Transmissions

There is a moment in Daft Punk’s One More Time where the whole track seems to inhale and exhale with the kick drum. Nothing is technically wrong. The compressor is…

Every piece of music ever made is doing exactly two things: creating tension, and releasing it. That’s the complete list. Harmony, rhythm, dynamics, texture, register — these are all just…

Every culture on earth, working independently, arrived at the same five notes. Chinese court music, West African kora traditions, Scottish folk songs, indigenous music from the Americas — the pentatonic…

Kevin Kelly published “1000 True Fans” in 2008, and it should have changed everything. In some ways it did — Patreon exists partly because of it, and a generation of…

A music supervisor at a mid-tier TV production is sitting with a browser open, a deadline in four hours, and a scene that needs something sparse, melancholic, instrumental — something…

There is a moment in almost every mix where something technically correct still feels cold. The levels are fine, the EQ is balanced, nothing is clipping — and yet the…

Cut the music from any recording and listen to what’s left. Not nothing — something. A low hum from the HVAC system three floors down. The particular way the room…

There is a moment in the opening of Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits — a recording often held up as a landmark of early CD-era production — where the…

Six hundred years ago, music theorists warned singers away from a specific interval. They called it diabolus in musica — the devil in music. Not metaphorically. They meant it as…

There’s a moment when a chord progression feels like it should resolve but doesn’t — it just hangs there, neither dark nor bright, neither finished nor broken. That feeling has…