One thing I found very interesting was the thought that the commercial recording industry controls who listens to the music being broadcasted as well as what type of music musicians have to sing in order to be broadcasted. I feel that this could be somewhat of a conspiracy theorists point of view, but if you think about it, the recording industry controls who they want to hire on to sing for them. The industry also probably wrote all the songs that they want their musicians to sing. I also feel that in times of racial segregation the recording industries could have integrated African American singers into their studios to sway the opinion of the public into liking them, and in turn letting the industry become more profitable. The whole segregation of music between white and black is kind of interesting to me, because of the example of Elvis we had talked about. Where people would call into the station to see if he was white or black because they could not tell by his voice. What interests me is that the white people called because they wanted to see if he was black so they would know to not listen to it, but when they found out he was white they knew it was okay to listen to it. Inversely, when black people heard it and, in the early stages of Elvis, it was the same style of music that they were playing they might have enjoyed it, until they found out he was white. Then they got mad at him for stealing their songs, which he was doing.

This topic interests me, one because I love geography and the land, and two once I clicked on a link and saw that the Civil War was involved I was hooked. Living in Virginia that was the first state I clicked on when Mapping the songs of America. I don’t know what I was expecting, but that was not it. I was more expecting there to be statistics of how much Justin Bieber was played than the vast amount of polka. However, while look at the Civil War map I was not surprised at all that most of the music appeared to be fight songs to lift the spirits of the troops, or that the music was about certain battles fought throughout the war. I did not fully understand Jonathan Crisman’s maps of rock and roll, I knew that it had something to do with rock and roll and it appeared to have some sort of chronology, but other than that I was very lost in trying to interpret those maps.

The articles about Pandora’s music genome was interesting and made me think about the points that were brought up. For example, how some customer feedback wanted their to be an option to play music that was local to the area. Another interesting thought to go along with that, was tracking where pockets of people were listening to the music of certain artists. This could be a tool for the artist when picking a venue for their next performance that way they could optimize their profit while touring. Also, if Pandora disclosed that information to artists they have the possibility of making and extremely large amount of money from any artists who decided to use this method of finding where to play. One thing I did agree with mostly with the doctorate student from UVA, was that Pandora seems to, without fail, play at least two songs consistently every time I will put on a certain playlist. That may be because I have given it a thumbs up, or maybe it is because I have skipped or thumbs downed so many other songs that it is going back to a song that it knows I enjoy.

Carr believed that the development of the internet shortened the attention span of humans. He also believed that it effected our ability to store deep information that we would have learned without the internet, now we just have the ability to have shortcuts wired in our brain to access the hidden information. The belief that reading to yourself, at one point, labeled you as different because that was just something people didn’t do because most history or stories were passed down orally. With reading to yourself it is like their are two selves present, one who is reading and one who is being read to. I agree with Carr, because I feel that reading aloud and teading to yourself is different in that when you read aloud you do not really process what you are reading, you are just focusing on getting the words right. However, when you read to yourself you can self reflect and interpret what you are reading. You gave an example of the two selves as wearing a suit to class, where one self is uncomfortable and the other is conforming to maintain the public image that is required of them. This is also a relation to the public vs. private self and how if we don’t maintain the distinction between public and private then public breaks down. At the end of class you challenged us with the thought that we can develop a new self, where we can read to ourselves and do a job that we hate, when at one point we wanted that job. You said that it was the theory of the brain rewiring itself, however I just think that it is the perception of the idea of the job is changing. For instance, you may see a job such as a soldier or firefighter as a heroic and glamorous job, but then you try it out and you realize how much work it is and then you start to not like that job anymore because you have gained more knowledge of the job.

Learning how to use garage band was a struggle to me because I had never used the software before. However, watching you use garage band and go through all of these little details that I had no clue existed blew my mind. It is  also mind blowing that there are so many pre recorded sounds and loops that are available for one to use and listen to. That is just on the free version too, I can’t even begin to imagine all the varieties of sounds you would get with the version that costs money. Garage band could also help someone to learn an instrument, as there is a piano and guitar section that allows you to learn how to play. I find that very interesting that a computer program could essentially teach you how to do a very human thing that has usually been taught by a person or just learned on ones own time. Also, with the same thought involving DARPANET being that information can be shared even after nuclear fallout, I wonder if that were to be the outcome of the world and those who survived did not know how to play music, if garage band would be their source of music, if they had internet that is.

One thing we discussed in class that I did not know about was that an organ can change its sound to other instruments such as a tuba or a violin. Also, another point in class was that western music is filled with major chords, that is one of those things I had never noticed until it was pointed out just like condensed popular music. One other thing that was interesting was how music and architecture can relate to each other. For example, there are houses that are built in a structure with certain ratios that display an undertone of musical composition. An example of this is the Villa Pisani or the Chordic House, it is built with the ratios of 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4, which result in a harmonious structure. I have never thought that music and architecture would be relevant to each other in the sakes of the aesthetic. I guess something in our minds relates the pleasant sound of music, to the visually appealing look of a harmonious house.

Jorge Luis Borges’s story about a library with endless amounts of books that seem to mean nothing or have no apparent usefulness is how I feel a lot of the time if I am trying to find information about a topic online. However, compared to when finding information through books that may or may not even be about your topic seems to take the cake. Borges’s story tells of this massive library where researchers spend their entire lives searching for information to their questions in order to attain knowledge. Eventually the researcher realizes that they will never find all the information needed and they eventually accept death. Although this story may sound like the life of a sad and useless researcher it led way for a development of research methods that changed how information is chronicled and found. Methods of configuring search engines to include specific search results only to the topic intended to be researched. This is one of the most useful yet overlooked innovation in my opinion, because a research paper that would have taken months to write about is now able to get done by a procrastinating college student in under a week. Not only does it help on a scholarly level, but also a practical level. For instance, if you need to fix anything on your car and you do not have the help you need, lets say you have a flat on the side of the road, you are able to look up on your phone not only how to change a tire, but possibly even how to change a tire on the exact make and model of your car. Access to information is one of the most crucial aspects of educational development in my opinion.

The history of the internet can be traced back to the aftermath of World War II and in the heat of the Cold War. In these days the biggest threat was not necessarily another ground invasion like Hitler did with the Sudetenland, but instead the fear of nuclear fallout. This lead to an arms race between the NATO aligned nations and the Warsaw Pact aligned nations. Primarily the United States and the USSR. One thing that was feared was that if the Russians nuked a major city like Washington D.C., all the information being held in that city would be lost, so instead of making paper copies of every piece of information that could be distributed, scientists came up with a plan to connect a series of computers together to link the nation together so that all the information may be shared electronically. This lead to the creation of DARPANET which was a series of networks which allowed information to be shared so that if one major information center got hit then it would not limit the amount of information that was available.

This blows my mind that the first makings of the internet was developed so long ago, because the technology they had in the 60’s was vastly limited to what we have today. I am also a naïve young person who has the belief that the internet first started with Google and is a recent innovation of man. I just think that the imagination of those back in the 60’s was almost looked at as nonsense or science fiction, with the example of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the memex that he wrote about in “As We May Think” that basically describes the functioning of a modern day computer. I feel that his idea may have been met with fierce criticism as that idea seems very impossible considering the technology available. That makes me wonder if any other inventors had ideas that were out there that were just pushed to the side because of how ridiculous they sounded, and I also wonder if any of those ideas exist today.

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.