You should see him tap dance

Sorry Phil, I don't know if I have anything smart to say about Auto-Tune the News, but I do want to give a shout out to my former Congressman Steve Buyer for that awesome song about smoking lettuce. I don't think my new representative, Brad Ellsworth, has been given a solo yet.

Okay, my attempt at something smart. I actually found the arguments easier to follow, perhaps because of the repetition and slowing down both the rate of syllables and the rate of content. Plus the Auto-tuning made many of the voices far less annoying (Palin and Kristol, I'm looking at you). And four-part harmony makes everything better.

When do we bifurcate?

Okay, a DJ created a mashup of Rick Astley and Nirvana (yes, you are about to be Rick-Rolled). Listen to/watch the video and tell me if Rick and Nirvana are using the same tonic, or two different tonics. Show your work.



I heard it as one tonic, with Rick creating some very extended harmonies and dissonant non-chord tones at points. Is this because I expect blues-influenced music to go beyond the triadic norm, or because my brain wants to find the simplest pattern to fit all the information? In other words, did I come to this conclusion top-down (schema driven) or bottom-up (sequential event expectancies)? Likely the two "strategies"* reinforced each other. I do know that if there were fewer common tones, or if the genre had led me to expect more melodic tonal closure, I would have heard two separate tonics, a la Milhaud.