(11/19/2018 – absent for Thanksgiving break)

(11/21/2018 – Thanksgiving Break)

11/26/2018

Throughout the entirety of this course we have looked at the overarching idea that all music is saturated in politics and history. Watermelon Man is just another example of this idea. In 1962 Herbie Hancock originally produced the song, and since then it has been re worked and re-produced by multiple artists in different genres and forms. Some of these include Mongo Santamaria, Manfred Mann, or Poncho Sanchez. It is easy to see both how and why this song, like many others, has made its way through multiple eras and areas of culture. When a song is catchy and has a rhythm or beat that is easy to pick up and not difficult to remember, it is more likely to be carried through different groups of people and areas of life. Even little factors, such as skin color or upbringing, impacted how this song changed and altered from artist to artist. As Professor O’Malley pointed out, in reference to Manfred Mann’s version, “white people do play it faster.”

Most of us turn on the radio pretty frequently, but a lot of the time forget that this form of media is regulated by an external organization that does actually have some say in what we hear and don’t hear. The FCC, while regulating who broadcasts on each station, also has input as to what information is “appropriate” to share on the radio, and prohibit certain vulgar or obscene material. Television works in a similar way, only visually. Personally I agree with the fact that there is some censorship in what can be said and done on the radio and on television. Many people prefer to stay away from vulgar content, and if there is regulation on such material, it makes it significantly easier. Also, the purpose of radio and television is to serve the public and ultimately entertain or inform. Vulgar material does not have a necessary value is achieving this goal, and it can be easily achieved without the use of inappropriate language or images. Only in a case where it is absolutely necessary to cross those lines do I agree with the sharing of such content. Many may disagree with this, but I stand by the fact that as long as it is fairly and properly regulated, with no bias to any particular individual, FCC regulation if shared material is a good idea.

11/28/2018

Every class, I make it my goal to connect that day’s individual lecture to the rest of the course. To connect overarching ideas to the smaller details and examples given in the lessons. Some days it makes perfect sense. When we learned about the minstrel shows, almost everything lined up perfectly and it all connected like a dot game.

Then some days are like this, where we begin by talking about Nabisco, the mass market, and crowdsourcing within search engines and I almost have no idea how this would connect to anything we learned five weeks ago. So I keep listening.

Amazon, one of the most powerful entities in the nation and quite possibly more powerful than the government itself, has a database of information stored up of over billions of users. Devices such as Alexa or even simply your iPhone have the ability to track your domestic habits and listen to your conversations in order to persuade you to buy things you didn’t even know you wanted. This explains why we talk about some product or service and then twenty minutes later we are scrolling past an advertisement for it on facebook. In a way, our lives are regulated by the devices that we submit ourselves too. Much like our discussion of the regulation of radio and television on Monday, the information we are exposed too and the conversations we have largely determine what we buy and how we live our lives.

11/12/2018

While sampling is one important aspect of the development of music around the world, being able to look at the overall development of different genres is another key factor in analyzing the growth of music anywhere. Especially outside the US, where most if not all music is, on some level, unfamiliar to us. I have always though it is interesting how influence from music around the world can become almost invisible to us as it grows and progresses further and further from its original roots. Songs like J Lo’s On the Floor has roots in Bolivian folk music – two individuals by the names of Ulises Hermosa and his  brother Gonzalo. I have never heard these names before, and outside of looking at this particular song I probably never will again. But they contributed to a melody line that has been played in clubs, basements, through earphones, on radio stations, and at more parties than anyone could count.  (This in particular is another example of sampling). A lot of music has connections that we would never realize and it is so important to keep these connections in order to better understand both where music came from and where it is going.

11/14/2018

The invention and quickly increasing popularity of the MP3 changed the way we enjoy music a lot more than we realize. Not only in the way sounds are received, but in what we physically hear. MP3 technology has to ability to mask or compress certain frequencies so that they are not even heard. In some cases, sounds that are hardly heard can be removed completely.

The invention of the MP3 also became a utilitarian entity. It sparked the popularity of other devices, such as he use of cell phones to listen to music. This contributes to the idea that music derives its meaning from circulation. Again, as we have repeatedly learned through many different forms, information demands to be free. Music demands to be heard and spread, and with technologies such as these, it is wildly easy. This raises the question of the artist…should they be paid for every time a song is played? Should a listener be able to buy a song one time and listen to it freely? Should the music be free to begin with? Aren’t artists paid by other means anyway? I believe that if everyone had to pay .99 for every song they listened too, financially this would not be possible and therefore music would have a much more complicated route in spreading throughout society. That’s not to say it wouldn’t happen, I just believe it would be different, and would alter the experience of the listener.

(10/24/2018 – no class)

(10/29/2018 – absent)

(10/31/2018 – absent)

11/05/2018   

How do you acquire property without taking it by force?

There are many creative answers here – you could buy it, trade it, claim God or some all-powerful entity gave it to you…You could use john Locke’s answer, that being that property is yours once you put labor into it.

So what about idea? How can you ensure that nobody is going to rip off your idea, or better yet, how can you ensure you won’t get in trouble as an individual for any kind of accident in the corporate world? This is why a lot of corporations are formed. That way, an individual is not directly responsible, but it is the corporation as a separate entity that takes the blame. It is like an immortal being, one that can sign contracts, own land, pay wages, etc. I thought this was interesting because I had never realized that this is exactly how I view the idea of a corporation until it was pointed out to me.

11/07/2018

The idea of sampling in music sounds a lot like copyright infringement to me. I understand that it is different, and that sampling is actually a very important part of music development. Not to mention the fact that is it a way to reference and acknowledge music and artists that have created memorable works in the past. Sounds can be reworked and altered so that the basic premise is still there, but it continues to evolve with new artists and ideas. However, when we first began this discussion I couldn’t help but think what’s the difference between sampling and breaking copyright? Someone could claim to appreciate and honor another piece of music all they want by including it in their work, but couldn’t they also just be taking that music for their own benefit?

While that was my initial thought, the more I take a look at that idea the more able I am to argue it. Sure, let’s say that sampling is like breaking copyright, just for a hypothetical scenario. Even if this is true, isn’t it necessary? Doesn’t all new music come from old music? Christian hymns find many roots in Hawaiian music. Country “white man” banjo music originally came from Africa. Even more specific, modern music exemplifies the idea of sampling. One example of this is “I Like it” by Cardi B, who sampled the song “I Like It Like That” by Pete Rodriguez. While this is not the same song, it is easy to tell that many elements from Rodriguez’s song was used in Cardi B’s version.

I believe there is a fine line between sampling and breaking copyright, and this line must be tread on very carefully. Using older music to advance and transform new music, while at the same time keeping the roots of original songs is respectable and necessary for music to continue to evolve. However, there is a difference between that and simply re-working a song slightly for one’s own benefit, therefore lacking creativity. If you have to take a second glance and question whether it is sampling or not, it probably isn’t.

10/17/2018

In Henry Thomas’ song “Railroadin’ Some”, you can hear this song and almost immediately tell that it can be classified as a “country song”. Why is that? Because it “sounds country?” This reason has always made both the most and least amount of sense to me, yet I am willing to accept it ignorantly as a sufficient answer. But there is always something similar between a lot of the music I listen too. It all sounds somewhat “the same”, except if I am listening to music from around different parts of the world. I have come to learn from my experience both playing and studying music in high school that the common I IV V I chord progression has made its way into most popular music, and therefore gives a similar voice to songs that, from a distance, seem completely different.

Country music almost sounds handmade, and that is due to the instrumentation and often repeated chord progressions and timbre that has become associated with country music to modern listeners. “The human brain (…) operates by association (…) With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. ” (Bush P.14). Often, we hear country music and think of “the south”. We picture a farm or a cowboy or plaid patterns everywhere. But what we don’t consider is the history that lies behind all of these stereotypes. As we have learned earlier in the course, all music is saturated in politics and history, and often the history that lies behind most popular music is forgotten or pushed to the side. The fact that Christian hymns are laced with traces of Hawaiian music is just one example of this. Although this is a sad fact, that many times the history of a genre of music is overlooked, it does not take away from the fact that, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, there is a certain interconnectedness to information and music that no amount of ignorance can take away.

10/22/2018

The debate over the true cause of the Civil War has always been an interesting one. Many believe it was solely because of racism, or solely because of slavery. From what I have learned (and I am aware that there is a lot I still do not know) I believe it was largely caused by the pride of slave owners and dedication to protecting their way of life that fueled the fire of that war. It was not slavery alone, it was not the white man thinking he was superior to the black man alone. It was the need for slaveholders to continue to live the way they had been, and by any means protect their lifestyle up to that point. After the Civil War had ended, the country as a whole largely failed at mending the seam between the north and south. As commented by one of our classmates, there was little effort put in to welcome the south back into the Union. They were seen as having “lost” the war. This is reflected in the simple fact that we still refer to those states as “the south”.

A great deal of propaganda that comes from the time of the Civil War was posed, or faked in pursuit of painting the war in one light or another.

(10/08/2018 – No class)

10/10/2018

Growing up living in West Islip, NY, with my mother, going to my high school, I can 100% attest to the statement that White people clap on the wrong beat. We are the worst and it’s something we can’t help because naturally we think we have rhythm, but we don’t. Almost all pop music emphasizes a beat on the 2 and the 4 (and if you have no experience in music just bear with me here). But listeners from different backgrounds have different ways to interpreting where and when to clap on which beat. Clapping on beats 2 and 4 is rooted in music from Africa (you learn something new everyday!)

The Great Migration that occurred from around 1916 to 1970 mainly consisted of African Americans moving from the south to the north in order to get a better chance at life in America during this time. Until this point, blacks were associated almost exclusively with the south, and racism was still extremely pertinent in society. Virginia Senator Carter Glass widely contributed to the disenfranchisement of black voters, supporting discrimination and outwardly making no effort to fight for their right to vote. However, in places such as Chicago, they could vote. I found it interesting that blues singers, such as Bessie Smith or Muddy Waters began to emerge around the same time. Relatively few white Americans listened to their music at this time and into the 1950s. Toward the end of his life, Muddy Waters began to be seen as an icon of rural authenticity; this is another example of how difficult it is to speak outside of racial stereotypes, especially in American history, it seems like everything is riddled in these stereotypes. W.C. Handy, “one of the first to arrange and publish blues material,” played a large part in amplifying the popularity of the Blues genre, and “identified the blues as a collective invention of the African American South” (Miller P.148/254). Music cannot simply be music, artists, especially those of color during this time, cannot simply be artists. Once again, all music is inevitably saturated in politics and history.

10/15/2018

Personally, I’m from the north – so naturally, country music was odd and almost foreign sounding to me. I wasn’t a fan of it at first. I find a lot of it to be corny and makes me cringe at the thought of someone plucking on a banjo in their overalls and straw hat, singing through their chipped tooth and thick southern accent. However, since branching out and giving the genre more of a chance, I have come to learn that country music is about much more than it gives off from a distance.

The way a genre is marketed often creates a divide between people that we are not even aware of. People that are proud to be from the south and associate their roots with country music do not resonate as heavily with music that originated in New York. But it is through means such as the railroad system that emerged in late 19th century America (as discussed in Miller’s book) that originally made it possible for people to experience music that originated on the other side of the country from them. “United States train companies completed approximately 100,00 miles of rail between 1869 and 1900” and it was because of this mass increase in transportation that “mass marketed songs flooded the south” (Miller P.25). From there, as other people began to experience new music, people themselves began to become woven into music. This again reinforces the idea that all music is inevitably saturated in politics and history, whether that be good or bad is up to opinion.

10/01/18   

I was surprised to learn that the banjo was originally an African instrument, played by people of color. Now known as a white mans bluegrass instrument, it is normally not associated with African culture at all. However, this is one example of how minstrel shows in the early 19th to 20th centuries impacted black vs white culture. A type of music or dance popular among blacks in the south were adopted and performed by white men. These white men dressed in “blackface” in order to make themselves look black without actually being black. I found it interesting that a white man could dress up as a black man and draw an audience, but if an actual black man were to get up onstage, there would have been a riot among the crowd.

Stephen Foster, known as “the Father of American Music” was one of the most famous minstrel show composers. He wanted his music to be authentic in mirroring the culture of slaves in the south, so it is said that he actually traveled and learned from them in person. Although, this may or may not be true. I am skeptical of the idea because Foster was a white man living during a time of heavy segregation and dehumanization of anyone who was not white. So if this is true, I doubt the likelihood of Foster essentially being taught by anyone he saw as inferior to himself or his race.

Through the establishment of minstrel shows, black people were essentially turned into stock characters. In advertisements, they were portrayed as almost cartoon-like, with exaggerated features and extremely white teeth and eyes. Often wearing smiles that were a bit too big and costumes that labeled them as minstrel characters, these white men impersonating black men were anything but admirable of black culture. This was the exploitation of black culture and slavery in the south, contributing to the overarching idea that whites were superior to any race. “Throughout the 1830s, early blackface minstrelsy had thrived on raucous tunes such as “Jim Crow” or “Zip Coon” that parodied African American dancing and celebration” (Miller P.34). These songs satirized the life of African Americans, and again pushed for the agenda that whites were the superior race. “By the 1850s, minstrel show composers had turned toward depicting romantic nostalgia for an idealized southern past expressed through burnt-cork caricatures of black southerners” (Miller P.34). This proved to be true even in comparison to Europeans, such as the Irish. Many times Irish people were compared to dogs or apes, and were therefore not entirely considered “white”. As these irishmen began to perform in minstrel shows, they became considered “more white”. Overall there must have been something more that white people wanted from blacks other than establishing white supremacy. If that was all they desired they would not have used minstrel shows as a means of doing so. It appears almost like there is a fascination with black culture; this foreign, different, thing that white men could never experience first hand no matter how badly they wanted too. Blues music, dances, and cultural norms that only black people fully understood and experienced because of their position in society. So, if white men could not have it for themselves, they did whatever possible to take it from those who could. Regardless of the condition of racism in America during this time, minstrel tunes made famous by Tin Pan Alley firms “became an integral part of southern culture (…) white supremacy did not prevent black and white southerners from embracing the same mass-produced music” (Miller P.49). Both blacks and whites sat in the same audiences at minstrel shows, and white people were paying money for the entertainment that can only be credited back to black people. In a way, as much as this highlighted the racial divide in America, minstrel shows also served to decrease this divide.

Weeks after I wrote this blog, I went back and read through it again. Overall this topic was by far the most interesting to me throughout the entirety of the course. It deals with a number of things I am personally fascinated by; music history, people, racism, and human rights. While I will openly admit that I have not found every topic of this course interesting (quite frankly I disagree with the idea that dynamic range is no longer relevant in modern music), the stories of early music spreading throughout the country and how white people adopted it as their own and how oppressed colored people were and degraded through minstrel shows is something I could read about for days on end.  

10/03/2018

I have found that there are many cultural links between different types of people and music that I have never been aware of. For example, as discussed today, I was never aware of of the connection between native Hawaiian music and Christian hymns. From 1778 and on, it was documented that European protestant missionary choirs introduced numerous styles of music to the island. Falsetto singing and and string instruments were brought and introduced by Mexican cowboys, or paniolos. Hawaiians began playing instruments such as the ukulele or steel guitar, and often played the steel guitar on their lap with a steel bar. The craze for Hawaiian music later led to musicians and individuals pretending to be Hawaiian; similar to blackface minstrel shows (as discussed earlier in the course), these performances tended to mock Hawaiian culture rather than celebrate them. Country musicians especially began to dive deep into different styles of Hawaiian guitar. I had personally never realized that there was such a strong connection between music that we listen to every day and cultures that we almost never interact with. I have never actively  taken note of experiencing Hawaiian culture in any part of my everyday life, so to learn that it is already woven in to things I consider part of my own culture is interesting. As discussed in Miller’s book, Tin Pan Alley paired with the emerging railroad system served to link all corners of the country through the spread of popular tunes. Tin Pan Alley essentially “perfected the mass production and distribution process of popular songs” (Miller P.25). In this way, the music of the minstrel shows were able to make it to places in the US that they never had before.

The overarching idea here is that music is inevitably saturated with politics and history. You cannot have a song or a lyric that does not come from somewhere deeper and rich with meaning and context. This highlights the interconnectedness of everything. The simple fact that we cannot exist on our own, separate from everything. This also relates back to an idea discussed earlier in the course that music, like all information, has no central point of return. It is everywhere and incorporates everything, particularly politics and history.

9/24/18

“Information theory is indifferent to meaning”.

Beginning our class with a video on the mechanical mouse and the application of “boolean algebra”, we discussed the overarching idea of logic, and the main idea that you can solve a problem in logic without having any information on the contents of the problem – the issue itself doesn’t matter, the logical structure is what matters. According to Shannon, “information” as understood in information theory has nothing to do with any inherent meaning in a message – it seeks to disregard the meaning of the message so that it can communicate more effectively. In other words, information and meaning are two different things. Google, for example, does not search for words – it doesn not know the meaning of the words either. It searches for the patterns within language and spelling repetitions. Even in other programs like GarageBand, musical and cultural traditions have been reduced to plain information, stripping them of their rich history.

Shannon himself was particularly optimistic about the spread of information, and specifically the expansion of artificial intelligence. “Shannon believed it was possible for a computer to play honestly, and to play better than a human” wrote Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman in their book A Mind at Play on Shannon and the information age. Having this much optimism about the success of artificial intelligence, and not automatically believing that the invention of robots leads to the takeover of robots, may very well be an indicator of why Shannon had the ability to be so influential in the information age. (Soni/Goodman P.211).

9/26/18

“Information wants to be free.”

The notion that there is no central point for information was a key point of our discussion, and one of the main takeaways that I took note of. The spread of information has accelerated with the invention of the internet. The ARPANET, (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was essentially the first version of the internet, started off extremely limited, but even by the 1970s it had doubled in size. It almost seems like once the idea of spreading information quickly was widely accepted, the information itself became uncontrollable; things that were originally created by people now control the way we think and act. The spread of information is not linear, and has no specific pathway. We discussed this idea with the example of hypertext, in which potentially every word in the text is linked to some or other words. Ultimately this notion is only going to get stronger, with the advancement of technology and lodes of communication. We may have more control of the mechanics, but the information has control of us.

From past lectures and readings so far, I immediately connected this idea that information demands to be free to that of music. Music spread throughout the country like wildfire once it had the means to do so, and like any other piece of information, it has no central point to return too.

Carr discusses the “interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, (and) multimedia” aspects that make the internet so “attractive.” Information is so readily available to us with the click of a button; there is an “unprecedented volume of information available online” (Carr P.91). Through the simplicity of finding more available information, paired with the ever-increasing convenience of our devices themselves, “our use of the Net will only grow, and its impact on us will only strengthen” Carr P.92).

9/17/18

Our discussion began surrounding the Civil War, and a brief summary of the events during that time. From 1948-1990, the US battled the USSR in a fight for global independence and containment of communism, as well as avoid an all out nuclear war. This resulted not only in “proxy wars” such as those fought in Korea and Vietnam, but the policy of MAD (mutually assured destruction). My main takeaway from our discussion is that a permanent military industry resulted from this war. The Department of Defense became the largest in the government. At first many were concerned about this industry infringing upon the liberties of the common people; a large body of people with violent weapons who have sworn loyalty to their leader can in fact pose a problem if power is put into the wrong hands. However, due to the structure of the American government, specifically the checks and balances system, this has not taken over our society. In the late 19th century, the information revolution came about, also partly as a result of this war. With so many casualties and such a mass amount of information at once, rationalization and record keeping in high concentrations quickly became important.

9/19/18         

After having read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, we discussed the way in which the human brain works by association. While this idea may be very useful in our everyday lives, demonstrating how humans have the ability to find connections between things that may seem entirely unrelated, it also serves as evidence that the way we think has been “bogged down” by the society that surrounds us. “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing (Bush). Our “indexes” of information are largely constructed through association of ideas. In a way, the way we process information is much less up to us than it was years ago. Carr describes the take-over of the internet’s endless stream of information as a “cacophony of stimuli” that “short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively” (Carr P.119).  One thought is drawn to another by the suggested association of thought, which correlates to what we are surrounded by. We also touched on the idea that the self you construct within your own head is much different than the self that others perceive you as. In other words, The self you construct in silent reading is an artificial self, contradicting modern technology. Silent reading, as described by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows, “changed the personal experience of reading”(Carr P.66). Originally, people did not read silently, but as this practice grew in popularity, learning itself began to change. “The development of knowledge became an increasingly private act, with each reader creating,in his own mind, a personal synthesis of the ideas and information passed down through the writings of other thinkers” (Carr P.67). This relates loosely to the concept of signal to noise ratio. For example, when a professor has something important or interesting to say, but either mumbles or has an accent or beats around the bush, the message is lost among the noise, or distractions that get in the way of the overall understanding.

9/10/18

“The medium is the message.”

This term, originally coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, is stating that the means by which a message is conveyed is embedded into the message itself. In his book The Shallows, author Nicholas Carr refers to McLuhan’s Understanding Media, where McLuhan writes that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one (…) nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them” (Carr P.89). Although older forms of media may stick around after new ones have taken popularity, it is the new modes of media that eventually replace the old. “When the Net absorbs a medium, it recreates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed” (Carr P.90). These changes in the way we are presented the information in turn changes the way that we absorb the information.

It is not the message itself that grabs your attention, but the medium through which it is understood. Our discussion shifted to talking about literature as a medium, and how those who are illiterate are superior to those who are confined to understanding things by reading. Although I understand the logic here, I do not agree with this statement, since there is only so much you can learn from word of mouth or other modes of communicating. One example given in class was the story of Troy; before literature, every time this story was told, it was told differently. However, once written on paper, the story becomes the same over and over again. In this sense, you gain a lot through literacy, but you lose a lot at the same time.

9/12/18

We continued the discussion on the idea that “the medium is the message.” An example of this is the Smithsonian Museum; This is a means of communicating history. Not only that, but it is a means of controlling or owning history as well. In this sense, the information and the stories belong to the experts and scholars, not to the common people. We moved into a discussion of idealism vs realism. I strongly agree with the notion that idealists tend to be those who have a strong religious belief as they believe that an ideal world exists outside or separate from the one we are currently in. To an idealist, there is an ideal for everything, and it is not us. This relates to religion in the sense that the ‘ideal’ thing is God or heaven. Personally, I agree with this idea because I consider myself an idealist due to my faith. On the other hand, realists believe that there is no external existence that is better than the one we live in. It is what it is, and that is the reality that we must accept. While this is an entirely different worldview with its own benefits and costs, it could be particularly problematic, because realists have no external authority to validate what is good or what is better than what they have. However, the idealists problem is that they have no way of knowing if the ideal world exists or not. Due to the fact that these world views contrast so greatly, you cannot be both a realist and an idealist.

8/27/18

Our discussion was surrounded by the fact that popular taste has eliminated dynamic range in modern music. Compared to music produced in the 50s/60s, for example, music produced today may have vocal and instrumental range, but generally remains at the same volume. This is not something I noticed until it was brought to my attention, and now it is difficult not to notice. However, I can’t agree that it is 100% true in all modern music , as different styles incorporate different dynamic ranges. Bluegrass and folk music, at least from what I have listened to, does incorporate different dynamics through the use of multiple instruments. Within most mainstream pop music, there is arguably most commonly a two decibel difference within a piece of music. Everything we hear has been compressed to be the same volume.

8/29/18

Expanding off of the previous discussion, dynamic range has a certain importance in music. The changes in volume compel us to pay attention, and the recent compression in modern music has served as a way of impoverishing our experience of listening. We don’t pay as close attention to what we are listening too, whether it be from the busy nature of our society or the fact that modern music lacks the heart that older music has. It also appears that the majority of people don’t realize that these “loudness wars” are happening because recent generations have never been exposed to anything else. Many people don’t understand the impact a simple change in dynamics can have on a piece of music because they have hardly experienced it, if at all. People pay more attention when music gets louder or softer, and recent generations are not used to paying attention.