HIST 390 Blog

I really enjoyed reading about how Pandora is doing its “Music Genome Project”. It reminded me a lot of Claude Shannon and how he talks about turning things to information.  In this scenario, Pandora is hiring people to map music based on qualitative and quantitative variables.  This make it in theory easier to give listeners what they are looking for in a particular station on Pandora radio.  I think that in theory this sounds great in order to improve accuracy.  For instance, reviewers were asked to rate the song quantitatively in the length of the song, as well as qualitatively in terms of how smooth the vocals are.  However, one problem that some people had in response to this, and one person said particular, was that it caused too much homogeneity in their listening, taking away the element of ebbs and flows in the song’s differing tempos and other qualitative factors.  This person went on to likened it to how a mix tape usually gives you a variety of sound while also giving you enjoyable music.  I really agree with this statement and am unsure of how you can program to find music that gives you both likeness and difference that people seek in their music.  It can be complicated because people want different things to be alike and different as well.  Sometimes my reasoning for liking one song over another can be for an obscure reason such as certain lyrics at one point or that I don’t like how they build up the chorus.  However, I may really love an extremely similar song to that one because of changes that are very small.  I am not sure how you could differentiate or predict that for me using computer algorithms.

I found learning about the correlation of western music and the use of major chords to be really cool in the way that our perspectives of what makes a chord “happy” may not be the same as another culture’s.  I am still feeling confused as to why a major chord sounds inherently happy to us while minor chords sound sad.  However, I did find it interesting that the Western world uses more major chords while the Eastern world uses more minor chords.  Perhaps in Eastern cultures a minor chord does not necessarily represent a sad emotion as it tends to in the Western world.  I also wonder if this thinking of what makes a chord happy as oppose to sad is based off of something we inherently feel, or is it reinforced continually in the world around us?

 Learning about the decline of the number of chords in modern music was very interesting to me.  It made sense that a decline in chords would come from funk music, which utilized usually only two or so chords and was really great for dancing.  This also has its roots in Latin music, such as Cuban or Puerto Rican music.  This was really interesting to me because it makes a lot of sense why so much music today is very dance centered.  The combination of less chords along with Reggaeton beats is the basis of so much of our chart topping music, made usually to be played in clubs.  What I also found interesting was how because of this harmonically static music, it makes it much easier to sample the music in another song.  We tied this theory back in class to Claude Shannon in class and how he says that everything can be made into information and then messed with.  In this case music can be translated into information on our computer and in music production software and then sampled and messed with to create something completely different.  The information is the same, but rearranged the meaning changes.

Wikipedia and crowdsourcing are really interesting in how it allows people to contribute online.  Although Wikipedia is not the most reliable source because of this, it does end up being at the top of most search engines when searching for just about anything.  Crowd sourcing is also a really interesting thing that has led into things such as crowd-funding on websites like Kick-starter.  These websites allow people to raise money for specific causes by advertises them to the public to contribute money to the cause.  I think that places like crowdsourcing and Wikipedia are important in keeping the internet open for the people and having people’s voices, causes and contributions be known.

            For the digital scavenger hunt I looked up the word “Hip Hop”.  Interestingly, there were two tiny bumps of interest, once around 1903, and then again in the 1920s.  This had me thinking that perhaps “Hip Hop” was used to describe something else at that time.  I researched those dates and “Hip Hop” and found no results.  However, “Hip Hop” did appear again with a sharp increase in 1980.  Upon looking up “Hip Hop” during that time period, it was clear that during that time “Hip Hop” in the music scene was taking off as the “Golden age” of Hip Hop.  Artists during this time include LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys.

This week we talked about forms of Nationalism, and how different countries support their form of nationalism.  Because the United States in formed with so many people of vastly different backgrounds, it doesn’t necessarily work to boast of a racial nationalism.  Our nationalism is contractual and thin in the sense that we are a new nation and that it’s hard to define what is American because we are all so different.  We tend to be united by the “American Dream”.  Contractual Nationalism is based out of the Enlightenment and emphasizes rationality and individual, which Americans double down on this in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

This Contractual Nationalism is very opposite to Romanticism, which is the Enlightenment’s reaction to rationality.  Romanticism stresses that rational calculation of self interest is not all there is to life and that people are moved by greater things, such as love.  As partly rational and romantic, it argues that meaning and beauty exist in our irrational emotions.  Translated into a form of nationalism, Romantic Nationalism, focuses on a common “soul” beyond law and individual rationality.  It is closely related to Racial Nationalism, and that a “race” of people makes a nation.

It was interesting to me to learn that the United States flirts heavily with the idea of a racial nationalism when it comes to white people.  Also how they tried to do this in the late 1800s by pushing a “folk” culture and conquering the great frontier in the west.  Although this is contradictory, considering majority of the “folk” people were African American.

Lastly, we talked about the Blues. As a 1-4-5 progression, the blues is eventually translated into yodeling blues music, and in many ways was white people impersonating black “folk” music.

This week we talked about beats in class.  We talked about how different genres of music can revolves around different beats.  For example, we started by talking about a lot of beats from Central and South American cultures such as The Habenera, Tango, and Samba.  The Habenera is said to be from Cuba and features a displaced beat (1, 2, 3 & 4).  Jelly Roll Morton, the “inventor of Jazz” says that he was really just playing Cuban music when he played Jazz by following a similar displaced beat.  This displaced beat also translated over into the Swing beat as well, which features a triplet played over a 2, 4 beat. Rock comes from the swing beat by taking out the triplet and keeping the 2,4.  A lot of hip hop features a strong swing beat.

A really interesting part was when we talked about the Reggaton beat.  I have always thought that the Reggaton beat was obvious to pick it out until we talked about how the Reggaton beat is in all these top hits right now.  I had no idea!  I was definitely wrong.  I think in Latin music it’s easier to pick out since I’m use to hearing it there, but I didn’t notice it in the pop music.  Similar to the swing beat in hip hop music!

For class this week we talked about minstrel shows in the United States.  I was blown away by the lecture on minstrel shows.  I found it to be so unbelievable and gross.  I had no idea about them at all and on top of that how prevalent they were, and how much they affected things today.  I strongly believe that it’s a disgraceful part of America’s history that is not taught enough.  I may be an exception, but I had never been taught or heard about minstrel shows at all, and I’ve come to learn they were super prevalent in our history.  I have heard of “black face” before, but even that had never come up in any school lecture, I had only heard it on the news from what I assumed where seriously extremists racists.

Building off of my rant, another thing I found to be incredibly interesting was that the songs “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Dixie” were are written for minstrel shows with white men wearing black face.  Wow.  That was really crazy to learn, and I feel like it needs to be more common information because I think that if people, particularly southern white people, who have pride in these things realized the origins, they would be blown away and disgusted.  There are white people who genuinely don’t think the confederacy is racist, and even with the seriously obvious reasons as to why it is, they maintain the thought that the symbols of the confederacy don’t symbolize racism.  The fact that the confederacy song is a straight up minstrel show product proves the blatant racism.  I don’t know how you could separate it after knowing that.

Aside from the minstrel shows, we also talked about beats this week.  European music being on the 1 & 3, while pop music and dance music tend to reside on the 2 & 4.  We then talked about the alteration of time and space caused by changed in technology in the United States.  Such as time zone and regulated time, electrical light, and motion pictures.  Lastly, we touched on the “Acoustic Era” of recorded music, before musicians sung through microphones when recording.

For class this week we talked about the signal to noise ratio.  Signal is the thing that you want to hear while noise is the noise that you don’t want to hear and keeps you from fully hearing the signal.  We then talked about Alan Turing, imitation game, and the Turing device test for machine intelligence.  I found it really interesting that he would judge the intelligence of a machine based off of external ability to do something, with disregard to any internal creativity.  I agree a lot with John Searal who commented on the Turing test and said that it was not a legit test because someone had to program the machine in order to do the things that it does, and so the person is intelligent, not the machine.

Next we talked about Claude Shannon and The Mathematical Theory of Communication.  This theory is the key to his work and says that the meaning of a message is not important when transmitting it, and that everything is just information strung together to make meaning.  This differentiation between meaning and information is extremely important and is used in search engines.  His main goal was transmitting messages with the least amount of noise.  This system led into binary codes, which I find to be fascinating.  Binary means that all information can be turned into either yes or no questions at their most simple form.  By starting off at the simplest units, you can layer yes and no answers to form complex answers, images, messages, etc.  He also was interested in music as being a means of information as apposed to messages.  I like this way of look at things because it shows that things are not all technical or emotion.  I would argue that most things in our lives have an information component and a meaning component.

In addition to these things we also talked about the Cold War, as well as WWII.  During these wars Analog computers were created and gave way to things such as ENIAC, Arpanet, and the internet (Tim Berners-Lee).  We talked about how the internet in a lot of ways was created to survive the Cold War and how it was a successful tool for America because of its culture, compared to the Russian/Soviet culture.  The internet created a place where information flows freely across large distances even when a place is destroyed.  Furthermore, the concept of the information not being able to be destroyed is important during war times, and changes the information landscape in general for the world.

In class this week we talked about the differences between realism and idealism.  Idealism represents that thought that somewhere in the universe there is an ideal that we should strive for.  This ideal in many cases is represented by an ideal God, or gods, and people are seen as the lesser version of this divine and should work towards the ideal divinity.  It can be guessed that idealists tend to be religious.  A realist however, does not believe that there is an ideal somewhere.  The idealist seeks an ideal that touches the soul and is beautiful.  The realist is skeptical and points our that lots of terrible things are not good, and that people often find terrible things to be moving.  Also, the realist believes that we are all just as alike as we are not alike, and that we only like things because they are like something, but not like it.  What I like about these two types of viewpoints is that they describe the same end point, but different ways of getting there.  For the idealist beauty is the divine shown.  For a realist beauty is something we find familiar to us, but restated in a different way.  Interestingly enough, the very different between idealists and realists is the familiarity of both recognizing beauty, but the difference in the perception of why it’s beautiful.

We also talked about the analog computer, and the time periods from WWII to the Cold War in which analog computers were invented and then improved.  A very important figure was Vannevar Bush who created Ratheon missile defense.  He also considers further individual use for sharing information through Memex.  He also thinks that people think similarly to hypertexts, learning and then connecting and jumping to another idea.  We then talked about the evolution into electronic computers from analog computers, and ENAC in WWII as the first digital computer using Thermionic Tubes.  The vacuum tubes used by computers were later replaced by Silicon transistors.  Finally, we talked about the microphone and how sound is amplified, a feat that I always took for granted.  I have a communications professor who likes to talk about old bands he’s seen to our class.  He always says that a lot of these old bands sound better now in concert than they did back in the day because they didn’t have the advanced amplification technology that could fill up massive arenas while keeping up the sound quality.