Overall this course was fascinating, I have never had a history course that spread in that long of a time period and covered so many topics. Learning how the technology that came from boats needing to communicate lead to what music production now and what people did in the past that inspired so much creativity. What was required to make music in the early 1900’s vs. how it is made now. Learning that with knew creations and the spreading of those creations lead to copyright and defining what is property. The way genre’s were created and how they fit the time periods they were invented in. All around this was one of my favorite class this semester, and I learned a lot without realizing it.

Changed the entire concept of space and time, especially when you could record radio.

Listening to something that isn’t live and you are not watching was bizarre. It gave people more opportunity to find inspiration from music. More people are able to hear a song and they can hear it multiple times in a shorter time frame. This was a weird concept and the fact that the radio was fairly accessible to the common public. Then the idea of being able to own a record player, buy a record produced by any artist who recorded one and listen to it at home as many times as you wanted was even weirder. People could have careers not only performing music but producing records and being in the background and the science side of music production. Having music so accessible to everyone was a great discovery. Thanks to the discovery of radio and recording music lead to even more advancement I can listen to a playlist from my laptop as I type this post and it can have various different artists, genres, and even languages.

The discovery of recording messages to a record using microphones and different locations and selling that across the world lead to even more debate about who should get paid what and who owns what. The artist performed, the person recording produced the music, the company shared the produced music with everyone. Who deserve credit when it makes money? It should be distributed evenly between writers, performers, producers. The companies that help support the artist and are supposed to ensure that everyone involved is getting the credit they deserve. The spreading interest in the production and spread of music lead to more jobs and opportunity.

If there is no air there is no sound, sound travels in waves through the air.

pitch is determined by frequency- how “frequently” it vibrates.

There are 5 basic elements of any general communication according to Claude Shannon: information, the means of how it will be transmitted, the receiving device, intended recipient, the source of noise

Information as understood in information theory has nothing to do with the message. it is a degree of order that can be treated mathematically as a mass of energy or other physical quantities such as the rate at which information is produced, the capacity of the channel for receiving information, the average amount of information in a message.

Sending information always requires a source for receiving information and a message.

each part of a message is a single piece of information itself.

I am not going to lie, I don’t really understand this.

Patents apply to inventions, gives the owner exclusive ownership

Trademark is a specific sign that identifies a commercial entity- a logo, name, or phrase

Copyright is when the creator of an original work are granted exclusive rights for a limited time. That limited time has grown over time it started with 14 years and is now lifetime plus 70 years for corporate works, 95 years from date of publication or 120 years from creation. Having the idea of something protecting your invention from being “stolen” inspires people to keep having new ideas with the goal of bettering humanity.

It also makes people try to cheat the system, people don’t want to pay for things but things cost money, and now to pay for the rights to something in order to use it.

The Real Book is an example of cheating and release things that have copyrights for free. It was technically not legal but everyone knew about it.

Having rights to intellectual property is tricky because it is treating it the same as physical property. They are 2 separate entities and should be viewed as different. There is ownership of things that are palpable and in the physical realm and there is ownership of ideas and makes people want to create in order to have an impact on something.

Funk is a groove that makes people want to dance. It focuses on rhythm and groove. It changes where on the beat the note would be played. “Soul Train” was a show that was created that influenced production of music. There are only 1 or 2 chords in the main parts of the song to gives people the opportunity to express what the song is doing through dance and not through excessive musical complexion. It gives a simple start and the opportunity to add their individualism. It gives extra opportunity to hear things and make something out of it and then out of that but it also gives people the opportunity to hear something and change it very little and say they are just similar but because it’s new and my take it’s different

Sampling: using a piece of audio and replaying it somewhere else. Giving people the opportunity to use one person’s creativity and ideas and combine them with your own making something new. In theory this is a good idea, it’s a good way for people to see what else can be done, and push the envelope, but some people because of the way people are will just copy and use other peoples music without a lot of their own work and that is less sampling and more copying.

Sampling can be looked at as a problem or a solution but in reality it is just a tool. People will always find inspiration from other’s work and want to put their own twist on it to make it their own and sampling is a good way to do that; but you will also have the people who will just want to make money and sampling someone else’s work makes less work and more opportunity to release more music and work faster, which is wrong.

– Compression: making quieter parts of a song equal to the loudest part of a song
– the entire song is one volume even if the emotions change
– recast the meaning of public and private- intimacy and loudness go hand in hand which they shouldn’t

Everything is one volume to take emotion out of the music and into the lyrics. It makes it possible to have the same song as background music or the main focus depending on what you want and not how the song is produced. It gives us control in a sense

older music focus is midrange freq.
modern music is emphasized on bass and treble with a scoop in midrange- comes from development of earbuds
Electronic music switches between bass and treble so often the constant change makes it easy to listen to when you have a very short attention span

It was originally garage rock and it developed between 1974-1976 in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. It was created by bands that didn’t accept the mainstream types of 1970’s rock. A lot of times the bands use short songs loaded with power cords with lyrics that often have themes of anti-establishment. Some of the bands that were big in starting this genre were the Ramones, Sex-Pistols, the Clash, Television, and the Damned.  This lead to different versions of punk. Street punk and alternative rock were the mainstream in England. This gave a whole culture that was how people dressed and saw the world. In America, pop-punk is the sub-genre that really blew up with bands like Green-Day, the Offspring, and Blink (now Blink 182). The popularity of punk music tends to ebb and flow with how the economy and political state of a nation. It is more popular when people are angry and upset and want a way to show that.

• the Minsteral Show: white guys dressing up in black face
  • songs written in that era were made for these shows
  • very racist and appropriating culture
  • meant to be entertaining and hyped for white people
  • It was only acceptable if a white person was dressing as a black person but a black person couldn’t dress as a white person- wasn’t considered funny, it was wrong

These are wrong and it amazes me how they can easily make of other people and not be able to take what you give.

• Railroad and Telegraph
  • instant communication and transportation to different places at a time
  • changes space and time
• Time zones
  • changed how time is looked at because the time and the sun aren’t the same everywhere
  • the sun would be up in Maine for a while before Chicago but it is the same time in both locations
• electric light
  • people would adapt there hours to when the sun was up until they could just switch on the light, changing the factor of time
• Motion pictures
  • displace time and space and can take you back to where the picture was taken, you can relive the past
  • it is possible to go back to the location without being there
  • do we think in the way movies are made or do movies base on how we think
• • Flat discs
    • records: dominate the music world- people don’t have to leave their house to listen to music and they can listen to the past
    • acoustic recording era: no microphone- volume is controlled by where people are sitting
    • Music became something that didn’t have to be social
      • it was privatized
      • and permanent to how it is reorded
    • Electrical recording era- after 1925
      • could use microphones so everyone is heard
      • Ribbon mic- fragile
      • a quiet person- could be heard in a whole music hall- displaced location
      • tape recording- recording things on multiple different tapes for one final recording

• signal to noise ratio
  • the amount of noise being produced and the amount of noise understood
  • telegraph: the further the signal has to go the less clear it is; the noise is distorted
  • could get electromechanical switches to do algebra
  • Alan Turing- developed a test to determine the intelligence of a machine
    • is it true if a machine can fool you into being a human, it has to be considered intelligent
  • John Searl- one must know what they are doing and have intention to not be a machine
    • machines aren’t intelligent- they just follow rules
  • originality is a piece of intelligence- but is not all of it
    • plagiarism is the lack of intelligence and lazy
  • Claude shannon- the mathematical theory of communication
    • the more uncertainty in a message the more information
    • information and meaning are separate- words don’t have meaning they are just information
    • words don’t care about meaning to you but are there to convey information
    • are humans intelligent?

There are plenty of people who helped invent the internet and most were inspired by or in spite of each other.

• First computer
  • punch cards- programs
  • Arpanet- 1970 (advanced research project agency)
    • transmit programing info across lines
    • designed to survive nuclear attack
• Tim Berners-Lee: inventor of world wide web- find a way to make communication more universal
• hypertext- rewire authority/ make new ways for people to gain information
  • http: hypertext transfer protocol
• The internet: all the worlds interconnectivity
  • www subset of internet
  • Information wants to be free

• Plato is the father of Idealism- somewhere there is an ideal for everything. Everything is perfect
  • people are flawed and need something to look toward
  • you have a model to follow
  • know oneself to be imperfect but will find a perfect somewhere
    • it is ones duty to seek perfection
  • Forget an individual’s ideal, there is only one
  • the ideal moves your soul
• Realist does not believe there is an ideal
  • we have no perfect example we are just here and then we aren’t
  • there is no ideal just something you have been trained to love
  • very skeptical
  • find terrible things moving
  • nobody is any closer to an imaginary ideal than anybody else
  • everyone is alike and not alike at the same time
  • It is a dog eat dog world and what one person does has nothing to do with anything another person does

I feel as though i am a realist. There is no perfect world or something to strive for except doing what we think, based on our past, to be good.

• the Cold War
  • US vs. USSR
  • US economy is booming and industrial nations are struggling
  • US goal is to keep communism contained
  • Military doctrine  “MAD” (mutually assured destruction
    • new weapons assumed we never have to use or will be used against us
  • US economy structure changes with large scale standing army
  • Central to the technological benefits we have today
  • Boats have lead to multiple advancements

Computers have become a huge part of our lives and we can thank militaries for our ability to have information immediatly