally self-google?) – and a few weeks ago, I started noticing videos with my music showing up in search results on YouTube.  The recordings being used (demos from various older projects) were all otherwise unencumbered and were still being licensed occasionally for other uses, so in an effort to protect myself, I decided to contact YouTube and see if I could draw their attention to the issue.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new and interesting way some recording artists have started to use the internet: in an "if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em" move, several pop acts have decided to embrace the medium to the extent of making even the individual elements (the discrete instrumental and vocal parts that make up the recording as a whole) of some of their work freely available online.  The general public can download these ‘stems’, alter them, edit them, add new material, and put it all back together as a new (and hopefully interesting) creation of their own.

Completing the circle, these remixes can then be uploaded back onto the original artists’ websites, for sharing and commentary.

Just a few artists hosting public remix "contests": Radiohead , Mariah Carey , Franz Ferdinand , Third Eye Blind , and Nine Inch Nails …

And so you have fans, aspiring DJs, and recording studio professionals all sharing their creations side by side on the original artist’s website: a fundamental redefinition and flattening of of the artist/audience relationship, the composition/production relationship, and an obvious musical corollary to web 2.0 – ‘open source music’, if you will…


All well and good. But while that’s what the cool kids have been up to, along comes Microsoft Research with a decidedly uncool demo of their new $29.95 Songsmith application. This program will take a melody sung into your computer’s audio input and generate chords and accompaniment based on on the pitches it detects, the styles you select, and the settings of parameters with names such as "Happy" and "Jazzy" (more on the modeling and algorithms behind all that here) .
Whether or not this is an intriguing or a sadly misguided use of technology is open for discussion – what’s more interesting (to me, at least) are the cover versions of popular songs now starting to appear up on Youtube using the original vocal tracks as Songsmith input material. Some (such as this version of Oasis’ "Wonderwall") are almost musical – while others (such as this take on Van Halen) are just kind of cringe-inducing.


It would be all to easy to come down on Songsmith as fundamentally anti -musical (a lot of people have seen that unfortunate Microsoft demo video and done just that) – but consider this: if you believe (as I do) that a little play-time is healthy for us grownups too, what’s so bad about software that lets people have some fun with their computer creating these Soundsmith cover version/remixes?  Maybe they’ll be inspired to use the software to take it a step further and at least get at least a whiff of what it might be like to write a song on their own from scratch…

So while it might not be for everyone, I think Microsoft Songsmith is just fine, for what it is – unleashing the inner Moby within all the John Hodgman s out there…

As part of my ‘other life’ as a music composer/producer, about a year ago I was invited to give a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in studio production.  To teach my approach to mixing, I decided to bring the individual tracks from a recent piece I had done – almost 30 discrete sound files with one instrument or part on each, that together made up the piece as a whole.  These were then remixed by the students during the workshop while I coached the sessions – not only a great way to demonstrate my personal production and mixing methodologies, but (somewhat unexpectedly) it was also very interesting to see how others approached and altered the material.

Now consider the Web 2.0 model, in which there’s no longer just that one-way street running from server to client – instead, communication occurs in a more reciprocal and viral manner.   Well, as it happens, there’s a near-perfectly analogous phenomenon going on with recorded music: much as I had done, artists are making the individual elements (or “stems”) that taken together comprise their finished recordings freely available online – to to be freely downloaded, deconstructed, altered, and remixed by anyone who cares to.  The power of today’s personal computer and the ubiquity of multitrack digital audio applications such as Apple’s included-with-the-OS  Garage Band make this possibility for everyone, not just us recording studio types.

It appears Thomas Friedman was right, the world is getting flatter….

A few examples:

• Easily 20 years ahead of its time, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 release “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” was, at the risk of understatement, a groundbreaking record (just ask Moby, who built a career on his 1999 homage, “Play”).  Concurrent with a 2006 Bush of Ghosts re-release, Byrne and Eno made stems of several tracks available to the public and hosted an online remix competition, in which remixes could be uploaded back to the site and then voted on – results of which can be heard here.

• Kudus to Warner Music Group for going along with Byrne and Eno on the open licensing.   Radiohead, on the other hand, having had abandoned their traditional major label to release their latest album “In Rainbows” online themselves this year, could do whatever they pleased with the material – which was to simultaneously give away stems of the track “Nude” online for a similar remix competition.  The response from both professional DJs and producers as well as the general public was described by the band as ‘overwhelming’ – so much so, in fact,  that another track (“Reckoner“) was subsequently given away for remix as well.

Think of it as “open source music” (in fact, Byrne and Eno used the same Creative Commons license well-known in the open source software community to make the stems available).

I’m not a gamer – for me, though, (and maybe you?) this is a great way to have some fun with your computer. Try it out sometime… a little bit of creative playing around is good for you.