Ethan Hein

There was a lot of hype coming into the Ethan Hein week. Some of us had already had a lecture with him about hip hop music and its inseparability with African American culture. That left me completely reeling, and I still don't think I have recovered yet.

In tech though, as a certified Ableton god, Ethan went through some techniques which would up our game to the next level.

He talked about vocoder effects and how you can alter an audio clip to give it that extra robotic/sci-fi feeling through pre-set or or the vanilla vocoder effect.

This is one of my favourite examples of a vocoder/harmonizer effect.

Ethan also dropped some philosophy on electronic music vs. acoustic music about the use of absolute silence. In most acoustic settings, absolute silence is not possible and undesirable but when you're making stuff in Ableton or Logic, this is not only possible but throws a spanner in the works, a twist which can be exploited to create something new. Who was it, Debussy who said music being the silence between notes? Our ears conditioned to hear patterns of sounds, and when those patterns are broken with absolute silence, you can get really interesting effects

This guy gets it:

Just wanted to end on something about his hip-hop lecture and comments about the winning film at the Sydney Film Festival: thanks for pointing out new ways to view products of culture. I am still trying to understand systemic and institutionalised racism, and catch myself being a product of that system.