Too Much Music

Coming at ya with a show about live performance: the gear we use, how we think about it, and what we're planning for the future. Covered topics include Alison's live Bitwig and/or Ableton setup using the Ableton Push 3 and various mixers, Greg's spatial audio work, their 2023 live setup for Blix Byrd, and...Justin Bieber?!?Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.S...

Greg and Alison are back...to talk about themselves! In this episode, they'll tell you about how they met, why they're not still married, and what things are like today. Don't worry, you'll hear plenty of music talk along the way. Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.c...

Alison & Greg talk about how we hear, understand, and define the identity of a piece of music. After a bit of a dive into the great music thinkers of the 20th and 21st century and their work on how our minds hear and process music, they jump into the specifics of what musical parameters go into identity, and how we can define and codify those parameters so that they're available to an AI system.Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison &am...

Today we take a look back at the music technology underpinning a startup co-founded by our hosts in the early 2010s. With the motto "Use Music to Find Music" , Clio Music was perhaps the first commercially available search engine to speak the language of music and has been a part of TiVo since 2012. Listen in as our intrepid hosts share insights from that experience as well as ways they see this technology playing an important role in the future of music AI.Subscribe on your favorite pod...

Where does music live? Is it the sound in the room? Is it in your brain? Or maybe it lives on paper? In order to repeat it, we need to create systems to write it down, and ultimately represent music as information or data. But what gets lost when we do this?Writing music down seems straightforward enough. But as we’ll see, the process of reducing the rich experience of music to dots on paper isn’t as simple as jotting down a grocery list or even writing down your innermost thoughts about last...

The first sign that the Wilder marriage might be in trouble happened before the wedding: it was a knock-down, drag-out fight about whether there's a fundamental difference between music in the European art music tradition and music in the American blues tradition. (We can all agree that this is a severely nerdy topic to fight about.) Eventually, after years of testy conversation, Alison conceded on this one -- Greg and Alison now agree, they're different. But how?This two (maybe three?!...

The first sign that the Wilder marriage might be in trouble happened before the wedding: it was a knock-down, drag-out fight about whether there's a fundamental difference between music in the European art music tradition and music in the American blues tradition. (We can all agree that this is a severely nerdy topic to fight about.) Eventually, after years of testy conversation, Alison conceded on this one -- Greg and Alison now agree, they're different. But how?This two (maybe three?!)-part...

Since Alison and Greg are a formerly-married couple, they know each other's strengths and weaknesses. In this two-part series, they're using that knowledge for good, and creating challenges tailor-made to help the other person become a better musician -- and who knows, maybe a better person along the way!This episode covers Greg's challenge to Alison: to craft a drum sound for her upcoming Blix Byrd album by testing out a few different sounds. This is opposed to her usual gut-instinct way of ...

Since Alison and Greg are a formerly married couple, they know each other's strengths and weaknesses. In this two-part series, they're using that knowledge for good, and creating challenges tailor-made to help the other person become a better musician -- and who knows, maybe a better person along the way!This episode covers Alison's challenge to Greg: to create a piece of music without using his composer craftiness. He's not allowed to think about what he's going to make, but has to abandon h...

It's official: the internet has been a game-changer for music. Alison and Greg dive into how music is and isn't valuable today, both monetarily and culturally.As usual, their conversation is far-reaching. They talk about the usual suspects: Spotify, major labels, Napster, machine learning algorithms, and music for media. Of course, it doesn't stop there. You'll also hear about the desensitization of listeners by reality TV danger music, the Faustian deal we make as musicians, the sheer brilli...

Greg and Alison want to tell you why you should (or shouldn't) go to music school. In this episode, they explore what it's like to take a traditional path through music school, including how music school might be beneficial or detrimental depending on your own musical goals.It's a magical mystery tour through a diverse set of of topics, including the differences between composers and songwriters, learning how to music on YouTube, Greg's mentor George Rochberg, the creative process in ge...