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.

I definitely went through phases of how I felt when the subject of analog computers was brought up. When you discussed in class that it involved navy war ships and guidance systems I was fairly excited, because I love anything that has to do with World War I or World War II. Then I clicked on the video and saw that it was in black and white and lost a small amount of interest. However, when it showed the inner mechanics of the analog clock my inner tinkerer perked up and I payed attention. I find it crazy that the laptop I currently using is the latest relative of these analog computers. I also find it very interesting that Vannevar Bush basically described modern day computers.

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