IMPORTANT questions
Did you do the readings and pay attention?
Can you manage the basics of DAW software?
Written part is the story, illustration through the music

Themes from this class:
The problem of attention: Digital media undermine/redirect our attention
oDynamic range compression, restructuring attention and benefits to multitasking
oCarr’s book argued that digital media makes us scattered and incapable of paying attention
oBush’s essay, which argued digital media can allow us to focus better by eliminating silos around categories of knowledge
oMiller’s book, pointing out how music marketing constantly required listeners to pay attention to race
oClaude Shannon’s work pointed out how much of language was redundant and did not need to be paid attention to.
oMarketing: fight for attention, modern digit marketing: trying to get me to like things similar to what I already like and make it harder to pay attention to different things (AMAZON, GOOGLE, ADS ON WEBSITES)
oWitts:

Displacement: The physical displacement people from their homes in migration and immigration but also the displacement of people in space and time (who are the people singing and drumming in Garage Band? And the displacement of meanings (why can I drop a style of guitar that started in Hawaii but now sounds like American “country” into my slamming dance track?
oSpace, time and technology
oCarr’s book on the construction of the self- the displacement of the person who is reading and the person who is being read to
oLecture on immigration and migration genre
oMiller’s book
oClaude Shannon’s book

Racial Categories: Racial division and categories being both reinforced and possibly undermined in popular music. We see people’s local and social and individual musical practices channeled into marketing categories. But we also see lots of borrowing and repurposing and adaption
oThe lecture on the minstrel show
oMiller’s book
oWitt’s book
oLecture on Genre
oDiscussion of digital marketing and preference tracking-does it show you new stuff or drive you back into your herd?

Enclosure VS openness: “information wants to be free” VS siloing” of information and access. WE see this in the Cold War origins of computing, in the history of the internet, and the debates about copyright and about piracy and about sampling and musical call outs.
oCarr, Bush, Miller, Witt’s book about music piracy
oLecture on the Cold War
oLecture on the origin of the internet
oDiscussions of sampling and copyright

Individual VS Social Music was always social before the world of recording. It becomes increasingly individualized.

How Music Got free by Witt is a book about the invention of the MP3 format for audio info. He talks about Brandenburg research of human hearing and correct compressed songs in an easily tranmitted form. He also talks about the copyright-infringing efforts online in the music industry and how people how to adapt to all the change of technology. The copyright infringement disputes are through civil court and is for using a creators work by reproducing or displaying or distributing the work.

A copyright is when something has originality and gets protected so others can not steal its rights. Some work that can be copyrighted is about anything like plays, music, literature, sound recordings and more. Somethings that can’t be copyrighted is ideas, facts, titles and a few other exceptions. The length of a copyright varies on when the work was created and the country it was registered. It usually is the span of the creators lifetime plus 70 years after the death. To claim a copyright you have to file one with the US Copyright Office. One example of a copyrighted song is Happy Birthday. This has been a legal battle for last two years due to not being able to use the song because of copyright. The battle showed legal evidence that the 1972 version of “Happy Birthday to you” was without a copyright. So the song has technically been in the public domain no later than 1922.

So sing Happy Birthday with a copyright fine! Yay!

The Encyclopedias were to organized to make information available to the public. The earliest hacker, Richard Stallman, worked on GNU which was the platform for all computing software which was also free. Freedom 0 was the freedom to run the program for any purpose. Freedom 1 was to study how the program works and change it to make it what you wish. Freedom 2 was to distribute copies so you can help your neighbor. Freedom 3 was to improve the program, release your improvements and modify versions to the public so the whole community can benefit. Theses four freedoms were inspired by Franklin D Roosevelt. The copyrighting restricts the innovation and destroys all the quality of creativity.

Digital Scavenger Hunt
-Jazz
Earliest form – 1919 https://books.google.com/books?id=7MRZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA98&dq=%22jazz%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwir15SD_YnfAhUuvFkKHZu1CpQ4FBDoAQhVMAk#v=onepage&q=%22jazz%22&f=false

^from source

“The music was like nothing that my ears had ever heard, and uncouth to the point of absolute unintelligibility. But there were the insistent rhythm, the demoniac energy, the fantastic riot of accents from the drums and other percussion instruments, and a humorous mood which made me laugh long and loud. It seemed humorous to me. I have often wondered what that mood really was- in Siamese. There is no room for doubt when we hear our own jazz! Wholehearted, boisterous, rough but the very soul of Kindly good humor and care-free merriment.”

In the book the Segregating sound by Karl Miller focuses on a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. African Americans were more blues while white southerners were country music. The links to music among race and region were new in the 1920s. Both black and white artists had played both blues, ragtime, ballads, minstrel and etc. Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helps create a “musical color line,” which is a cultural relation to physical color like the Jim Crow South. This emerged through interactions of the northern and southern musicians. This allowed companies to create new markets through the south, the globe and even folklorists who wanted to have southern music about the history of human society. This made peoples musical worlds defined less as who they were but by the music they heard. This challenges all assumptions about the relation of music, race and the market.

This picture shows that different genres are popular in different areas. The origin of genre started with Migrations of the movement of black and white rural people to cities. In the 20th Century both black and white leave rural areas for rural cities and they help invent stylized versions of themselves. White folks who moved to DC area played distinctive guitar styles and a lot of bluegrass. Black folks who moved to DC developed a unique style of hip hop, called “GO Go.” Like African American migrants, white migrants combined enthusiasm for the advantages of modern life with nostalgia. Genre marketing drives people apart but the common roots of popular music remain.

I put this picture in this attachment to show the movement of genres through migration to this day in age. Obviously not all people living in that state it is true for but the majority of that population. Personally I enjoy indie/alternative music but for my state (NJ) it says the majority enjoys Rock, which would describe more of my parents.

A normal song goes 1,2,3,4 and repeated. Virtually ALL pop music emphasizes the 2 and the 4 but listeners from different backgrounds often have trouble clapping with the rhythm it. The new world, because of its blend of African and European also introduced a “displaced” beat. An emphasis on the “and” of 2 ; 1 AND 3 4. “Tango” beat switches to American infection of the “swing beat” often seen in today’s hip hop.

Race records like R&B, which african americans mostly bought these records.
The Stovall Plantation was the first juke, dancing hall where people would come to dance and drink. The Folklorists were part of an intellectual movement that sought to capture pre-modern, non commercial culture. The Appalachian music, was the music of Africa as supposedly heard in the rural south.

In the 80-90s people would have actual black people in the minstrel shows. The black minstrels had very uncomfortable posters because of the no emotion presented on them. (There is a theory that Mickey Mouse is actually a minstrel.) The Billy King Poster was a black minstrel who was forced to laugh and not look straight ahead. Another form of the minstrels was the Amos n’ Andy radio talk show, where they were white men acting African American and doing stereotypical comedy scripts. People either loved it or despised it.

Traditional Hawaiian music had been blended with Christian hymns. They adapted forms of guitar, including the Ukulele, which originated in Portugal. They invented the steel guitar. There was a general craze for Hawaiian music, records and pseudo music. Hawaiian musicians and people pretending to be Hawaiian. Old billy Bailey was a version of minstrel Hawaiian. The blues actually originated from Hawaiian music. Country music carries in it blackface minstrelsy and colonial conquest of Hawaii. African American music reflects roots in Africa but also the commercial circulation of Hawaiian and country music.

The role race was played in music. It was called the Minstrel Show, where white men performed as African Americans using blackface. They used the term “blacking up” when dressed up as African Americans. The entrustment used was the Banjo which originated from Africa while today we associate white, country men with banjos. The “Yellow Rose of Texas” was a song created by a minstrel, for a light skinned black woman. This later became the anthem for the Confederacy. This was the “original Jim Crow” that had stock characters to the minstrel. Personally when hearing this information since I have never before.It honestly shocked me because of how racist it was back then. Now a days people would have serious consequences for doing something like this yet back then people actually made MONEY off of this. Hearing this completely made me upset that African Americans had to sit and watch shows basically making fun of who they are.

The Cold war time when the computers were evolving, they wanted to construct a safe environment with military. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the ARPANET had
Packet switching VS circuit switching. In telephones, there was a single circuit for each connection. The Arpanet had info- a message to someone- was divided up into packets and these packets took varied paths. A version of internet working ARPANET, for people working in military defense.

Hypertext: a text in which some or all of the words or ideas are linked to other things.A A hypertext is not linear. It does not have a start point, or an endpoint and doesn’t have a table of contents, or a defined path. The hypertext transferred to protocol. The Internet had all world’s forms of connectivity. Knowns as the WWW, world wide web is the subset of the internet. In 1993, there were only 130 websites in the world and by 1995, the number had grown almost two hundred fold to 23,500. The internet could be compared to the TV and radio.