The musical term that I immediately thought of when brainstorming ideas for this blog was rap. Now I know rap is still a popular music style and didn’t really know if it was around before I was born, but it was! Thinking of what to search alongside the term rap, I jumped right to the word “gang.” Now I know this could be seen as a racially driven statement, but my thought process was that when N.W.A. came to popularity things were not the best in south central Los Angeles. At first glance I was surprised because there seemed to be no correlation to the two; however, when I refined the results to 1950 to 2000, there seemed to be a direct steady rise and fall of the two words. However, when I included police, it seemed there was no relation between police and the other two terms. I am not sure what to make of this, and on the outside looking in I may not have thought that anything was really wrong, because I included violence, which also seemed to have no correlation to rap or gang.

What particularly interested me was when we talked about Elvis. I found it particularly interesting that he was sampling songs from the African American community, but making his own spin of the song. It was interesting that the African American community was especially mad at him, because other African Americans were sampling music from other African Americans and there was no anger towards them. I also thought it was kind of strange that the only song that Elvis apologized for was a song that he sampled from a white singer. Also, I found the whole concept of the Real Book very interesting, and the fact that I have not even heard about it before. It seems to me to be the older version of illegally downloading mp3 files to your computer. Another thought is about the Mickey Mouse copyright in correlation to the copyright laws, which will be interesting to see if they change again once the copyright of Mickey Mouse runs out.

I thought it was interesting learning about the history of swing beat and how simple it is. The fact that someone was able to give a 4 minute tutorial on YouTube for anyone to learn shows how easy it is. One thing I found interesting, too, is how many songs today follow a modified swing beat rhythm. I probably shouldn’t be as surprised as I am, but I was genuinely surprised at the amount of popular older songs I knew that had swing beat rhythms. With that, it is just like the Adele songs where once you hear the volume is consistently the same you cannot not hear it, it is the same with the swing beat rhythm once you catch on to it. Also, how swing beat kind of tied in to mambo, and how mambo was a Cuban music that was popularized in North America. Then, when we looked at the decline of mambo using the Ngram viewer, and how the decline of mambo matched up with the timing of the Cuban missile crisis.

Learning about the recording process and how it has changed over the years was pretty interesting. Listening to the differences in recording styles, like when Ella Fitzgerald would have to sing right into the microphone and actually have to sing over the instruments playing. As well as when Frank Sinatra would stand behind a wall so the feedback in his microphone. I also thought it was a little strange that MCA records has several studios in underground rooms that will produce certain sounds depending on how you wanted the song to come out. Also, finally learning how a record is made to produce sound, yet still being completely blown away at how it actually produces sound out of just a bunch of squiggly lines. I think sound is one of the craziest things, and how sound is just a bunch of created vibrations that vibrate our ear drum and that our brain can produce and decode music and sounds.

I find it very interesting that most of today’s music is compressed. When we listened to Adele’s “Hello” it blew my mind that the volume stayed the same even when she was belting out notes. In comparison, when we listened to Aretha Franklin sing and she would change the volume of her voice and sometimes you would struggle to hear because it was so quiet and other times it was very loud. I also think that Frank Sinatra being a microphone singer was very interesting to learn about, and especially hearing him sing, and like you said he does not ever get very loud when he sings, and the fact that there can be a full symphony of instruments playing yet you can still hear him sing. I can’t unhear what I heard last class whenever I am listening to music I now notice the compressed songs and find myself hoping that at least one song won’t be compressed.

First off I think it is crazy that a lot of the inventions that were created so long ago that we still use today were initially created for military usage. When we learned that analog computers were made for targeting systems on navy destroyers and that’s why we now have computers at our everyday use. Going off of computers, the creation of the internet was made in case a nuclear bomb exploded over the United States of America. The first form of internet was the darpanet, and its original use was that If a nuclear bomb exploded and destroyed all records in the area of destruction there would be digitally stored information that could be relayed through groups of networks across the country. I just find it crazy how the video we watched puts in to place how simple the internet started out, to now being so incredibly vast and almost incomprehensible.