On Monday we talked about our final project – thank goodness. I was starting to get nervous. I don’t feel comfortable doing this project, nor am I equipped with the proper technology, but I’m going to do my absolute best.

We can use a MIDI file if we want. If there’s a tune we know we want to use, we can search it and drag it into GarageBand. From there, we can edit it to fit any style or sound we want it. There are so many things you can adjust to make it sound exactly how you want it…even changing individual notes or lengths of notes. It’s truly amazing. You can start with a drum beat if you want to start from scratch. I’ll probably do it this way and build it as I please.

The thing we want to think about when doing this project is how history has played into this music we’re making. Does it have a historical background? Where did the instruments originate? What type of beat does it use and in what kind of music is that beat typically found? How did it make its way into your ears?

I’m going to get started on this project as soon as I can, but right now I’m trying to recover from all the food I ate yesterday. 🙂

-Jessi Russell

A couple things I want to mention before I begin talking about our classes: I was record shopping (remember, I bought my husband a record player for his birthday) last weekend and I found a Bessie Smith album! I love her voice…just beautiful. Another album I found was a mix of African American artists of Virginia from the early 20th century. There was a short essay on the back explaining how the record was assembled and how little recognition these artists saw in their life for their amazing musical talents. However, the drawing on the back of the album showed a mild form of the elasticity of the black bodies in minstrel show posters. Certain features like the jaw were exaggerated, making the people look less human and more animal-like. I just found it very ironic that the record was supposedly celebrating these artists’ work in a way that was non-white-centric, yet the drawing was done in this style. Lastly, I was watching Jeopardy last week and there was a question about Bell Labs! I knew it right away and said confidently at the TV, “what is Bell Labs?” My husband was very impressed with my obscure knowledge.

Okay, now to class stuff. Monday we talked a bit about how American music up until about the 1960s was set to a swing beat. Then replaced by a rock beat around the time of The Beatles. There was very little in-between. Even gospel music followed this beat transition.

Starting in the 1940s, huge numbers of people flocked to New York from Cuba and Puerto Rico (along with other Latin American countries, but mostly these two) and influenced the music. Displaced persons influence musical traditions greatly. This might be why our music has very few chords now. This particular displacement created a Mambo craze in the U.S. What makes the music sound Latin? I couldn’t have told you, but now that I hear it, I really hear it. The clave (“key”) creates that sound that we know so well in Latin music or Latin-sounding music.

“Louie Louie” investigation – that’s funny. They ruled the lyrics unintelligible at any speed or any version. My high school fan section used to sing that at football games along with the band who played it. Funny.

“On the Floor” by Pitbull and J Lo – I heard it from the very first rendition of the tune that we heard. Probably because I listen to that song somewhat frequently on my workout playlist. The point is is that music has an international backstory that comes from displaced persons and/or sampled music. It creates a depth we may not have known about and helps us understand the music we hear everyday. This displacement is an engine of innovation and creativity.

On Wednesday we discussed Witt and some other stuff related to it. First though, Lalo Schifrin – creator of the Mission Impossible theme. A famous Argentinian-American who wrote it to sound vaguely Latin. It does a little, but had you asked me to describe it, I wouldn’t say Latin.

Now Witt. I wish I enjoyed this book more. I thought it would be like the first book we read this semester. I thought I would adore it and fly through it. It was written in a very accessible way which was great. It was written for an audience who knows nothing about the making of music – perfect, because I don’t. 🙂 I did think it was a little too casual, though. The parts I remember from the book are about how what’s-his-name is bad with the ladies, and what the people of Bentley, North Carolina do for nightlife.

I had no idea there was a such thing as an mp2. Who knew? The mp3 won out and it takes advantage of the fact that there are sounds that you can’t hear to make the files small. This psycho-acoustic realization was critical in the digitization of music. The ear is not a microphone, so you can get rid of the crap we won’t hear anyway. Branenburg develops the mp3.

Glover…should he have gone to jail? Someone said he’s an “engine of innovation, not a criminal,” but to me, this cannot be said in hindsight. If someone ignores copyright laws and makes something amazing, then goes to jail, people can’t say they were actually this fantastic innovator and not a criminal. Those things are not mutually exclusive – you can absolutely be both, but your ingenuity does not negate your criminality. The law is the law, and just because something good came out of it, doesn’t mean we can judge this system in hindsight and think we know what we’re talking about.

I was intrigued by the discussion of pitch. Pitch is distinguished by the frequency of the sound wave it produces. A difference in overtone series creates a different sound, despite the fact that they are playing the same note. A saxophone and a flute sound different even when they’re both playing a C. This is what the pipe organ does. You can play a note and then add different overtones to make it sound like different instruments. I did not know about this process at all and I find it very interesting.

That’s all I have time for. Papers and projects due before Thanksgiving must be done for other classes.

-Jessi Russell

I don’t hate blogging, but I do hate the fact that random people or bots or Russians are trying to comment on my posts. I keep marking them as spam, but it’s super annoying to wake up to emails everyday telling me people are commenting on my posts. I guess I could look to see if there’s a way to set it up so that people can’t comment. Super annoying.

This week was weird. We started off on Monday talking about how it is possible to acquire property without taking it by force. According to John Locke, if you “mix your labor” with the land, you own it. He wanted to moralize the English occupation of North America by saying they came in a farmed and stuff, so the land is theirs…as if Native Americans were surviving without doing anything to the land…yeah, uh huh. So, a deer can’t own property because it goes around eating the plants and drinking the water, but it’s not putting the plants there or building something out of a tree.

As far as intellectual property rights go, are ideas property? When do they become property? There are patents, trademarks, and copyrights – none of which I fully understood, and I still don’t, but I’m a lot more knowledgeable than I was before. Why is there a limited term on these? If it lasts forever, the future generations getting royalties are not laboring for those payments. Also, the public good thing. And the fact that it can be made better or competitors can come in and lower the market price for the consumer.

What is a corporation? A legal person. It’s a fictitious legal person. It’s a disembodied legal person. Super strange, but crucial to the American economy. Then there are holding corporations, which is a corporation that can own other corporations. Which is funny because people can’t own other people. I think this is like that chart that shows that like literally ever corporation in America is owned by a total of like 8 holding corporations. Everyone has seen that chart. You know, like Dasani is a corporation and so is Minute Maid, but they’re both owned by Coca-Cola. And isn’t Coca-Cola owned by someone? Maybe it’s one of the actual big ones.

Should intellectual property copyrights be extended? The Mickey Mouse Curve keeps the extension going. When it gets close to falling out of copyright, Disney goes to lobby Congress to extend it. On one hand, intellectual property is property – it doesn’t matter who made it, it matters who owns it. No one tells you how long you can live in your dead grandma’s house, why should intellectual property be any different? On the other hand, intellectual property is not physical property. Perpetual ownership of intellectual property retards innovation, chokes creativity and encloses our common heritage. Think “Happy Birthday” (the song). If you copyright that, part of our common culture goes away because we have to pay money to sing it to our mom.

What I thought was cool was that Disney used a ton of sources that were out of copyright to create a story to make a movie. Then they made billions of dollars. I actually think this is cool. It creates something fun and accessible to a group of people who might not ordinarily run into that piece of work. Like Mulan. I study Chinese history, literature, language, and culture. In my literature course this semester, we read the poem. Then Disney made a movie out of it and brought attention to the story of this brave young girl who did something amazing for her family and country by fighting in the army. I was exposed to this story at a young age and now I’ve been able to read the original source and appreciate it in a different way because film brought me to it first. So I guess I’m against extension of copyrights because it prohibits creativity and new content or content in different forms.

Wednesday was all about sampling. Sampling is interesting and I think that many people who would be in favor of copyright extension would be against free sampling. I think those in favor of copyright deadlines and intellectual property becoming a public good at some point would be in favor of free sampling. I think it’s fine. I guess there have to be regulations at some point. It can’t be the SAME EXACT song with the lyrics changed. I don’t know where or how to draw that line though, but I do know that I think sampling allows us to gain something new from a piece of work that already exists.

We listened to “Hotline Bling” by Drake and heard “Why Can’t we Live Together” by Timmy Thomas. Or Cardi B’s “I Like It” from some other song I can’t remember. I heard that one immediately when I hear “I Like It” for the first time (although I couldn’t name the exact title or artist, I knew I had heard it and that it was sampled).

We talked about how artists use turn tables to do cross-fading and sampling. It’s pretty awesome and I’m jealous of the artists who do this and make it look so easy. By the late 1980s we see digital samplers like the E-mu SP1200 become affordable for many and makes sampling easier.

Then there was this law suit about FUNKADELIC’s song being sampled in the N.W.A. song. I didn’t hear it at all, but then we watched the explanation video and I hear it well. There was this whole thing about how this is not de minimis – not too trivial to be considered. If you ask me, this is the most minimis, but it’s not my decision. It’s a siren, people. It became law that if you sample, you have to pay. Does this enclose creativity? Now an ordinary person cannot afford to license it and use it…is something lost there? Should they just have to create something completely original? Does original even exist anymore?

By sampling, we can re-purpose old art and show it in a new way. Maybe that will even encourage people to see where it came from and appreciate that too. And if it doesn’t, so what? The people appreciate what was made and I think that’s great.

-Jessi Russell

I never skip class. Well, I guess I can’t say that anymore because I kinda skipped class on Wednesday. Not a total skip. I think for it to be an actual skip, you don’t have anywhere to be. I skipped because we had to take my dog to the vet. He has a painful wart on his paw pad and he’s been limping and wincing from the pain. It was breaking my heart and clearly hurting him, so we had to get it checked out and the vet had limited availability. So to take care of my baby, not technically a skip. 🙂

On Monday we talked about the encyclopedia. I am just old enough to remember using them, and my old-fashioned-ness is exacerbated by the fact that I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania (think Amish people – my neighbors are Amish). I didn’t get internet until I was in 7th or 8th grade I think. I vividly remember the floppy disk as a way of transporting my word documents from my home computer to the computer at school. I didn’t get a cell phone until I was 16, and I finally got a smart phone right before I went to college. Anyway, we had an encyclopedia set in my house and I remember reading them for research and when I got bored. My sisters thought I was crazy for that second reason for using them.

The encyclopedia brings up an interesting thought – how is information organized? It has to be categorized and cross-referenced. It’s very complex, and before computers it was hard to do.

Then we talked about Richard Stallman. What an interesting dude. I find him very interesting and forward-thinking. Essentially he created a platform for new computing software that is open to the public for correcting and advancing the product. He argues that the best way to get the best product for the most people (value theory much?), is to leave it open. Copyrighting is the enemy, in fact, he swears by his “copyleft,” that is, to leave things wide open for anyone to use and improve. He argues for the four freedoms of software – run the program for any purpose, study how it works and change it how you wish, redistribute copies of the program to help your neighbors, and improve the program and release what you’ve done to the public.

Then we talked about this in the context of Wikipedia. It operates under the belief that because anyone and everyone can add to it, you are getting the best and most information possible (so long as you cite it). Experts (or just nerds) of any subject can start a new page or edit an existing page. I love Wikipedia. I have learned so much from that site, it’s ridiculous. I honestly believe I would be dumber if I didn’t spend significant time on Wikipedia.

The downside to this whole “information should be free and changeable” thing is (1) that if someone makes something great that will benefit others, shouldn’t they get paid for it? And (2) in this way, there is no filter on information. Wikipedia has hired editors so that nothing inappropriate, false, or not cited is published. We talked about the DC shooting in the pizza place, or the recent anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooting. These incidences occur out of false, diluted, or exaggerated information online. If information was controlled in some way, these things might not happen. But then we’d be going against our internet freedom of speech that makes us American and not The Great Firewall of communist China.

We were assigned a digital scavenger hunt for Wednesday, which I did, but then missed class. I chose to search mambo. I wonder if I can figure out how to insert the Ngram in here. I’m not familiar with blogging and I’m not fantastic at computer-ing. Anyway, there’s a little spike around 1830, then a bigger spike from 1857-64, then a bit wavy, then a HUGE  spike in 1956. This is really when the term took off. Then a dip, then a consistent rise until 2000. Since then, a slight decline.

For the Library of Congress newspaper digitization source – why does it stop in 1963? Newspapers still exist. From 1789 (where it begins) to 1963, there are 1127 results. From 1830-1963, there are still 1127. I think it’s fair to say that this word really started to pop up at that time.

In Mississippi from 1830-1963, only 3 results. In Connecticut, 6. Fourteen in Pennsylvania, and a whopping 306 in New York. Seems to be a more northern musical tradition.

This is fun. I found a children’s book called Under the Mambo Moon by Julia Durango about a Latino family where the girl is celebrating her quinceanera. Judging by this book, mambo may be a Latino musical tradition.

I’m going to keep digging into this, but I want to get this published so I can get to work on my paper due on Monday. I’ll look at some more books and jot down some quotes to see if I can gain some more knowledge on the genre. I’ll edit this post when I do so.

-Jessi Russell