Songwriting

Songs are often born from strangely understood, hidden places, with no map in or out. These posts share songwriters’ insights, approaches and stories about their craft.

A circle of people dressed for cold weather standing in a circle on sand - Pyragraph

A Body of Many Bodies Flowing with sonic collaboration along the Rio Grande

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In There Must Be Other Names For The River, we ask ourselves about our personal and structural relationships with the drying river that today we call the Rio Grande. In this sound performance, listeners hear the voices of six singers channeling the river. Each singer represents a point where streamflow data have been collected from the 1970s to now and into possible futures.

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5 Songs Without Words - Pyragraph

Five Fantastic Songs With No Lyrics

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Singing the words to our favorite song is a way to interact with the art we love, a way to feel like we are part of it… But some songs are so good that we love them even if they have no lyrics.  Some songs are able to communicate a full range of human emotion without a single word.  Here are five of those songs, and what makes them so iconic.

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Dear Rich Intellectual Property Blog - Pyragraph

Dear Rich: Using MIDI Music from a Video Game Cartridge

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Dear Rich: I want to know if it is considered sampling when you record sound coming from a synthesizer that is playing electronic note data stored on a memory chip. Technically when you play an NES game (’80s video game system), the music that is playing is not pre-recorded. It is actually played “live” from musical note data on the game cartridge (gameplay triggers a MIDI pattern) in the console into the internal synthesizer.

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Chicharra by Eliza Lutz - Pyragraph

Chicharra on Chicharra

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I asked all the members of Chicharra, a band I’m in, to come up with three questions for another player. And it’s like they’ve been giving interviews their whole lives. Their curiosity about the nuances of how music is made, how the other people in our band-fam experience practice and performance, was so spot-on. I loved hearing them talk shop.

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Prism Bitch - Pyragraph

What’s Your Deal, Prism Bitch?

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Our advice for aspiring musicians and artists: 1) Trust your instincts and find a project where you can put some of that trust in the people you play with. It’s like magic. 2) Hold yourself and your collaborators to the “Don’t be a Dick” Golden Rule. 3) Surround yourself with kind people who inspire you.

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Dear Little Bobby - Pyragraph

Dear Little Bobby: Too Slow, Manilow?

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Our modern civil rights movement needs as many people as possible to be themselves and for us to work together for change. But people “being themselves” also means that they are allowed to not talk about their private life for as long as they do not want to talk about it, maybe even forever.

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