That is the date I started working on my project with the Mixcraft 8 Digital Audio Workstation software.   After I downloaded the free trial software and opened up the program, I kind of had to take a second for myself haha.  I had virtually no experience with any sort of digital editing equipment, I took a digital art class sophomore year of High School and that is the extent of my knowledge, besides a few forays into the iPad app version of Garage band.

Instead of blundering through the program, which for me has a surprisingly well result rate when I do that, I decided to resort to watching some guy on the internet explain the basics of using the program.  So, I loaded up you tube and looked for “Mixcraft 8 Tutorial” and watched the first one to pop up.  This allowed me to stumble through the first minutes of my song composing experience relatively painlessly enough, and by around the 20 minute mark I was actually enjoying myself.

Going into the project I knew that I wanted to experiment in mashing the essential sounds of several, non obviously compatible, genres.  I though back to our discussions on genres and what happens when you totally remap a song to a totally non-obvious choice, like — one of my favorite analogies of the class — Guns and Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”  We saw how the meaning to the words changed when the whole osng was re-performed to the genre of mid-’30s or so swing dance, and that was kind of my jumping off point for what I wanted to do.

I found the whole experience with DAW enjoyable, and came up with some conclusions that I, at least, think are noteworthy about the identities of music, which can be found in my final analysis paper of the experience!

This class I found very interesting.  It posed the question in this post title.  What do we actually know about historical narratives?  How do we know what was actually true and what wasn’t?  And this more or less links back to the earlier class analogy of Dale Earnhardt’s car and museum presentations of history.

To refine, the subject brought up in terms of this question was concerning African and African-American music, and this makes sense because the class focused I feel primarily on the relations between African Americans, racism relations in the south, and American musical identity.  How do we know what African music from the 19th and 20th century was?  Do we only really see what white music producers saw as “music?”  Or is “African music” what was enjoyed and thought of as appropriate expressions of “black suffering” by white consumers what is historically presented as this genre?

I think that this genre of music is primarily influenced by the environments that it was sung, created, or “grew” in.  I think that it is really difficult for anyone to assign a definite source or starting point for the origins of a genre, it just mutates and mashes from whatever feelings or happenstances that artist/workman/housewife/random kid on a street corner/and so on was feeling or experiencing at that point in time.  Or, if a certain beat or tempo, and thus lyrics, came about as a tune to match the swing of a hammer or other practice, because, as I have learned in this course and from previous knowledge, “worker’s tunes” often made the genre leap to urban centers and stages.

This has been a very interesting and educational course, and attempted to deal with some pretty unpleasant parts of American history in an informative way, to learn from how those terrible conditions led to some of the modern societal aspects today.  (I wish everyone shared this approach, like someone who sat behind me sometimes would take to angrily or bemusedly muttering every time a racial issue were brought up in the class – which was often)

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt was a very excellent read.  It explored the transformation of the music industry during the advent of the MP3 format of data compression.  The format of the book — one chapter on Brandenburg, Morris, or the adaptation of the MP3 — then one chapter on “Dell” and the changes to small town rural North Carolina thanks to increasingly efficient methods of media formatting, or the  transformation of the American music industry as this technology advanced.  I learned a whole lot about how the MP3 affected the blossoming piracy and informational freedom “scenez” on the early internet.  Anonymous usernames, dead links, double verification dummy server identification (I paraphrase because I am not familiar with the lingo, and admit these might not be 100% true, but it conveys the secrecy I feel) made up the “scenez” of internet piracy, and the advent of the MP3 encoding file revolutionized the freedom of this information exchange.

To me, this file introduction represents one of the largest cultural changes to American society, at least in terms of the internet.

Class was cancelled for this day, so this post is kind of short, but I thought this topic was very relevant to anyone with an online identity.

The article was about the dangers to your identity, information, and privacy represented by simple one-step password systems for your email.  The article said that it is especially dangerous to have your email address be your username for things such as bank info, gaming sites, social media, and the list goes on.  He walked me through the rough yet simple process that a hacker could go through to gain control of your bank account by simply knowing your email address, home city, and/or other basic personal info…. This was a very concerning article to read.  I already know the dangers of having one password for multiple accounts, but i did not exactly know that just knowing an email address could allow someone to reset a password and gain access to your bank account.

This article honestly made me sign into my main email account and begin examining my security.  I had always been cautious, like a phone call specific code every bank site sign in, verification codes for password resets, for example.  But this article inspired me to add extra layers of security and verification to everything, just in case.

This week relates directly to the final project I feel.  The topic was “where things are borrowed from,” in my own words–namely “grabbing” a piece of music from one source, and re purposing it to fit your own narrative.

What sampling used to be was more analog : burning a CD, transcribing a record, cutting a segment off of a tape cassette, playing “scratch records” on a turntable, all used to give an original piece of music a new identity and purpose.  I feel that this ties in to a lesson waaaayyyyy back in February when we talked about “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and listened to a swing interpretation of it.  I think that was technically a from of sampling wasn’t it?  I am no expert on musical processes and jargon, but to me it did lend a whole new meaning to the lyrics.  It was more up tempo and happy, and the fact that a woman sang the swing version and kind of suggested to me of a lover pining for her man who had wandered away.  The original tells to me a story of a man wishing for the good ol’ days with an old girlfriend and the simpler times of youth.  Also, those different interpretations of an original song and the “sampled” meaning of it can be affected by each and every person who listens to the “sampled” version, as also the original.  Because according to Shannon all information is just information, it is up to the person receiving it to assign a meaning.

Added on to that interpretation of information is the “sampling” process.  This includes what part of a song a person wants to use, where in their project the sample is used, any edits or transformations that are implemented.  The possibilities for new variations on meaning I strongly feel are endless.  Sampling both empowers anyone at all to make new forms of music out of preexisting sound, and so I feel that it compoundly increases the possibilities for artistic creativity, but like many things in this course, is also a double  edged sword.  It also means that there is an overall lesser demand for artists competent in musical instruments, because if it exists as a MIDI file, why learn to play it yourself?  Sampling, to me, is a conundrum.

This post largely ties into the one from 3-19 on the problems inherent in presentation of a historical narrative and the availability of information.  Crowd sourcing, such as Wikipedia, is seen by many as an invalid source of information, and also by many as a valuable location for discourse.  Its when anyone is allowed to contribute to a particular topic, be it the growth of beets in suburban Wisconsin or the accuracies of modern viking portrayals.

I feel that this topic links into the early arguments for freedom of information, from Berners-Lee and Shannon most notably, even the earliest forms of the DARPANET.  Those figureheads argued that the more participants, or paths, that the flow of information has, the higher chance of accuracy or survival that information has, be it constituents in a discussion on the vikings or the waystations along which nuclear research can flow in  the 1950s and 1960s.

Crowd sourcing to me seems like it is a beneficial construct in the modern internet.  Anyone who feels that they have valuable information on a topic is allowed to contribute to a Wiki page on it, and the virtual numbers of other knowledge sources are also allowed to refute or refine that information.  It also has a system of moderation in place to regulate the stream for relevance or tension.  To me, Wikipedia is a valuable asset on today’s internet, but it is also up to the researcher to do more in depth searching in other places.

One of the big points brought up in this class was a museum exhibit of Dale Earnhardt’s car, and how historical narratives may be carefully and meticulously groomed for a historical effect.  In this example, we were presented with the question “how do you know that was actually Dale’s car?  How do you know that particular model wasn’t just one of his doubtless many training cars?  Did Dale ever actually even touch it?”  The thing is, and the point of that segment of the lesson, is that we don’t.  We don’t know what exactly happened in historical narratives like that, we only see the narrative that is presented for us by the museum exhibit, the textbook, the historical research.

To me, that line of reasoning does make a certain amount of sense.  I mean, how do we know that Dale actually used that car?  Someone that we accept as an authority on the schedule of Dale Earnhardt’s car rotation told us, and we believed them because, how are we going to know what a used NASCAR car looks like on the inside?  This line of reasoning and questioning presents an argument antithetical to the entire history major and historical research as a whole.  For the most part, historical research relies on first hand accounts of events, historical evidence, and books.  Lots and lots of books composed of other scholars’ interpretations of events to reach a well informed conclusion.

In present day, with the wide spread availability of knowledge and documents that in decades past were reserved for the few willing to sift through and find the relevant information anyone can educate themselves on a topic, and contribute to that scholarly discourse introduced.  However, that is a double edged sword, because anyone has access to the information.  That means, hypothetically, that anyone could “flood the market” with false analyses and evidence on any particular topic, it is simply up to moderators of forums and websites to control this.

This time we discussed what music senses of identity in regards to what kinds of music you listen to, and the contrast between musical choice and market supply.  The main factors of individual choice in the music store, availability/location of those songs in the market, and cultural segregation all impact people’s musical identities, as was posited.  I guess the main theme would be, “what you listen to has less to do with who you are than what you have available to you.”  For example, in Witt’s book on How Music Got Free, there is an example he puts forth where a small community named Cumberland, Maryland dominated the market for Music Explosion records, after a radio station played “Little Bit O’ Soul” non stop on the radio (Witt43).

This process of “availability to identity” makes a certain sense to me, because of course people are going to continue to delve in a genre that they always have available to them.  Growing up, my parents were fans of classic rock and other popular sounds from the 80s such as Duran Duran, Van Halen, Sugarhill Gang, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, because that is what they both had available to them in their youth, and what they remembered loving.  This influenced my musical tastes, because even now I’ll throw on “Rapper’s D-light” every now and then.

Another example can be seen later in Witt’s book, when describing Bennie Lydell Glover’s musical tastes.  Glover lived in slowly-urbanizing King’s Mountain North Carolina, and only really had country, American folk, and the blossoming rap scene available to him (Witt 69). These genres were apparent in Glover’s lifestyle and identity as a person and a music lover, and might have similarly been a mix of cheesy pop and hip hop had he lived in Hollywood for example.

This class primarily focused on “the Great Migration,” race records, and identity of artists.  In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, great numbers of sharecroppers, former slaves or their descendants, and overall large numbers of rural folk “migrated” into urban centers in search of better jobs.  The majority of these migrators were African-Americans escaping the prejudicial life of the south, and brought with them their rural attitudes and music.  However, as we learned, they faced some amount of prejudice in the more urban north as well, with African-American urbanites labeling them slang such as “geechies” for their more urban ways; and the phenomena of race records.

Race records have been mentioned before in the class, and I knew that they were sort of a music market segregated into “white” and “colored” music markets, but the happening was not really gone into much.  Race records often took the same song — often a “southern inspired” one, and geared it both towards the “white perception” and “white sensibilities” of African-American and southern culture, as we’ve heard about a lot in this course, especially about minstrel shows.  The flip side of the race records coin was an appeal to African-American culture by emphasizing themes of southern hospitality, romance, and nostalgia, often times yearned for by those who escaped the very same southern societies in the south.

There was also an emphasis on southern artists attempting to change their musical identities discussed.  Let’s say a singer from Alabama approached a record label from Detroit, and he tried singing classical, or more “refined music” than what he listened to growing up — which might have been race records from either side of the coin because we’ve learned of the cross-racial music appreciation prevalent in the south at that time.  The record label would most likely turn him away — because most urban labels were in demand for “American folk music,” or untouched by commercial enterprise.  The artist would then realize this, and relent to singing “southern ditties” such as — ironically — commercial hits they grew up listening to.  This happened to Vernon Dalhart, a singer from Texas who first tried to sing classical Italian opera in New York City, and went through the same conundrum (Miller, chapter 4).

For the class music scavenger hunt, I happened across a genre of music which saw massive popularity in the late 1930s up into the 1950’s: the Boogie Woogies.  This genre, I learned, is theorized to have begun in the late 1800s among communities of newly-emancipated slaves in the South, primarily in Texas.  I found that the Texas railways played an “instrumental” part in the spread of Boogie Woogie, as musicians would play on the trains in exchange for passage to the cities and urban centers of other states for which Boogie Woogie came to be known for.

A fast tempo dance music played on the piano, Boogie Woogie later grew to include other instruments and spoken instructions to dancers in the 20th century.  The first recording of the genre was in 1923, and the first widespread hit was 1928’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” in which Pinetop Perkins spoke instructions to the dancers for how to move during his Boogie Woogie.

This Boogie Woogie style grew dramatically in the late 1930s and quickly took over sections of the urban club and dance scene.  Then, around the turn of the 1940’s the swing style, which used primarily brass band bases, incorporated the Boogie Woogie style to even greater commercial success, and the two genres dominated the music scene of the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

While researching Boogie Woogie, I found that this genre was not covered before the first commercial success in 1928.  This is probably due to the nature of how Boogie Woogie spread, from rural areas to urban centers through the railroad.  Now, I do recognize that there are most likely experts on Boogie Woogie, but I believe that this relatively unknown quality of the genre was due to its prevalence in former slave populations combined with the more socially secluded areas of rural Texas.  The first actual mention of the phrase Boogie Woogy was in 1912 in The Abilene Weekly Reflector.  “The ‘boogy-woogy’ man is in Abilene.  He goes out only at night and is never seen during the day.  He… delights in annoying the women.”  This tells me something about the use of the term Boogie Woogie, at least before the genre became known, it was used to describe frightening, awkward, downright weird and shifty behavior.  Put this in contrast to the origins ascribed to the phrase Boogie Woogie, which are theorized to have originated from African words meaning “to move” and to “dance wildly, shake ones clothes off.”

To me this is interesting, because it goes back to our discussion of the different selves acceptable in society.  A term which stemmed from words calling for greatly impassioned dancing in one culture, but meaning queer and creepy behavior in another.  Also, how the society which used Boodie Woogie as negative then accepted the name as the new musical hit style, to me, that just means that societies look for new crazes constantly, even if, and apparently especially if, they previously meant something negative.